Ep. 238: Lingering Questions

0:08 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 238 are many and various as we pause to reflect on our recent series on social construction, talk about future directions, and take listener comments and questions. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer enjoying the philosophical literature of the 20th century in Madison, Wisconsin. So state your opening position with your

0:36 Seth: this is Seth Paskin, trying not to be confirmed in his biases in Austin, Texas.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, a social construction skeptic in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, almost always interpreting everything pragmatically in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:57 Mark: All right, so we got some opening salvos we didn't actually have. I put up on Twitter and Facebook that we're doing this just yesterday and we didn't get that many responses. But we've. We've gotten quite a few over the last weeks. And it's really October is when we started doing this social construction stuff. And so there were at least a few general themes I felt like we should address. Like we didn't really connect the dots. You know, we started. So Wes initiated this series and, you know, for the first one, reading Hacking and Berger, that was a good kind of survey of the positions. You also picked the articles for the one on race that we did with Coleman Hughes and that also had a range of positions. But then when we got to gender, we just, you know, it got more difficult. So we just read Beauvoir.

1:42 Wes: We read, you know, I was working on a bunch of articles and I was trying to find contrarians because I myself do not think that gender is a social construction in the sense that people typically think it is. And it's very hard to find any dissenting positions. Maybe you can find it. So maybe we can do that at some point in the future. But I found some things which are more analytical. People in analytic philosophy have written about this in a much more precise way than you're going to typically get with post structuralists. That was a work in progress.

2:19 Seth: I guess my comments are related to the specific readings more than anything else. I am sympathetic to at least some generalized notion of social construction that. But I'll get into more details later. I have to say that I thought most of the readings we had were quite good, and whether you agree or disagree with certain aspects of it, it didn't seem like we were doing anything other than philosophy. Hacking was clearly very philosophical I thought Butler was actually. Whether she's good or not, she was doing a very traditional philosophical kind of activity. Benjamin was the one that was most far outside. But I didn't feel like we were doing something outside of the tradition or outside of what we would normally do. And maybe the names aren't 2000 years old or a thousand years old, but I just felt like we were doing philosophy.

3:11 Wes: Someone on Twitter said something like, the way the authority of this podcast has plummeted is breathtaking or something.

3:18 Mark: I just clicked through that guy's thing and it saw immediately something about Reagan. He's a scholar of Reagan.

3:25 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. So it's a conservative account. And we've had other conservative accounts. I think people don't know that I'm not a fan of identity politics. For instance, they think we're very PC, probably. That's the impression I've gotten online. So you have a bunch of people who think we're very PC and so object to that just because we are doing some stuff in Continental philosophy and social theory. And in general, I don't really have any patience for that. I think we should be doing looking at both Continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.

And it's not an endorsement necessarily that we're doing something. I do prefer to do the stuff that we like. But there's also major figures to be grappled with and often it's because of requests. We have lots and lots of fans who like Continental Philosophy and have been asking for us to do Butler for a long time. And the idea that even engaging with it is somehow some business betrayal is ridiculous.

4:20 Dylan: It's something worth not having any patience for whatsoever.

4:23 Wes: Yeah. And as I said, what I wish people would realize is that despite all my problems with See, ironically, I'm training to become a psychoanalyst and my interests are very hybrid anyway, so I don't have patience for obscurantism. But on the other hand, I find post structuralist ideas fascinating. Then again, I see how there's a lot of bad writers and hacks with. Within the genre, I guess if you can call it that. On the other hand, analytic philosophy, there's just a lot of sterile, boring stuff in that too.

4:56 Seth: And hacks.

4:57 Wes: Each side of the division, yeah, has its drawbacks. And my approach to everything is to find what's interesting and good about it. If there is something, in some cases, I really don't think anything is. You guys know who my top villains are. And so, yeah, Butler's Gender Trouble book. I was excited by a lot of the ideas now, it probably seemed like I had a higher opinion of that book and her approach than I actually do. But what I'm looking for is the good stuff, the exciting stuff. I want to take what's positive out of something. I'm not so focused usually on the flaws in any given particular podcast. I just see that as a waste of my time to gripe about those things.

5:46 Seth: That feels to me like it requires my response to say that anybody who feels like the podcast has gone to shit and that we're liberal commie turncoats or whatever, nannies, you can just lay the blame at my feet, leave Wes alone and come after me.

6:04 Mark: I remember somebody saying a while ago on Twitter that we were her favorite bunch of liberals, like she was a conservative blogger or something like that. And I think that if you are conservative, if you do think these. These ideas are dangerous, that they don't make sense, I would hope that you would get something valuable out of us doing this work for you, that we're kind of walking through these arguments, these quotes, so you can actually be familiar with the thing that you're trying to argue against, that you're trying to dismiss for exactly the reason that Wes was just saying that we do try.

I don't know that I always did this, but for the past seven years at least, I've tried, like Wes says, to find, for the most part, what's positive, make it useful. I mean, I still ultimately do not have much sympathy for psychoanalytic explanations like what we were just talking about with Butler of analyzing. You know, she wants to say the fear of immigrants is a phantasmatic transmogrification of rage that is within us, that we feel within close social bonds, that we feel even within ourselves because of mother figures that we've internalized and things like that.

Like, I find that a fascinating way of talking, and I'm interested in learning how to do it, but I ultimately think it's just really speculative and don't place a lot of value in. I almost think it's more of a performative act to say any objection you might have to homosexuality is because definitely you're homophobic or like that kind of thing. There might be some truth to it. Like, I'm willing to discuss it, but I think it's really name calling more than anything else.

7:39 Wes: Yeah, I was actually going to respond to her on that, and I didn't get a chance to. I was going to give a more general explanation. I wanted to talk about group psychology, their identification with groups and their sense of Narcissistic injury and the anxieties. I wanted to make it less about how these horrible right wingers are just racists. And I wanted to try and get at the general psychology of this stuff, which we actually all share, which I think Butler to some extent did acknowledge in her book. But the other thing, I don't want people to read Judith Butler and get a sense that that's what psychoanalysis is.

You should look at the actual psychoanalytic literature and I think people might have a different impression the way it gets misused a lot by these people and it's not explained. Klein is not explained in her book. Melanie Klein, the psychoanalyst. And she's a very difficult figure to understand. So the kind of elusive sort of. Here's my grab bag of people I'm influenced by. Let me sprinkle them around in my book. I don't find that very useful. Ultimately, if you want to use these figures, I think you should be more precise and explain them more.

And it is very speculative. But I think the usefulness of it might become more apparent if there's a more direct engagement with the actual psychoanalytic literature because it is very theoretical and speculative, but there's a kind of a practical streak to it because people are clinicians and they actually ultimately are interested. They see patients every day. It's not just completely philosophical and detached from day to day experience.

9:10 Mark: Dylan, you weren't on that interview, but you just listened to it. Did you have any thought like, was it clear what her positions were? Did we seem to cover the ground? What was your impression coming away from that?

9:20 Dylan: I thought it was a good episode. I thought it was a atypically good kind of back and forth while she talked. She had a fair bit to say. She was clearly engaged in the conversation and, and listening to you guys. And I kind of regretted the fact that I wasn't able to be on it, but I enjoyed listening to it. Her points seemed to follow very much in line with the Gender Trouble stuff. And I liked how at the end she was making kind of an explicit link between the book that she just came out with nonviolence and the sort of positions, things that she was trying to talk about in Gender Trouble.

10:02 Mark: I mean, what did you all think of? Just this notion. She really made heavy use of grievable lives throughout and she wanted to make it clear. It's not like I expect you to even the most far flung person that you'll never meet to physically cry for them. So it's more a having a Basic respect for the sanctity of all lives and not privileging those that you would actually grieve for personally. That you have to imagine that these other people, someone will grieve for them, or even if they, you know, someone should grieve for them. So the fact that it's using this, like, emotional thing to suck you in and to make you understand what the concept is, but then it says, no, no, actually that's just a metaphor.

Put that aside. I'm just not sure ultimately what talking about things that way is adding to Peter Singer's take that we are morally unjustified in preferring our own kith and kin and small circle to being impartial to the world. Like, it just seems like she's restating one of the fundamental problems of ethics that we dealt with in that Peter Singer episode of should morality be completely impartial? Singer thinks that's the definition of morality. Like, that's what Kant says, that's what Mill says. Whereas if you are more Nietzschean or something, you might think, no, no, actually, maybe we're justified in having a circle of concern for the people that we actually have some relation to, some direct relation to.

Again, Butler's trying to say that we're all related to everybody in some way. You know, we're at least part of the same ecosystem.

11:37 Wes: I think even she, though, would allow circles of concern. I don't think this is functionally anything different, but that's part of the problem. I think I'm agreeing with Mark here. I just don't think Grievable Lives adds anything, because she doesn't really mean it, really. This is about. We don't have the same feelings for people that we don't know as we do for people we're attached to. And that means that it's a disastrous idea to try and base ethics on those sorts of feelings. Unless you admit, as she does at some point in the book. No, please don't take this seriously.

It's just a metaphor. I understand you're not going to feel this way about people who are strangers. Okay, so then what. What was it doing in the book in the first place? It's already in Kant and everyone else. The idea of treating people's ends in themselves and respecting them, and the whole attack on that stuff is very vague, kind of strawman version of state of nature and individualism that's given. I have no sympathy for any of that.

12:37 Seth: I think, Wes, your point about whether or not the concept of grievability adds anything to Kant's notion of treating people as ends and not just means, that's a good frame to put on it, because what she was trying to do there was. She was trying to introduce a notion of grievability to either augment or replace kind of traditional concepts of innate rights or some sort of concept of dignity, something abstract. And she's trying to make a connection and say that, yes, emotionally you only have the capacity to feel a certain depth of regret or connection to a limited number of people.

But she's trying to propose an alternative structure, an alternative interpretive framework where you could talk about the value of a life that maybe you're not directly connected with, but do it in a way that's more connected to your personal experiences and less abstract, less associated with some principle, right?

13:40 Dylan: Yes.

13:41 Seth: So I think the Kantian notion of treating people as ends versus means is still very principled in that respect. It's not connected to your emotional experience. And she's really trying to get at taking seriously the fact that we are in this web of interconnectivity with other individuals and human beings, of course, much more intensely with those who are geographically and perhaps familially and genetically related to us and whatever. But the move she was trying to make, I thought was interesting. And she's trying to supplant one interpretive paradigm, if you will, with another that gets her out of the complications associated with that other paradigm. And so I thought it was something new and interesting, and I felt like I understood what she was trying to accomplish with it.

14:31 Wes: So I think it remains abstract because at a certain point she says, well, what I mean by grievability is that. Not that you're going to grieve for them, because, no, you're not. Grieving people means something. It means that you had an attachment and that you have to do something about that once they're gone. When you mourn someone, we can't mourn people that we don't actually know. And to delude ourselves about that, I think is. And she knows that. So in the end, what she says is, yes, I know you're not going to grieve people that you don't know. But my principle is that you should see them as worthy of being grieved by someone that's also just abstract.

15:13 Dylan: Yeah, I think she's trying to stake out something that is less. Let's call it abstract and sort of, I'd even say, deeply principled, the way someone like Singer is, where it's a kind of mathematical truism. Kind of thing that he's going after. How could you possibly do X, you know, and be consistent and making it grievability is making it a step of abstraction. But I think to Seth's point, she's really trying to stake out a place that maintains a way of talking about personal emotional connection and abstracting it. So it's an attempt to be in the middle, in a way, and talk about what it is that would be a connection to other people that we don't know.

Like when we have some kind of emotional response to people in their situations that we don't have any personal connection to what that means and how we would get access to community in that way. I'm open to it not being completely successful, but that's the kind of work that she's trying to do, I think.

16:21 Wes: Right. We have these empathetic responses, but it's very important that we be principled about this. Because when you're not, it just becomes. It reverts into something that's just tribal. Right. It's my people against your people.

16:35 Dylan: Yep.

16:36 Wes: I have the sense. Well, it's about these strong emotions. The tendency of people is to think that the ethical and the just and the good are about these sorts of feelings. Like, I feel really repelled by homosexuality, therefore it's bad. You want to tease those things apart for people. That's really important to do. And that's why it makes me nervous when someone says, well, no, I want to go back. I want to emphasize these emotional components. It sounds nice, it sounds warm and fuzzy, but it's actually a basis, I think, for more violence and more oppression.

17:08 Dylan: It's an interesting take on it. I mean, I see why you point to that danger. And I'd have to think a little bit more about whether I think that this. It's going that far. I agree that by using grievability, she's trying to bring a personal connection to a connection to other people that's typically formed in the abstract. So she's trying to have it both ways in a way. And to that extent, your criticism that it's potentially dangerous is. Right. If I agree exactly about that danger. I guess the alternative with being super principled about it and it's sort of unabashedly abstract, is that you put the whole conversation to some third place.

Right. That's utterly in between when you just talk about it being just. Or what we ought to do as individual human beings or whatever, or a categorical imperative or something like that. Where were you absent it from the experience of connection with each other.

18:12 Wes: Yeah.

18:12 Dylan: So I understand that there's danger in appealing to our individual experiences and the connections we have to those close to us with a word like grieving, and to say, well, I'm going to abstract that idea of grieving, which is a very intimate, powerful personal experience, and talk about grievability and talk about that's the way in which you can have connections to people that you wouldn't even actually grieve for.

18:38 Mark: Can I also just add the element of. I'm trying to understand her critique of individualism here, that she just thinks that the paradigmatic case of the way that philosophers in the west think about ethics, of, okay, I'm in a situation and I can calculate things. And even if we were talking politically, it's like I'm imagining that I'm the leader of a country and I can move around the levers of influence the way I like, and how should I do that to maximize, you know, whatever the formula is. And so I think that she is trying to. In arguing against individualism, I'm trying to figure out what the alternative is for a new way to do moral deliberation.

That if it's kind of like we're all hanging together and we're talking, like, what do we want to do? What policies do we want to enact? Maybe we don't want to screw over Dylan's friend. I don't know Dylan's friend, but I know you. And so I don't want to screw over your friend, you know, but she

19:36 Dylan: wouldn't even talk about it that way because she's trying to get us to change our language away from individualism, to emphasize our inherent connectedness, both our contextualness in time and in idea and in culture, but also with each other as human beings. And she's trying to come up with a language to talk about that inherent connectedness, rather than saying there's this fundamental dichotomy between the individual and the community.

20:01 Mark: But doesn't that change? The connectedness is not just a matter of, when I, as an individual, I'm making my deliberations, then I consider connectedness, but that we are as connected beings making the decision together, that there's something even about the process of more deliberation itself, that is grouping. So does bringing in grievability help in that new paradigm? Is that this new pseudo abstract way of thinking of things? Because one of the things she says is, as soon as you start calculating the value of the life, then you're no longer Considering that life as something that needs an absolute protection.

Right, sure. With your family, you're not like, well, I think it's 90% clear that one of my kids will not die based on this action. So I think I'll risk it. At least you don't think that way. But it does seem like when we make social policies, like we're making highway policy. There is a towards zero deaths initiative in Minnesota that I work with on my transportation day job. But they realize that all highway policies are. It's a matter of minimizing deaths. Like you're going to have deaths. And the only reason, the only way, if you were really like, no, every single life is as grievable as my best friend, as my lover, so I'm going to do everything possible.

Then you would just shut down almost all industry. Certainly anything the least bit dangerous, like driving. And so it just seems like that's unworkable as social policy.

21:35 Wes: So how is that related here?

21:37 Mark: I'm trying to determine how this notion of grievability fits in with this anti individualistic take on moral deliberation. It seems like a paradigm case of group deliberation is deciding on public policies. That's exactly what she's talking about. Should we allow all the immigrants in? Should we have means testing their policies? She's concerned with. And policies always by necessity to make any decision. They deal with likelihoods and whenever there's a lot of moving pieces, there's a strong likelihood somebody's gonna somehow die. You just can't rate all lives as infinitely valuable and set a social policy at all.

22:19 Dylan: It would be interesting to talk to her about that. In listening into the episode, I didn't hear the conversation go down this road about, you know, her move is to make it while more abstract, more personal. And so that's why it's open to the criticism you're making. Mark. You've turned something that was sort of impersonal and therefore able to be calculated into something personal. As soon as you do that, then it becomes confusing. My impression was is that she wouldn't go that far. Right. I don't know what her language would be to avoid it.

22:54 Seth: The notion of grievability doesn't mean that every individual is a precious snowflake and infinitely grievable. I think that's an exaggeration. I think what she's trying to get at is something to the effect of to treat an individual or a thing right, not necessarily a human being. But just as it's the loss of that would matter to treat it as if it matters. It's not the same thing as assigning it value in some kind of abstract or absolute sense. It's just, is this loss going to be mourned? And it doesn't mean that it would be mourned by everybody, but is it going to be felt?

Is it meaningful? Obviously, that it's not outlined in a way that there's set criteria like who's going to mourn and to whom. Is it important? But I think it gets more at the notion. But the second thing I want to say is that grief and grievability are not, in my understanding, they're not necessarily emotion. They're not emotions. Grief is not an emotional response like, you know, anger or fear. In fact, they talk about the stages of grief are all composed of different emotions that you have during that grief. Grief is a process, and it's. By the way, it's a communal process.

I brought this up in the podcast. It's not an individual thing where you're having some kind of an emotional response, and you just say, well, can I grieve for this person? Is, do I have an emotional contact? Am I empathetic to their situation? That's not what's happening with grief. Grief is a process of dealing with loss that involves emotions, but it's a process which is predicated on some acknowledgment of relationship. If you have no relationship with a thing or an individual in any kind of way, it's not possible for you to grieve that. But if you have some kind of relationship or if you feel the loss of that thing, then you're able to engage in the grieving process.

24:56 Wes: I think it's important to do justice to her position. We articulate what you just said, but also I wanted to point out that this is all coming out of the psychoanalytic tradition, right? Beginning with Freud's mourning and melancholia. For psychoanalysis, the concept of grief is very important because the psyche is sort of structured through it, and our maturation and our development is essentially a process of grieving, where what we grieve is the object. What we grieve is a early childhood and the kind of connection we had to a maternal figure, for instance.

All of those things are lost. And ideally, what we do with that loss is we turn it into identification. We internalize the maternal caretaker function, for instance, and we learn how to do it for ourselves. So we compensate. This thing that we loved that was outside of us becomes an inner thing. And if it goes Wrong. We still do something like identification. But it's a pathological version of that. Where we haven't really grieved, we haven't given up this connection to this ideal object. And it can lead to character pathologies, narcissism, depression, stuff like that.

One of the things that we're defended against psychologically. Is this notion of independency and dependence. And to have true relationships with people and true intimacy. We have to be able to be in that risky position of depending on people who might go away, we might lose, or who might disappoint us. Right. We grieve not just because people die, but because they disappoint us or because they're disappointing aspects of them. When we love someone, we have to be able to grieve all the shit that annoys us in order to continue the relationship.

26:45 Dylan: It might not even just be people, right?

26:47 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

26:48 Wes: You can grieve ideals. And she wants to kind of apply that model. Model to ethics and say, well, look, we are all interdependent. And the way we conceive of our ethical obligations to others. Should be modeled on this idea of interdependence. And the fact that when something bad happens to them. It's not just like this abstract thing. Okay, they should be treated as ends in themselves. And so we have to respect their rights. But that our treatment of them is an acknowledgment of our dependence on them.

27:21 Dylan: Let's say, you know how in Rawls you have the veil of ignorance. And so you make up rules and laws and principles of interaction in society. Based upon the idea that you don't know where you land. That's the way in which you work through how those rules ought to be and what justice is. By pulling the individual out and your own context out as much as possible. And I think she has grievability sort of in the same kind of way. What's the lens by which I look at other people and my relationships in the world. So as to think about how laws and justice and policy ought to work? And that has to do with understanding people as having grievable lives. That's the kind of work it feels like she's trying to do with it.

28:14 Mark: Well, it's ultimately about equality, right?

28:16 Dylan: Yeah. It's an interpretation of how things are equal.

28:19 Mark: I do think. I mean, Seth, you were saying I was exaggerating. But she does say that whole. Once you start calculating, then you're no longer regarding. There definitely is supposed to be a connection. I think she even mentioned specifically the I don't know if it's in Judaic philosophy, something about just, you know, every time an individual dies, a world dies. That's where the Kantian ethic really is supposed to start. To consider someone as an end in themselves is to consider them essentially of infinite value. For practical purposes, you can't really do that even if you are talking about your own kids.

Well, I'm going to drive my kids to the store. There is some small possibility that the car will get in wreck on the way to the store. But yet I am going to take that chance. I am going to do a calculation, even though I regard my kid as close to infinite value as I can conceive. It's just we should, in making policy, regard everybody as equally valuable, right? Whether that means infinitely valuable, that might be unworkable, but equally valuable. And so clearly, even though it's a political book, she operates at a little bit level of abstraction.

So she doesn't actually say anything. But a complete open border policy is paranoid. She just is pointing out pretty accurately that some people who talk about border policies or write these paranoid books about how Europe is being invaded by immigrants and they are acting out some sort of weird paranoid fantasy and certainly not treating the dispossessed in question as having of equal value. As soon as you say America first, you're saying our lives here matter, the rest of the world really doesn't matter as much, at least as far as our policy is concerned.

Maybe in the abstract, but like we can't do anything about everybody in the world. We don't have all the tax money, we can't solve all their problems. It's out there. So we have to make our circle of concern small enough so that effectively we matter and they don't. And that's what she's objecting to, Right?

30:12 Wes: We really should tease apart like infinite value can mean two different things, right? So when it comes to deontology and Kant and the concept of rights, infinite value is a restriction on what I can do to other people. I ought to respect their lives and not murder them, for instance. But in a utilitarian calculation, some utilitarians will say, well, we can probably many these days we can ground the concept of a right through utilitarianism. But in general, right, Mark, for policy purposes, you're right. There's no treatment of, I think, each person as having infinite value in the sense that we have to maximize each person's well being.

We're maximizing the groups well being, we're maximizing society's well being. And this is one of the problems we saw in Singer, right, when I asked him, well, what if it's just all boys in ponds forever? There's always some sort of egotistical limit to our altruism because otherwise there's some real sense in which we have to be able to say, look, I'm not going to give up my entire life because of altruism. So there's some kind of egoistic limit to ethics. And the same goes for why have national borders? Why should American tax dollars simply be for our own infrastructure?

Why don't Russians vote in our elections? These idea of boundaries.

31:45 Dylan: Why have a door on your house?

31:47 Wes: Yeah, these ideas of boundaries and porousness which Wright Butler is very interested in. I think one, without being a bigot can argue that having an immigration policy or borders is not insane. So I think we ought to be more charitable. Yes, there is a lot of paranoia and racism and all that stuff that goes into an over obsession with that stuff. But the underlying concern is not completely unwarranted. And as Orwell pointed out, there's nationalism and then there's patriotism. We could be concerned about the power of our own group and their superiority to others, be nationalists in that sense. But we can also just be legitimately concerned about a way of life and a culture and a society and a nation. And we want to see that type and that kind of thing preserved. And there's nothing actually wrong with that.

32:42 Mark: Can I shift just a little bit back to. To gender? Just we got a lot of comments. So for instance, Charles Crawford, one of our favorite conservative listeners, who sends us a crotchety email every now and then. I enjoy interacting with him. He excerpting from one of his comments on the blog. It's impossible to imagine any form of human life without a rudimentary society organized around or with a view to human reproduction, even if only at the family level. And lo, along comes biology and essential differences between two sorts of humans, those who carry nurse babies and those who don't, but who busily help launch that process.

Good grief, even Pel folks and every feminist who's ever lived arrived on earth via that process. How can you talk about all this at such a vast length without giving serious attention to what it means in practice? So that's just a long way of stating what other people said in much shorter and snarkier ways. Women giving birth need to cool it. It's just discourse. Or someone else said gender is a biological fact and part of academia's attempt to Exterminate the human race is an attempt to destroy gender. The most endangered species is a human one.

So we have different levels of vitriol and common sense going into the phrasing of these.

33:56 Wes: So probably I don't give this impression on the podcast itself, but I think that. I mean, I do want to read people who dissent and discuss those positions, but. So there's a question of whether sex is socially constructed and whether gender is socially constructed. No, I do not think sex is socially constructed. I think that's based on a confusion about what construction is and a conflation of two different varieties of construction. And it's kind of a closet idealism where there is no distinction between our way of thinking about things and the way things are.

But then when it comes to gender as a social construction, if you think of it in the most charitable ways as just we culturally, we internalize these roles. And so, for instance, feminine behaviors or whatever it feels like to be masculine or feminine on the inside, that all of these things are internalizations of identifications with certain aspects of culture. And I think that is vastly overstated, and there's lots of evidence against it and very little evidence to show it's true. I think gender roles largely are very strongly connected to biology, and I think the existence of those roles isn't arbitrary.

It's not like culture is arbitrary. There's a long evolutionary history in which biology is implicated. But that's not to say that we leave culture the way it is, right? We do lots of things with culture to prevent our worst instincts and natures from manifesting themselves. When we fight against sexism, we don't need the idea that men and women are biologically exactly alike. It's not even relevant. All we need to know is that societies exist to equalize, regardless of what's going on biologically, whether one sex is more aggressive and has greater upper body strength, or however you want to define those differences so that they can oppress others.

It need not turn out that there's biological equality. All we need to know is that the goal is social equality.

36:01 Mark: So even biologically, there are things that we could read. Somebody had just forwarded me a Twitter thread from a biologist about how it's not that there are no scientific facts involved in biological sex. Of course there are. It's that the insistence on completely binary gender is a little arbitrary, right? That there really is sometimes a disconnect between what the chromosomes are versus what the phenotypic traits are, and that shows up in Gender Trouble. She talks about specifically you know, somebody who's born as a hermaphrodite, that should tell you right there, the fact that there is a person who legitimately, biologically is not clearly one or the other. That means that insistence on an absolute binary and fear of anything in between or anything beyond that, that's what I see. Her goal here is just loosening that complete straightjacket.

36:51 Seth: Right?

36:51 Mark: This person Foucault was writing about, born hermaphrodite, ended up killing herself eventually because of the social pressures of like, she was born female, then forced to switch to male and back again. You know, it was just a mess because society did not know how to deal with a person like this. And so, like, I think you could acknowledge whatever the complexities of the biology are. And I'm, I don't know, I'm not interested enough in that to have a podcast on that. Like, we don't generally talk about on this podcast physical details in that level of specificity. Go ahead, Seth.

37:22 Seth: But she's not deploying that concept. She's deploying it to disrupt or argue against this notion of the autonomous individual as well as the binary structure. So when she talks about things being socially constructed, she's trying to say there's a structure in which you don't spring full grown autochthonous from the head of Zeus or from your parents. You are born and you are raised and you are nurtured and you are educated and all of these things contribute to who you are. So, and this is turning into a Butler episode, I guess, or rebuttal to Butler as a response to Butler.

But she spent a fair amount of time talking about the state of nature and the Hobbesian state of nature. And she's talking about this notion of individuals who make decisions, enter into contracts, and that being the founding myth for a political structure that we exist in now. And what she's trying to say when she talks about social construction, yeah, we can hack it up and fine tune it, but essentially what she's trying to say is you can't realistically think of yourself as an autonomous individual making choices full grown and unsubbuted, with no history, no past and no relationships, no pre existing relationships.

And in that respect, the state of nature myth makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That seems to me very compelling.

38:50 Wes: I just don't think anyone has actually ever asked us to think that way. I just think it's a very uncharitable misrepresentation of state of nature theory. People really think that, no, you didn't grow up, you didn't have social influences. There was time when people were just free floating individuals or the same thing with typical representations of Descartes thought we were just nothing but souls. He didn't think personhood was bodily. I find all that stuff completely divorced from the history of philosophy. It's like treating these philosophers as kind of memes and they become symbols or representatives of some vague inclination like, oh, you like individualism, but I like community and that's what you represent.

39:35 Seth: I think you can disagree with the force of the argument, but I think it's wrong to say that it's a straw man or it's an uncharitable reading because I mean, we study the social contract in philosophy, right? You're reading Locke and Hobbes and Hume and all those guys is pretty standard fare. And it's fairly well established that there's a fair amount of influence on the construction of a few modern political systems, one of which is the United States, that comes out of these ideas. And to the extent that we buy into a notion of natural right and we think of the state as being a constraining, a constraining but also an arbiter between individual parties that have a certain level of autonomy and individual rights and that we sacrifice these individual rights for the sake of the state, that's not a straw man.

That's not a mischaracterization of how those ideas have been deployed. And then as she tries to provide some alternative to that, I don't know, I don't see anything abhorrent in that effort.

40:41 Wes: Well, I think we'd have to go into detail that we don't have the time to go into tonight to really navigate that disagreement. I mean, it's an interesting disagreement that we should pursue the next time we do more of this social contract theory type stuff.

40:53 Seth: But once again, listeners, pour your hate

40:57 Wes: out on Seth or me. It just depends on which way.

41:01 Dylan: Whatever you do, don't hate me.

41:05 Mark: I think it is recognized on Twitter that there's Team Seth and Team Wes. I think it was with the Latour episode that was born with a lot of these. So I actually, I was looking back at Latour and looking back at the hacking book chapter three about science that we really should have included in that discussion. We just had too much reading for that week. But Dylan read it and Wes has referred to some stuff in it and I was trying to. I just felt like there was a disconnect. Like at least in the race episode we read somebody just writing about the biology and Coleman, our guest was very clear.

Yes, you can admit all the biological stuff and still think it's pretty irrelevant. You know, there might be some interesting biological facts to look at. Like do the races biologically actually break down into kind of the four basic groups that we would use or is there more to it? Like, okay, you could scientifically, but for any purpose that we would be generally interested in. We're interested in the cultural stuff. And so there really is a matter of some cultural contingency as to whether you have the one drop rule, sort of where you count the half breeds there.

And so just talking about that and talking about the part of race that is equivalent to what we would call gender as opposed to biological sex, you know, just being clear that those really are quite different things, like that solves a lot of the problem, or at least I feel like there was pretty clear consensus even among, you know, Coleman is not a super liberal guest. You know, he's argued against reparations and things that's like, that's what he's known for. But even he drew that distinction very sharply. And so I think likewise, if the only thing you get out of studying gender trouble and reading Beauvoir is to sharply distinguish, like, okay, there might be some biological facts and there might be an episode that we have to have in the future and have a trans person on and read some of those things about the ambiguity of biological sex.

But then gender being a different thing. Like, I think even just the bouvoir that we read at least gave us a lot of convincing stories about the way in which the particulars of gender images in particular societies evolve. Like, these are not something that is worth fundamentally arguing over. It's just you might really question though, how deep it goes, which is, I think, what you are getting at, Wes. In other words, like, you're not going to argue if you're looking at a particular case study, right? You're reading Jane Eyre or something and looking at how women are treated in that situation and how the problems that she raised about what if you raise your girl wearing boys clothes, she's a tomboy.

What if you dress her that way and then as our Jenny, our guest was talking about, and then you throw that person out into the society and they're shunned there. Like, those are very relatable. You know, I think you would be a fool to be on the conservative side of that and say, yes, everybody should be chained down to whatever, you know, these social strictures, because they come right out of nature. And if you wear pants as A woman, that's unnatural. Like at this point, hopefully, for anybody involved in a philosophy podcast, a straw man, to think that anybody would really think that women should be straight jacketed in that way.

44:09 Wes: Yeah, but I don't think conservatives believe that either. I mean.

44:12 Mark: Right, well. And then it still leaves open what you were talking about, Wes, of how far down does the social construction go? There's obviously social construction involved in how we perceive categories of race, categories of gender, but does it go all the way down? Even putting aside the biological stuff, you seem to be implying, Wes, that it's not a matter of arbitrariness. There are physical facts implicated. You could use that word in the way things have borne out. Right. So I'm not sure what we would read to decide that one way or the other.

44:47 Wes: Yeah, I think it's an empirical question, like, and it ought to be treated as such. I think it's treated as dogma, as a kind of religion by many people in the social sciences and humanities, and they don't even express any curiosity. You will search long and hard to find someone, scratch their head and say, huh, I wonder if gender is a social construction or to what extent it is a social construction. That doesn't happen. It's a paradigm, it's a framework that's applied, and it's just run with. It's taken as a kind of grounding assumption. You don't get arguments back and forth.

I mean, I'm sure there's stuff out there to find, but I've had trouble finding rigorously argued cases for and against gender as a social construction. For instance, there's some sociological research on it, you know, looking at kids and what toys they gravitate to, and even doing those experiments with other primates, for instance. But anyway, it's an empirical question. And just because it's social, I think people get confused. They think, well, these are social phenomena. Of course, they're social constructions. They're confused on a number of accounts.

They might think, well, the way we look at the world is through concepts and through these lenses, and some of them are social. And so because our concepts are socially constructed. That's what I mean when I say that gender is socially constructed. That's a confusion. That our concepts are constructs does not mean that the things we're talking about are constructs. Those are two different things. And then when we talk about gender being a social construct, we're really talking about this idea of role internalization from culture. But like I said, biology is implicated in culture.

It's implicated in the social. And to say it's social does not mean that it's not also biological. And we just don't know how much of it is contingent, how much it is variable. Look at the fact of what we call feminine is so uniform across different cultures. That's evidence against the idea. Why wouldn't we see more variability between cultures in for instance, what we think of as typical feminine behaviors? So that kind of evidence should be. If you want to argue against it, argue against it and tell us why or come up with other experiments.

That's what I would be looking for. It'll be fascinating, I think, as the science has done on it, to find out which part of it is more plastic and which has something to do with human biology. But I think more has to do with human biology than people are currently willing to admit because they think if you say that you are somehow validating oppression, the oppressive stuff and sexist stuff that has gone on in the world for so long. And I don't think that's true.

47:25 Dylan: The problem for me with this particular part of social construction and the argument is I feel like most commonly granting Wes's point of principle, that there's something closer to the truth of the matter to be figured out. Is that typically trying to say, well, the truth of the matter is that it's a biological fact, blah blah, blah, that that way of speaking often ends up being used as leverage for a way to answer a question that is much more complicated than that that has to do with power relations and ethical relations amongst those people to try to preempt that conversation. And that's why I find myself having very little patience with it. Because there's an agenda already in place. Right. Almost always in my experience, not a genuine inquiry into the complications of what is true and not true. It doesn't end up being that way, ends up being a political argument.

48:30 Mark: So is this another example of just the fact value distinction that this is kind of how I feel about it, that there's the. Are you going to treat people with respect and try not to oppress them and let them pursue the modes of being that they find most comfortable, or are you going to be a jackass about it? That's the moral question. And then there's whatever biological questions are sort of separate, like they might be interesting. Not that interesting for me. I mean, what you were just describing, Wes, I wouldn't want to have an episode on that.

That's just not what we do. And I don't see the direct bearing on. Let's try to look at all the current science to figure out exactly how much is nature and how much is nurture. Like, that's philosophy. I like the fact that it's more abstract. And I only have to, as somewhat of a pragmatist, care about the scientific facts to the extent that they dictate behavior. And I just don't think there's going to be any justification, no matter what the exact formula you come down on.

49:30 Wes: But there's philosophy of science type stuff that would be like, there's a really interesting paper, for instance, on whether gender is a historical natural kind. So there's lots of work to be done without us simply trying to go over some of the science experiments. I agree with you that that's not really what we do. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a way to look at people who disagree on this and say, no, it's simply saying it's a social construct is misleading.

49:58 Dylan: One of the things I really liked about Hacking's book and chapter three that Mark referred to is the thing that he's wrestling with captures a very personal experience for me, just about why I was in philosophy and why I was in science. When I would go to my political philosophy classes when I was in college, I would have this experience, especially when reading sort of post structuralist, postmodernist types, that they were vastly underestimating the power of scientific method of investigation into the world with mathematics, of the sheer power of knowing things about the world, and that they were really blithe about that.

And then I would go into my quantum mechanics class or my physics classes and especially, you know, reading some introduction or whatever about how we got all the answers to X, Y or Z. And I find that the way of thinking was vastly underestimating the cacophony of ideas that were underlying the same exact answer. That you could look at the world and just the fact that you came up with the same number, but you came up to it with three or four different ways showed you that there was more more to what was going on than the simple fact of the matter of looking at the world, it being absolutely obvious.

And that there was more about the way in which we were doing it both together and the way in which the words we were using affected the way we thought about it. And I liked that a lot in that chapter of Hacking. And that's the part I like most about this series of episodes on social construction is going back and forth between those for my own self. I end up being just Fundamentally pragmatic about it, that we have provisional ideas about the way in which we interact with things, but we're always trying to interact with something to be figured out, whether it be socially or politically or whatever, and that we err a lot when we are being overly principled.

I was looking for a quote that he has in chapter three from Feynman. Here it is just referring specifically to physics from Richard Feynman. Mathematically, each of the three different formulations, Newton's law, the local field theory, and the minimum principle, gives exactly the same consequences. What do we do then? We will read in all the books that we cannot decide scientifically on one or the other. That is true. They are equivalent. Scientifically, it is impossible to make a decision because there is no experimental way to distinguish between them if all the consequences are the same.

But psychologically, they're very different in two ways. First, philosophically, you like them or do not like them, and training is the only way to beat the disease. Second, psychologically, they are very different because they are completely unequivalent when you're trying to guess new laws. That, to me, is the nub of it, that you can be trying to figure out something about the world, and you say it's absolutely true, but there's actually multiple ways to think about it and that those ways of thinking about it are not the same, even if you come up with the same result.

53:10 Mark: I guess as a way of following up on all three of the things we've just talked about a little bit, the philosophy of science stuff, this gender stuff, and the modern political stuff, which was touching on Black Lives Matter and touching on immigration and all, is what we think. I mean, I know we avoided contemporary political stuff, I think, for a long time because in some ways it seemed so thankless, right, that either we're not woke enough or we're too woke. But actually, a lot of people thanked us for, like, this Judith Butler interview. We just did.

Like, we got a bunch of literally, thank you for doing that interview. Thank you for covering gender trouble in this detail. That was really useful. So, on balance, I guess I don't mind, and I'm not as uncomfortable voyaging into this area as I thought I would be. I'm getting a better handle on it. It's still a little frustrating. I'm glad that we did this today because I felt like so many of the discussions we've had, I felt like I have to make some sort of disclaimer like, hey, I'm just talking about the author now, just trying to understand this difficult text.

If you want me to actually stand back and evaluate it, that's going to take another hour. Or I'm not sure that I have the information at my disposal. Or I'm going to put my whole judgment about the postmodern take on science sort of in suspension, because that's the way I think about. About progressing through the philosophical landscape. Is that okay? Here's an interesting issue that was raised by this text. I don't have a decision on it yet. Let's read some more stuff later about it. And so this is part of what motivates me to then want to move to.

Okay, we've opened this box of post structuralism. I'd like to actually understand that. How many more readings will it take for me to understand that Latour was not sufficient by itself? Hacking reflecting on Latour is not sufficient by itself. Kuhn was certainly helpful. There's lots of things we've read that are helpful. So this is one of the things that's just come up recently of how, going forward, how much do we want to pursue some of these threads that we've been talking about today? Or do we want to acknowledge that it's hard for us to know how much of our audience actually prefers that?

I'd say based on just the requests we get, more than half of them are for 20th century, and quite a lot of them are for, like, contemporary people that actually there's no chance that we're going to cover. Because it's just like, I have a favorite professor at my school and I want you to talk about him. Probably not. Like, it has to be somebody who's taught in classes for there to be enough buzz about it for us to feel like this is something that the audience in general is going to be interested in. It's cross purposes. Like, are we going to engage more of this contemporary stuff?

Are we going to be more of a classic great Books podcast? Obviously, we're going to do both, but how do we balance them? Is the question maybe to contemplate slightly here, see if we have some consensus

55:50 Seth: on the issue, is every time we read something like this, and I actually think it's good that it's bringing out some contrast, because even though our MO Is civil discourse and all that, we don't disagree nearly as much maybe, as we should, which is why people think we're all liberal.

56:07 Dylan: You're wrong, Seth.

56:08 Seth: Not realizing. Not realizing that Wes is somehow fascist. A fascist.

56:14 Dylan: Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

56:16 Wes: I have a friend who's A fan of the podcast who calls me a fascist, even though I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter. I'm a fascist for descending from that.

56:24 Dylan: Just shows that you're a fascist.

56:25 Seth: You're a complicated figure, Wes. And I appreciate being a liberal who's stuck in the bubble. I'm One note. I'm like the cardboard girlfriend in one of those sitcoms, whereas you're the complicated male lead, a cardboard girlfriend. The question is, what's the opposite of what we've been doing, right? We read this stuff and then everybody says, oh, shit, we got to get back to the Greeks. We need to read Parmenides or we need to get back to Plotinus or let's get to the Middle Ages or something like that. And then the alternative is too, we could try to read something quote unquote conservative, whatever that might mean.

And we've done, you know, little excursions there. So again, I'm just going to make my final plea for this. I don't think anything we've been doing is not philosophical, is not philosophy. You can argue that it's good or bad, you can argue, but there's nothing different about my approach. And I feel like our discussion with Butler and talking about Benjamin and talking hacking, who, by the way, analytic but very readable, very good, not a hack whatsoever, even though that's in his name, that's just good stuff. It's just good philosophy and there's something behind or something we need to read into and try to understand about this desire.

It's like, well, we don't want to do too much of this stuff about gender. Okay, well, if you think of it as being about gender and you want to talk about metaphysics or ethics, like, somehow gender falls into the taxonomy of ethics, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, those sorts of things. Whereas my reading of it is that it's straight up philosophy that's leveraging that particular thing, gender, to have conversations about binary conceptual schemes and ontology and politics and all these other sorts of things. So I don't feel like we're on a run or we have to do something different.

So that's just basically me. If we want to go back and read Malebranche, okay, by all means, let's go back and do that, or one of those medieval Islamic philosophers and all that. But I'm having a good run right now and I like it. And I don't feel like we're doing anything we haven't been doing for 11 fucking years.

58:39 Wes: Just to reiterate, despite all my criticisms of Post structuralism and critical theory and even the way psychoanalytic concepts are applied, obviously I'm interested in those things as well. I have just as many criticisms for the other side. I used to bug you guys all the time by talking about scientism and I'm trying to read up on the history of 20th century French philosophy, including post structuralism, and that actually excites me. So I don't understand how people get into this frame of mind where they think, I'm only into analytic philosophy, I'm only into continental philosophy, and the other side is stupid and sucks.

I just don't get it. Even if you strongly disagree or if you think there's a lot of misuse of certain ideas, I don't know how you wouldn't want to still investigate. But as far as the balance of what we do going forward, I mean, I don't know how to specifically break it down, but I still want to do this type of stuff and I still want to do analytical stuff. I don't mind if we're reading Ned Block, a very dry paper on the philosophy of mind or if we're reading the most far out French thing, whatever. I am interested in all of it. I just want the variety.

And I do want to still keep doing classics and early modern and ancient and all that stuff.

1:00:01 Dylan: I myself am very wary of trying to have some kind of balanced principle between different categories of philosophy. I think basically we've more or less followed our noses about what we're interested in. And if I was going to have a principle about how we pick things, you know, one principle would be to not stay too stuck on something for too long and also at the same time not shrink from engaging something for a little while. Other than that we should just do stuff that we're interested in.

1:00:34 Seth: Stop being reasonable, Dylan.

1:00:36 Wes: Yeah, I mean, our eclecticism really is actually a strength. We're open minded enough to do all these different things. Yeah, many podcasts would have banned one category, another as not serious or as dumb or whatever. But enough people take this stuff seriously, enough people are interested in it, and there are always or usually important underlying ideas that are worth investigating and learning about.

1:01:02 Dylan: It's totally awesome that you can go to our podcast and you could go listen to a podcast about Judith Butler or with Judith Butler and go do one on Edmund Burke. The fact that you can do that is awesome.

1:01:16 Mark: I guess there's two sort of categorical things though, I want to say so. One is, I think the folks I was quoting before who are wondering why we're spending so much time caressing these highly liberal thinkers and waiting on their every word. Want us to. Can't you give equal time or something like that to conservative figures? And we've talked about contemporary conservative types that you might even have as a guest or have.

1:01:44 Wes: We should definitely do Oakeshott and Scruton and Sidgwick.

1:01:49 Mark: Yeah. And there were some commentator or novelist that we had picked, like, yeah, we're going to do in general. We're open to that. But it seems like the conservative positions are simpler to state so that they just don't require as much reading. Like, I really enjoyed the Burke that we read, but I don't need to read 10 other things like the Burke. It's not creating a strange cultural edifice. We just said what the fundamental distinction against social construction theory just being this realist distinction between the discourse on the one hand and what the discourse is talking about, that's a really simple thing to describe.

I don't feel like I need to read a paper refuting Judith Butler. That just makes that point. Like, we can make that point ourselves. I'm definitely open to be convinced, you know, if folks want to reach out to us and like, oh, yeah, yeah, this, this and this conservative thinker. But I just feel like we've looked down those, you know, in considering libertarianism and considering Ayn Rand and considering Hayek. That's great that we did that.

1:02:49 Seth: That was a great essay, though.

1:02:51 Wes: I don't think I agree on this. I think we can do more conservatives. Like I said, Sidgwick, Oakeshott, Scruton are three big ones.

1:03:00 Mark: I just don't recall us ever getting any requests for any of those. So I'm not against doing them. But I also am feeling, well, oakshott,

1:03:06 Wes: we've definitely gotten requests for. And he's someone.

1:03:10 Seth: Scruton's a big figure.

1:03:12 Wes: Yeah. And Oakeshott is a big figure, and he would be a logical person to do. He wrote a book of essays we could look at called Rationalism in Politics, and he's talked about a lot. Just like, I have no problems doing very lefty stuff. I would have no problem doing that. I don't think we should shy away from it.

1:03:29 Mark: And the other categorical thing is just, again, how much of it we're putting into historical stuff versus more contemporary. And by more contemporary, I even just mean 1910. I mean, I'm not saying we have to read that many books by authors who are writing them right now. It's pretty time consuming to read a whole book so we're only going to, I think, continue a couple times a year maximum. Having an author like Butler on herself where we read her current thing, that's got to be an exception rather than the rule. It would just burn us out otherwise.

Absolutely. And we want to read sort of the most influential, highest quality stuff throughout history. But at the same time, we've now covered enough of the historical basics that even. Yes, of course I want to read more German idealism. Of course I want to read more Middle Ages philosophy. Of course I want to read more. More really ancient world philosophy. And there's a lot of ancient Greek and Roman. There's always more. However, when I look at who people are actually requesting, how many Plotinus requests we've gotten as compared to how many Zizek requests given how many things fit in the modern category, that that includes phenomenology and the continental stuff and even straight up science literature.

Can we read a Stephen Hawking book? Can we read. So many of that stuff is going to be from the last century that I had suggested. Like, can we just go back and forth? Pick an old thing. Pick a relatively new thing. An old thing. New thing. So your response to that, Wes, was like, maybe we should do a new thing one out of every four times. Like, more like that. So I'm sure it'll be somewhere in between there. But I did want to see Dylan and Seth, where you landed on that, whether you feel like me that we've earned the right to do 20th century stuff now.

We used to only do that once every six months because we had so much historical stuff to do now. But, like, I feel like chasing these threads.

1:05:13 Dylan: I simply don't worry about this at all. I don't worry about the balance between the old and the new. I don't even think about it that way.

1:05:22 Mark: So Dylan will go with the majority. That sounds like.

1:05:25 Seth: I don't either. I just. I want to be interested. And there's some stuff that's just not interesting to me.

1:05:31 Wes: You guys know when you say that, that just means we're going to be doing what Mark wants to do.

1:05:38 Dylan: I think about it with different principles. And I said what they were a little bit earlier. I like it when we pick a thread and we follow that thread for a few episodes. I think that's great. I like it when we have something that we want to do and we realize that it'd be good to read a couple things in preparation for it. That makes total sense to me. In fact, is very much like the follow the thread I also like it that when we say, you know what? We've been doing X for a while. You know, we've been doing a lot of social construction. You know, maybe we should go do something else.

We should scratch a different itch. What should we do next? And we balance things that we're interested in at a given moment with thinking about what our fans would like to have us do. And there's a little bit of basically going up to the bookshelf and saying, you know what? I'd like to go read that again. That's my principle right there. It's like drinking wine. You look around to find stuff that you like.

1:06:35 Mark: No, you drink an old wine and then you drink a new wine the next day, and then you go back to an old wine if you don't. Seth, what was your take?

1:06:43 Wes: And unfortunately, we can only drink 26 bottles a year.

1:06:52 Mark: Can't we just drink more per. Can't we drink three bottles for one session? No. No.

1:06:59 Dylan: So I'm going on a whiskey distillery tour in Scotland in about two months, and I'm going to go to 16 distilleries. So how many philosophy books does that correspond to?

1:07:08 Wes: That's amazing. I hope your travel is not postponed

1:07:11 Seth: or over how many days?

1:07:13 Dylan: Eight.

1:07:14 Seth: Eight days? Sixteen. Okay.

1:07:16 Dylan: Actually, there's a couple 3A days. I hope it doesn't get messed up as well.

1:07:21 Mark: Well, maybe we can do a recording while you're there and you can be inebriated on the show.

1:07:27 Seth: Well, if we do, it should definitely be about the Scottish Enlightenment.

1:07:31 Wes: I think we need to do a video episode, all wearing our masks, hunkered down. Coronavirus is not going to interfere with the podcasting schedule.

1:07:43 Seth: Do you know, like, a box of masks costs, like $900 now? Every place is sold out of Amazon and Home Depot.

1:07:51 Wes: One of my counselors works at a hospital and they're having boxes of masks go missing. I was looking today. I couldn't find any except for really expensive.

1:08:00 Seth: I believe it.

1:08:01 Mark: Well, be safe, audience members. Stay in your house and read philosophy. Don't talk to anyone face to face. The Internet is enough.

1:08:10 Dylan: Keep six feet between your outstretched arms with a book at the end.

1:08:14 Seth: Wash your hands.

1:08:16 Wes: This virus vindicates our philosophical isolation.

1:08:19 Seth: Palms, back, nails. Yeah.

1:08:25 Mark: Well, thank you, listeners for putting up with this. I hope some of this was helpful. We, of course, welcome your feedback. Unfortunately, we don't know how to get a representative sampling of your opinions. So we always are free to, like good existentialists, interpret the facticity of your saying, no, don't do that ever again is. Well, that's just one dude. Just one. Just one asshole saying that. No, no. We will try to respect every one of you, even if we do not ultimately follow your directives. But we want to involve you, especially if you give us money. That's the way it is. If you say, I want you to do Zizek, here's a $50 donation in addition to my citizenship. That'll. Okay, make it 200.

1:09:05 Wes: We will even do your self published book if you pay us enough.

1:09:10 Dylan: We're definitely buyable. And that's another principle. If you gave us enough money, we'd definitely do whatever you wanted us to do.

1:09:16 Mark: Exactly.

1:09:19 Seth: There's no doubt about that. But I'm going to say that it's a sliding scale. Asking us to do Zizek and wanting us to do your self published book are two different things. In case people are not aware, unsolicited books show up on my doorstep, our doorsteps, all the time. Some from Princeton University Press and some in very scary looking plain brown wrappers.

1:09:42 Wes: Yes, I have definitely gotten unsolicited self published books by fans that are, some of them quite crazy.

1:09:53 Mark: For our closing song, since this is a host only episode, I thought I'd do a host only song, meaning one of mine. It's called the Size of Love, the final track on my Mark Lint's Dry Folk album, released a little over a year ago. It's something I wrote on a napkin in a Denny's when I was, I believe, 22 years old. I got my harmony singer Iris Hutchings to sing lead on it. And just as Judith Butler says, drag is parody that reveals something about social construction. Maybe this kind of parody also reveals something about social construction of not just musical genres, but relationships. Or maybe that's just a bunch of pretentious bullshit. It's a very silly song. Enjoy. Good night, everybody.

1:10:27 Dylan: Good night.

1:10:28 Seth: Good night.

1:10:29 Wes: Good night.

1:10:33 Unknown speaker: I was hungry so I bought thoughts and fries Done in just them progressively by size As I chill them slowly I watch your eyes as they bug out to the S of love. The size of love is about yea big Smaller than a forest, bigger than a twig Yes, I know that you dig me on what you're dreaming of. Cause I see you swelling to the sun of love. I was thirsty so I bought a coke. When you said add salt I thought it was a joke that occasion haunts me. I miss that coke A see sensation grow into the signs of love. The S of love is about Y B Smaller than a forest bigger than a twig. Yes, I know that you dig me I'm watching, dreaming of Cause I see you swelling through the size of love.

1:12:34 Mark: As we left at Denny's, Paid the check and skipped to the airlock

1:12:47 Seth: next

1:12:47 Unknown speaker: to the cigarette machine. I have never seen that many nervous ticks in a macho man. Your breath so big and your love so mean. Sigh so love is a bounty a big smaller than a forest, bigger than a squig. Yes, I know that you dig me I'm watching, dreaming oh cause I see you swelling to the sight of love. The size of love is about gave me. Smarter than the forest, bigger than the tween. Yes, I know that you take me, but I'm giving you the show Cuz it's underwhelming sight. Yes, it's less than empty Sigh. Of your love.