A podcast with me and Andrew Heaton. He was a good interviewer. At one point, I remark that the Intellectual Dark Web (I don’t call it that) has a large number of people with a background in psychology and comedy. I wonder why having a background in comedy makes someone potentially receptive to the view that shutting down opposing views is wrong.
Comedic material is conflict. Humor works by redirecting spite in round about ways and it needs a source of spite for that.
Laughter is aggression turned inwards by the comedian creating a punchline that changes the villain to the listener. The listener directs the developed rage against himself and obtains an anxiety reaction called laughter.
Humor is by nature transgressive
Great interview. I had never heard Andrew Heaton before but he has excellent interviewing chops. And his inventory of interviewees looks promising. So thanks for that.
At one point Dr Kling said something about populism not having a literature. I would maybe push back on that a bit. I think a book like Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson that focuses on the issue of inclusion versus extraction is very much populist. And Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons which focuses on local advantages in governing commons relative to regulatory fiat from afar can also be viewed as populist.
Fiction though provides a very rich and nuanced wellspring for populist thought. Some of the greatest novels ever written are implicitly populist. Start with many people’s all time greatest novel ever written, Middlemarch, by George Eliot. When the idealism of the little people subverts the condescensions of the comfortable, that is populism. A populist creed might well come from its pages:
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
One sees the same sort of populism from more of a leftist slant in Germinal by Zola, and in every single novel Thomas Hardy wrote. But these are just what I have read over the past year, a more comprehensive list could undoubtedly be put together by someone with more time and energy.
Looks good but you have to get the Podbean app to listen. YouTube or Soundcloud is better.
No, you can listen in a browser at the Podbean website. If you are using mobile, it will try to force you to get the app, but you can “request the desktop version” of the link, and you will then able able to play the sound file.
It is an interesting point. There was a precursor to this years ago after the comedian Daniel Tosh got in hot water about some (extremely unfunny and untasteful) jokes about sexual assault; Lindy West and Jim Norton subsequently debated the issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up1qyxHSbCg
At the time, I thought West had the better argument. Her point was that if you make bad, sexist jokes, getting called an ***hole isn’t censorship, it’s just calling a spade a spade. It does seem like now, public outcry is the first step towards cancellation.
I still think West was right on the merits of the joke and the man.
I attended an event recently in which many of the speakers and attendees were bemoaning the purported transition into “tribal” and uncivil polarization, lack of fidelity to the principles of classical liberalism and civil rights like free speech and due process, and so forth.
I took the Devil’s Advocate (progressive Intellectual Turing Test) position and asked, “Well, ok, what’s wrong if we lose free speech and ban speech which is hateful, hurtful, or offensive? How is that a worse world? What are you worried will happen?”
I was astonished to discover most people were tongue-tied in their response, having been brought up in a generation that viewed those rights as something akin to sacred terminal ends not subject to questioning, instead of as instrumental values which enable or bolster other goals.
That is to say, when progressives argue for limitations on speech, they have an ideological structure that provides them with immediate recourse to various reasons why this should occurs, what harms are happening now, why those harms should be prevents, how the benefits greatly outweigh any costs, etc. When conservatives, old-school civil rights “liberals”, or libertarians oppose the idea, they are often not actually “arguing”, in terms of “making an argument,” but just expressing disagreement and merely reasserting that the principles ought to remain sacred.
Note: Saying that modern life with science and technology and free-ish markets is great, and once upon a time our predecessors were enthralled with certain political ideas, is not actually a fleshed-out argument for why the former absolutely depends on the latter. A typical progressive university student will ask, “What’s any of that got to do with tolerating hate speech? You mean if we stop tolerating hate speech, all of a sudden the electrical lines will come tumbling down, and the bridges will crumble, and Amazon won’t deliver my package on time? That’s ridiculous.”
People who disagree with progressive speech control and advocate for free speech needs to be much more concrete about exactly what will go wrong if we have to conduct discourse in the shadow of the guillotine.