TEASER-Episode 182: Reflections on PEL 2017 (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So many mindfulness books. We never are going to talk about mindfulness.

0:04 Wes: We've clearly not listened to the show mindfully.

0:10 Dylan: Well, there's a certain kind of. I don't want to do an episode like that. I don't want to take them up on their offer. But it is kind of interesting that we end up being solicited for such things as an idea that we would be a platform for promoting book X, Y or Z. It may just be because they cast such a huge net.

0:29 Wes: They do, yeah. They don't vet us very carefully.

0:32 Mark: It's utterly indiscriminate, either because of the Robert Wright and. Or the doctor Drew one that somehow we got on some lists that now we are solicited. But it was even before that, you know, we had Ambassador Ghobash who we wanted to do, but that still was not what we would typically cover on letters to a young Muslim. That was before we did either of those episodes. That was in the spring that we got that solicitation.

0:56 Dylan: Can we do that one that's sitting on my shelf.

0:59 Mark: I want to.

1:01 Wes: You sent an email again. Right. They didn't respond.

1:03 Mark: So I think they didn't respond.

1:05 Dylan: I'd reread that book. I mean, just to get it back in my head right away.

1:10 Mark: That's maybe a transitional topic that we haven't done a lot of the non Western stuff. We were better about that this year that we actually got around to Confucius, probably the most famous philosopher in the world. So that would be. That's good that we finally got around to that. And then just as a spur of the moment thing, did this American Indian

1:29 Wes: philosophy episode and then Wright Buddhism.

1:33 Mark: Yeah, and. Right. That's just because. Yeah, because he happened to pitch us a Buddhism book. But there's so many texts in Buddhism, especially classical texts. And I have somebody on the, you know, a guest picked out who we're going to maybe sometime this spring do the Bhagavad Gita. He's a Hindu geek. He calls himself, I believe, Hindu nerd, something like that, who was inspired by our Confucius guests. And like, yeah, I'm not an expert, but I could do what that guy did.

2:01 Wes: So good.

2:02 Mark: We're empowering people and we have had a lot of requests regarding Islam. A couple folks in particular that have, you know, are potential guests that have asked us about covering either the Ancient text. You know, there's that whole line of Middle Eastern Avicenna, Averroes, et cetera that we'll get to eventually. But we just, we don't do a lot of Middle Ages stuff.

2:27 Wes: I mean, I don't think we have to do these things to please people. I mean, or to fill out some agenda.

2:34 Dylan: We should do them because we're interested in them.

2:37 Wes: And admittedly I am much less interested in Eastern philosophy than Western philosophy. I might have been traumatized by that course we ta'd together Mark World Philosophy. Remember that?

2:50 Mark: Yes. Where he used. He just found like I want to teach my regular intro philosophy course, but instead of reading Descartes, I'm going to find a Hindu text that is three pages long and makes exactly the same point, you know, as Descartes, evil demon. So like there's nothing I did not learn about foreign cultures. I just learned it was just an intro to philosophy course using non standard texts.

3:14 Wes: Yeah. So I just, I actually. So while we we've been talking, I did a little analysis of the types of episodes. We did 13 philosophy episodes. Four fiction or film. One science that was the Darwin. Two psychology, not counting the James, the Milgram and then the Fonagy with Dr. Drew and then four more vaguely political stuff, the White Privilege and Baldwin and Rorty on the left and then the freeform one. So of the philosophy, there's the American Indian and the Buddhism and the Confucius. That counts for three of those. Thirteen Western classics for six.

Or I would say Western classics for seven, including James's Psychology. And then we did Onfray, one contemporary other than the Wright. And then what I categorize as social thought, Arendt and then Debord. So I guess someone could say, well that's just a little over 15%, that's strictly philosophy. And even then some of those are weird choices. So I don't know, what do you guys think?

4:23 Mark: Well, one thing I was happy about was that just to characterize what happened last year is that some of these topics were picked because I wanted to finally like get around to having Stephen west on. You know, we talked about get around to having Robert Wright on. You know, this is somebody we talked years before about being on the show. Finally time we got around to having Corey Mohler on and then having Doug Lain on. So having these other podcasters on. And there are others in that category that we still haven't had either the guys from Philosophy bites on. We haven't had Peter Adamson on from History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. He's somebody that we've talked to long ago. Oh, and yeah, and we had the other. We had Dave Pizarro on. So I was kind of checking off boxes of other podcasters that I've wanted to have on for a long time.

5:11 Dylan: But let's also remember some of these are opportunities. Right. I mean Stuart was on because he's a friend of mine and he'd come up with a book about something I was interested in talking about. Dr. Drew was on because of him contacting Wes, right?

5:27 Wes: Yeah.

5:28 Mark: He just wrote us

5:32 Dylan: again. There's a number of them that end up being opportunities that came along. We're going to have Emily Wilson on in a few weeks because I read an article about her new translation of the Odyssey and it sounded really like an awesome. She sounded awesome to talk to and she was willing to come on the podcast. Right. That was an opportunity one. Right. We didn't have Homer's Odyssey in our backlog.

5:58 Mark: Sure. Yes. And there have been just as many things like that. Like one of the reasons I didn't push harder on the Didion, I wrote to Maria Popova trying to get her to join us for that since it was her post and she just never responded to that even though like I reached out through multiple ways and my brother in law is in touch with her and so I'm sure she knew about it, but she's busy or we're not in the same league as her. I don't know exactly what, but that did not happen.

6:26 Wes: But we are in Dr. Drew's league.

6:29 Seth: Hmm.

6:31 Mark: Yeah. These other ones with comedians, it's not like we stopped trying to get comedians and celebrities and stuff like that on. It just has been difficult and even the last kind of celebrity philosophers that we've set our sights on just have not come through. So actually he asked Dan Dennett and he did not come. I sent multiple emails to Sam Harris since he now has a giant, hugely

6:49 Seth: popular podcast and apparently will go on every podcast except ours.

6:53 Mark: I don't know about that.

6:54 Wes: But yeah, we constantly get requests to have him on. Maybe he knows about my slandering of his name. Repeated slandering of his name.

7:04 Mark: But there have been other people that have repeatedly slandered him and he will talk to them and he looks it as an opportunity to clear the air. And I think we've been good. I even pointed this out in an email to him of other people that we've said this guy, that Peter Singer we were not very nice to the first time and then we had him on and it was a totally different experience.

7:22 Dylan: You said to him, look, we've had other people on the podcast that were really shitty too beforehand. Then we had them on and we were really great to them. So please come on our podcast now, because we've insulted you before, but now you can come on and we'll be really good to you. Is that what you said?

7:35 Mark: Not in so many words, but yeah. Yeah, that was part of the gist. That was not my initial approach.

7:43 Wes: I think another. You write very long pitch letters. So we had Leiter on the hook and then you sent him this very, very long email. I would pare down the length of those.

7:56 Mark: I gotta be me.

7:59 Dylan: Tmi, man.

8:01 Wes: It's just now they look at that and they get intimidated, and I don't

8:04 Seth: believe they give it that much thought.

8:06 Wes: No, I'm just saying if someone writes you a long email, you don't have time and you're getting inundated with emails. It's like, if I get a pitch for an article, I mean, they'll tell you this. When you're pitching articles to magazines, you really have to be brief these days.

8:22 Seth: No, no, I get it. I'm just saying, like, I don't think anybody that we possibly wanted to have as a guest was like, let me listen to some of the episodes and see what these guys are all about and see whether I'll participate or not. I just don't think people pay that much attention. They have other shit to do. The people that we want on our

8:38 Mark: show, I don't know too wide arranged for me to generalize across that. But that does point out why I like when people reach out to us and bug us repeatedly and say, hey, I know about Hegel. You should have me on for Hegel sometimes. And then remind us, a year later, I still am here and I know about Hegel. That's the way to get on. If you're wondering.

8:57 Dylan: Just be a pest.

8:59 Mark: And yeah, the people who've made specific, like, reading lists. Here's exactly what we would read. If I were on the show with you. It was very easy for me to then pitch it to the rest of the folks. It's not a guarantee. They're still. It usually means it goes in the hopper at least and maybe two years later that we finally do the episode. So I wanted to at least briefly touch on this American Indian philosophy episode just because that was one that I didn't mean to be political. I really was like, I don't want to do the same thing we did with the white privilege episode stuff.

So we're just going to read. But, you know, immediately before the episode even went up, people were, you know, a minority, of course, but people that actually know something about this were condemning our choice of guests. The fact that we didn't actually get somebody. Yeah, he has a connection to the native community, but he's not himself. Not like the guest we had for a Confucius episode who was raised in a household with that tradition.

9:54 Wes: It's such a silly, like, it's just not even to me worthy of engagement with that type of argument. It's like, oh, you had a professor of German history on, but they weren't German. Your qualifications as a scholar don't depend on you being part of your subject matter.

10:09 Seth: Right.

10:09 Mark: But just the Native community has a number of dire political things going on with them that because we weren't really aware of them, certainly aware of them as a background, I was sort of projecting on like, yeah, okay, the stuff that Baldwin is complaining about, the black experience is probably like that, but worse with the Native community. And certainly it's very clear in what we read about the history of. Of their land being taken away and all that stuff of what the historical evils back there. But in terms of what the intellectual challenges are right now.

So just the fact that somebody referred after somebody that I think knew. Knew what they were talking about after we posted the episode was just complaining that, like, we were treating them like they're extinct, you know, because we were covering. Well, it was not all historical information, but the main text that we are doing. The Black Elk was written so long ago and was all about the doings of even longer before that. And the things that we are choosing to obsess about, about rain dances and stuff like that just shows that we were essentially erasing from existence that the current people that are in this situation and even just having.

So that would be a reason. It's not just that you should always have to have somebody of the ethnicity on with you, but that there are particular things that we were not being sufficiently aware of or sensitive of, despite the fact that we spent like the whole first half hour giving disclaimers about the episode. Like, I thought we were really damn careful.

11:33 Dylan: It can't be that when we talk about something that is either sensitive or isn't talked about very much at all in popular culture, it's not like the world is riddled with discussions of American Indian philosophy that we have to then go and give a synoptic account of all the context, all the Injustices, all the sensitive points. We can't do that. We can't be held accountable for doing that. We can be respectful and engaging of the text, which we. I think we always are, and we can give the respect that we do of asking authentic questions and doing our best to be open and honest and intellectually vigorous about those inquiries.

And I think that we were on that podcast, and I think you could make the criticism. Well, there's more to say. There's more to do. You could do a lot more on it, and I think that's true of a lot of texts. Basically everything that we have done, you could do many, many episodes on it.

12:38 Wes: In every case. It wouldn't be because we're white, that we didn't know about something. It's because we're not experts, like every other thing we read. And there's a difference between being an expert on some scholarly topic, being on, say, ancient Greek philosophy, and then having the kind of knowledge of a way of life that you get only by being embedded in that way of life, and. And then the ability to communicate that. But there's a difference between the ability to communicate a way of life and a culture, to be a sort of cultural ambassador and being a scholar. They're just not the same sort of thing. Right.

13:16 Mark: Folks just saw that that population had unique enough challenges that it required special treatment that we did not. Like, I'm trying to think about what. What a parallel case would be. And, you know, would we want to do an episode on Mormonism or Baha'i?

13:32 Seth: I?

13:32 Mark: Somebody asked, asked us. I couldn't. It wasn't either those things. But, like, can you just do an episode evaluating this kind of religion, whether it makes sense and, like, no, we don't do that. That's not. But at the same time, like, would it be out of the question? But that's not what we.

13:47 Dylan: That's not what we did on the Native American episode either.

13:49 Mark: Right, right.

13:50 Dylan: I mean, just saying that let's do an episode on evaluating something that's. We don't do ever do episodes that are evaluating something like that.

13:57 Mark: But because we had to get past, especially in the first half, and the fact that we posted in two parts, like we always do, I think was a special disadvantage was this one, because we kind of had a bunch of humps to get over before we could get to the real discussion, which, you know, the discussion of the contemporary readings, which was more in the second half. So the fact that we were spending so much time in the first half talking about, like, rain Dances and does the kind of stuff that was. He was talking about Black Elk.

14:22 Seth: We weren't just talking about rain dances.

14:24 Wes: We rejected the idea that rain dances lead to rain. Was that what we did that was so bad?

14:30 Seth: We were talking about it as the idea whether it's viable to think about whether that's a causal mechanism or not. But we were talking about other ways to think about causality in that framework.

14:40 Wes: Yeah, we were charitably trying to save the text at every turn.

14:44 Mark: Right. And part of it was just which text we chose. We were doing these traditional stories and we were doing the Black Elk. But basically you're arguing about, are these people a bunch of savages that believe stupid stuff like rain dances? And like, first of all, that's not the way we talked about it, but the fact that we were dwelling that much about.

15:02 Seth: So why did you just say that?

15:04 Mark: That's. I'm just trying to reflect the kind of comments that. That I was seeing.

15:07 Seth: Oh, okay.

15:08 Mark: Yeah. That we were not being. By focusing on this kind of stuff, which is not the best representative of the tradition. So I spent some back and forth and chasing down people by email and trying to work up a follow up episode to that. And I in fact read an entire book. One of the names that came up repeatedly in the readings we did read was this guy, Vine Deloria Jr. And he was a major activist in the American Indian movement in the 60s and the 70s, the red power movement. And then he went on to write this pretty much straight philosophy book, the Metaphysics of Modern Existence, 1979.

It's not one of his best selling books, which were earlier and more overtly political. But I read through this whole thing. I thought it was really cool, as when I started it, that he was. He was arguing, you know, we actually need a metaphysics. We need a overwhelming. Not an ontology of the universe kind of thing, but what is a framework from which to understand and connect all the different sciences together. That his criticism of modern intellectualism was that everybody's a specialist. We really do need something like philosophy similar to the critiques that we got from Heidegger and many other things.

That modern materialism is maybe not the best or, you know, kind of leaves us spiritually impoverished. If we straight ahead take scientific materialism and figure out what's the philosophy that corresponds to that, which would be like something like not logical positivism, just. But straight up positivism.

16:36 Wes: You're talking about naturalism, aren't you? Are you really talking about. You don't have to be A positivist to be a naturalist.

16:42 Mark: That was the question. And you know, so that book started out very well, but actually by the end of it, what really disappointed me about after he had, you know, given these pretty good high level analyses of different secondary sources, things that were popular at the time that were in vogue when he was writing this. So Teilhard de Chardin is one of the ones he, you know, wrote about both supportively and critically, which is somebody we might read at some point. There were several other, you know, he would even talk about Wittgenstein. But the last chapter ended up being.

I know he's. He's kind of known as a creationist, not a creationist in the biblical sense of this text is literally true, therefore. But just in criticizing why we insist on evolution is correct and insisting that we are also too hasty in dismissing astrology. So ultimately, even though this guy, like, was extremely well read, like very, you know, a great writer, and I'm not entirely discouraging people from reading the book, but by the time I got to the end of it, I was like, I'm not so excited enough about this that I'm going to force it on all you guys.

And it certainly doesn't do the job that whoever was complaining about rain dance talk, this guy actually is like in the canon of a. He's dead now, but like a nearly contemporary, you know, leading figure in not stuff from the age of Custer, but in Sitting Bull, but basically now one of their leading intellectual lights. And really the themes that I was seeing in there were very much exactly the kind of stuff that we did talk about. And the embarrassing parts like rain dances, even though, you know, had their equivalents in this book too. So I felt a little justified that actually our approach was okay, was at least it wouldn't have been helped that much by doing this follow up episode.

18:33 Wes: Mark, I just get the feeling you've just dug yourself in it even deeper with.

18:41 Mark: I just got to reflect the experience that I had in trying to chase this down. I'm trying to represent. I do think that some of the complaints, you know, we get complaints about a lot of stuff and I don't, I don't. Okay, I do take many of them way too seriously. But I'm not, I'm not dismissing these as a bunch of politically correct trolls or something that we're pointing this. I think they were pointing at legitimate political things that I will have in mind when next we approach this kind of topic, if we ever do.

19:08 Wes: Yeah, I think I'm less sympathetic than you are Seth. What do you mean? I'm already disagreeing with you.

19:15 Seth: That was from several hours ago.

19:17 Wes: Seth tweeted, this could be fun. Wes Alwan is already disagreeing with Seth Paskin. What did I disagree with you about?

19:23 Seth: You challenged me on, like, two points on my first opening salvo about the thread and.

19:28 Wes: Oh, no, I just asked you what you meant.

19:30 Seth: I thought, oh, okay.

19:32 Dylan: I don't know.

19:33 Seth: You're right. I'm hypersensitive. Questions equal challenging to me.

19:36 Wes: So I did disagree that Spinoza is about biblical criticism, but I think I've said that before.

19:41 Seth: Well, we did two different episodes. One we titled Spinoza and Biblical Criticism,

19:45 Wes: but I had said to Mark before that I don't think either of those episodes are actually about biblical criticism.

19:53 Dylan: The section on biblical criticism in Spinoza isn't about biblical criticism.

19:57 Wes: It's not. It's about interpretation and freedom of conscience, really. At bottom, the biblical criticism is a smokescreen to what he's really doing. Religion happens to be. He is an atheist.

20:14 Mark: Right.

20:14 Wes: We do know that.

20:16 Mark: My experience reading that book was very much like the experience for me of reading Darwin. Of, like, there's a lot of material here. Most of it is not going to be really relevant to what I want to talk about. There's certain sections that we could really focus on. So, yeah, all the specific stuff about prophecy, and it's just a different way of reading than, like, reading Descartes meditations, where, like, every line is important to the argument. Whereas this was more like, okay, now I'm going to skim over these 20 pages, and then the overall point of those 20 pages might be one of the points in your outline.

20:48 Seth: Well, if you want to read something by Spinoza where every line is important to the argument, you can read the Ethics.

20:53 Mark: Exactly. Yes. Which is why we did that a

20:56 Seth: hundred years ago in the early days.

21:00 Mark: Was there anything else about this whole political thing that we wanted to harp on a little more, or do we want to just wrap it up right now? Is that your dog Dylan that making those noises?

21:12 Dylan: Worf wants to be beside me, and he's just hanging out here, and every once in a while, he gets up and shakes his loose fur.

21:22 Mark: Okay, some of that were while you were talking, so that will be on the recording.

21:25 Seth: Dylan's dog gets a credit on this episode, just like my cat does on some of our previous episodes. Dylan's doggy is named Worf.

21:33 Dylan: Yeah, he's a Shar Pei named Worf. And so if you can figure out the reference, you. You Win a prize.

21:40 Seth: I imagine that a very significant portion of our audience gets that reference. Well, I'll say this more than anything. I felt this way for, you know, half a decade now. And I feel this way even more now that I'm becoming more. I am text based. I need text. That freeform conversations don't work for me. And it's in large part due to the fact that maybe I'm just not as well read as some of you guys, or maybe not as thoughtful, I'm not sure. But I appreciate having a text to anchor the conversation, whatever the topic. And I also think that I'm getting to that point in my life where there are things that are interesting to me and there are things that are not so interesting to me, and it will become more and more challenging.

I'll need to find ways to engage with texts that appear to be around topics and issues that seem less interesting to me. And it just feels like this year kind of brought that all into focus for me.

22:38 Mark: Do you disagree, Wes? Did you want us to have a whole episode on sexual harassment and stuff without reading anything?

22:47 Wes: When do I ever request freeform discussions? I'm all about that text.

22:51 Dylan: I like the variety of stuff we did this past year. And I would enjoy continuing to do a few literature, maybe even a few film episodes in addition to our contemporary leaning, explicit philosophy bent stuff. I thought it was a good mix.

23:07 Mark: Well, I think we're gonna have to do a Peanuts 1950 episode and then a Peanuts 1951 episode and then a Peanuts from 1952 episode and every little thing. The fact that authorial intent is not the be all and end all does not necessarily mean that everything would make a great. A rich source material, of course. So it would be very easy for us once we abandon the. We're just going to read interesting things into whatever is placed in front of us that puts the whole universe in front of us. But I think we would have to be very careful.

23:42 Dylan: Well, let's do Pitch Perfect 3 for our episode.

23:46 Mark: Yes, yes.

23:49 Dylan: Which I enjoyed, but I wouldn't do a podcast episode on it because you'd

23:54 Mark: have to really do all three of them together.

23:56 Dylan: Well, yeah, so that's like. That's like an eight hour commitment.

24:00 Wes: You really can't fully understand one unless you watch them all.

24:05 Dylan: Then you have to watch all of the Green Bay packers games with Clay Matthews in them to understand the second one and really comprehend the full meaning.

24:16 Seth: Groovy.

24:17 Mark: All right, well, thanks guys for trying this. Always nice to check in. And yeah, next time we're going to be talking about Mills On Liberty, as we've mentioned, and just insert the usual end stuff. Nobody's going to just listen to this episode without knowing what we say at the end of every other episode. So insert all that in your mind. Facebook website, LinkedIn and our special worship group that meets every Tuesday. You know how we always announce that staring, how we're all gonna stare into the sun and we're having the countdown to the apocalypse. It's coming in, I think, 14 months now. So, you know all the usual stuff that we say at the end.

24:56 Dylan: There are ads for eclipse water.

24:58 Mark: Yes, it is rich.

25:00 Seth: Hey, is that all we're reading is On Liberty?

25:02 Mark: It is rich and thick and chocolatey. I really enjoy.

25:05 Wes: And then we're gonna do free speech after that. It's great. It is truly, truly great. You haven't read it in a long time. I assume it's better than just your associations with it.

25:17 Dylan: I never read it and I'm really enjoying it.

25:19 Seth: I never have any associations with it. That's fine.

25:22 Wes: It's not just, hey, I'm a libertarian. It's not that cool.

25:26 Mark: Good night, everybody.

25:27 Wes: Good night.

25:28 Seth: Good night.

25:29 Dylan: Good night, Sa.