Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics

Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom – of thought, of expression, of movement. But at the same time we think of migration – which is free movement – as abnormal. We even mythologise a sedentary past – of villages, farmers, peasants, ‘tied to the land’, living and dying in the place where they’re from. Yet in the 17th century, around 65% left...

Why We're Drawn to the Sea: A philosophical enquiry that looks at the sea as a cultural, literary, biological, evolutionary, and philosophical concept. The sea has long been a source of inspiration for some of our greatest thinkers – a great unknown to be explored, a passage to be used to transport goods, a place of relaxation, a dwelling place of monsters, a provider of sustenance. But could the...

Is Wokeism Civil Religion? A response to Carefree Wandering's take of Wokeism as civil religion + German-style guilt-pride. I look at Robert Bellah's article 'Civil Religion in America' and take a look at free-speech, dogmatism, cancel culture, and more. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acas...

What makes us postmodern? Do we live in a psychological condition of postmodernity? Is postmodernism everywhere? The sociologist Anthony Giddens described living in the modern world as being ‘more like being aboard a careering juggernaut rather than being in a carefully controlled and well-driven motor car.’ Through the work of Zygmunt Bauman and his 'Postmodernity and its Discontents' I look at c...

Wokeism? What is it? Is it a force for good, for bad? Is it political correctness gone mad? Is it really everywhere? Or is it a red-herring? A New MccArthyism? Puritanical? Cancel Culture? Dogmatic? This idea of being woke – of wokeism – appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Does it have a history? What’s going on under the surface? When you strip away the noise. We’ll look at the history of the term...

Humans love to fix things, to find the cause of a problem, to probe, tinker, and mend. We ask, in many different ways, Why does this happen? What’s the root cause? What’s the origin? What or who is at fault? What or who is responsible? But there are three subjects that have intertwined with the topic of responsibly more than others. The idea of responsibility has many forms both historically and c...

Is Equality Natural? Do We Have a Natural Impulse Towards Equality? This is a philosophical tour of how philosophers have answered the equality question, and how hunter-gatherers, tribesman, and homo sapiens for 95% of their history, have been egalitarian. Based on Christopher Boehm's book, Heirarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour, I look at the !Kung, The Semai, The Utku, N...

What makes you modern? We know that modernity means technology, industry, cities. But is there a modern attitude? A modern psychology? What sets apart from pre-moderns? Can we even imagine what a traditional attitude might feel like? Traditional life was circular. We were tied to the land day after day, month after month – the idea of improvement, or of relationships with a wider world, were large...

Jordan Peterson is famously critical of ideology. He has a particular distain for Marxism, Stalinism, Nazism, Postmodernism, Feminism, in fact, any ism. Instead, he argues, that the individual is sovereign, ideology should be renounced, and that, quote, ‘If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.’Rule VI of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life is 'Abandon Ideology'.Drawing on the Rus...

Through 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, I examine Jordan Peterson’s philosophy of responsibility. First, I try to understand what Peterson says about individual responsibility. Second, I take a look at the philosophy of free will and responsibility. I look at determinism, psychology, and history to begin to draw a between what we’re responsible for and what we’re not. Ultimately, I argue that...

This is a tale of three revolutions. Revolutions past – twin revolutions that served as lessons. The second was a counter-revolution, a result of not learning those lessons. And the third, well it begins in 2030, but stirrings of it are already being felt. I look at the causes of revolutions and state crises in the past, looking specifically at the English Civil War and the French Revolution, to a...

Philosophy is often too abstract, but the Existentialists are known for being (a bit) more practical occasionally. Here are 5 useful things we can learn from the Existentialists and existentialism, specifically Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. They are:Laugh at yourself (looking at Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground a...

The pursuit of an authentic self is often compared with the desire for uniqueness, of individuality, of creative freedom. But does this mean, as some have argued, that ‘authenticity’ itself is an individualistic, egotistical, narcissistic, and self-absorbed concept? After all, ‘be yourself', to thine own self be true, and ‘follow your heart’ all conjure up the idea of stepping away from the crowd,...

Who are we? How do we find out? What is it to find our authentic selves? What can we learn from the history and philosophy of authenticity? Today, supposedly, we’re free. Free, to do what makes us happy, to be anything we strive to be, to choose our own paths. We even feel free from parts of ourselves – that our emotions are something separate from us, that there’s a real us beneath them, a supra-...

The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is best known for giving us the concept of a leap of faith. He was a deeply religious thinker, but his ideas have as much relevance for secular lives as Christian ones. He was the grandfather of existentialism, a purveyor of authenticity, and of discovering, amid conflicting beliefs and the demand to conform to the rules of society, who you rea...

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that human violence has declined across history. One part of this argument is that life in a state of nature – before civilization – was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Amongst other things, Pinker argues that hunter-gatherers, tribal societies, were – and are - much more violent than later more civilized societies. Both Pinker an...

An introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Hobbes looms over all of us as the preeminent defender of the modern state and sovereign authority. Nuanced and original, he is probably the most influential figure in modern political philosophy who, and could be described as the father of both modern liberalism and modern conservatism. Hobbes’ originality was his belief that political theory could be...

What can the Holocaust teach us about morality and ethics? Does the Holocaust pose a challenge for moral relativism? Zygmunt Bauman argues yes. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman argues that the Holocaust proves that societal rules, norms and standards cannot be the only source of morality. Perpetrators often argued in court that they were only following the law of their country. How can we ju...

What drives ordinary everyday people to become mass killers? What are the psychological mechanisms and cultural factors that lead to genocide? What were the causes of the Holocaust? Can we theorize a psychology of genocide? A theory of genocide? The Holocaust was not perpetrated solely by a few sadistic psychopaths but by tens of thousands of everyday Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Austrians, Slovakia...

Winston Churchill once said that ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.’ In the wake of what happened in Washington last week, I think this metaphor illustrates something deeper about the relationship between demagogues and their followers. Who are the tigers and why are they hungry? Riots - the voice of the unheard - clearly si...

How can we untangle Madness & Civilization and think clearly about what Foucault is saying, both in the book, and by extension in later works? Looking at some criticisms of him are a good way to try to pin down exactly what’s going on with his method and view of the world, so let’s start there. In 1987 Lawrence Stone, for example, criticized Foucault as being ‘unconcerned with historical detail of...

Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (abridged in English as Madness and Civilization) was a revolutionary exploration of how our interpretations and experience of madness have changed over time, and how they’re not quite as ‘rational’ – or even more ‘rational – than they first appear. Everyone who was worked on the history of psychiatry since has worked in Foucault’s shadow. He looked at history...

What did Descartes know for certain? That he is a thinking thing, a cogito. But what does it mean to think? Descartes lists a few modes of thinking: Doubting, affirming, denying, understanding. Heidegger embarks upon a similar project to Descartes. What, he asks, is the fundamental nature of our experience? Of our existence? Heidegger agrees with Descartes. If we want to live life well we need to...

Descartes’ Error is a 1994 book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio which outlines the somatic marker hypothesis, a theory about how the mind and body not only interact, but are indissociable. Damasio argues that those feelings provide what he calls ‘somatic markers’ for the mind that aid decision making. They point us in the right (or wrong) direction. The rationalist or Cartesian view – what D...

This is an introduction to Rene Descartes' Meditations. Descartes - born in 1596 - is often considered the father of modern philosophy. He was a radical innovator, completely sweeping away the old and inaugurating a new method – simple, pure, clear, individual thought. He claimed he read very little, and most of his work was in the sciences. When a man asked to see his library he pointed to a half...