back to indexGlenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture | Lex Fridman Podcast #285
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I hate affirmative action.
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I don't just disagree with it.
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I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment.
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The hatred comes from an understanding
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that it is a bandaid, that it is a substitute
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for the actual development of the capacities
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of our people to compete.
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They wanna tell African Americans to pat us on the head.
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We're gonna have a separate program for you.
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We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
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That doesn't make us any smarter.
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It doesn't make us any more creative
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and it doesn't make us any more fit
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for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
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The following is a conversation with Glenn Loury,
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professor of economics and social sciences
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at Brown University.
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He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time,
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writing and speaking about race and inequality.
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I highly encourage you to listen to his show
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on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Loury.
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Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech
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I think is the greatest speech in American history.
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If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it.
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And ask you a question about this dream.
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I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
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and live out the true meaning of its creed.
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We hold these truths to be self evident,
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that all men are created equal.
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I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,
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the sons of former slaves and the sons of former
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slave owners will be able to sit down together
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at the table of brotherhood.
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I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
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a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
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sweltering with the heat of oppression,
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will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
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I have a dream that my four little children
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will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
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by the color of their skin,
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but by the content of their character.
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I have a dream today.
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First of all, damn.
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I mentioned to you offline I immigrated to America
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and this is why I love this country.
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This is one of the great speeches that represents
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what this country is about.
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So what is this ideal of equality
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that we should strive for as a nation,
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that all men are created equal?
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What does that mean to you, this equality?
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Well, if we put this in historical context,
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King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.
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It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs
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the Emancipation Proclamation
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declaring the enslaved people to be free.
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They're not yet citizens in 1863,
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but the end of slavery has become the position
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of the federal government when Lincoln issues
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that Emancipation Proclamation.
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So putting it in context, enslaved people,
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four million or so African descended enslaved people,
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how do they become citizens?
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How do they become in this status of subjugation
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and domination and stigma and exclusion?
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How do they become citizens?
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It seems to me that that's the heart of it.
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The equality that King is talking about
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is an equality of status as members of the nation
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as free and equal citizens within the republic.
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Now, I think it's really important to understand
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that slavery was not merely a legal order,
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but it was also a social system
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that had the symbolism attached to it.
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They had a big journey to make
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from their subjugated status as serfs, as landless people,
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as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really
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in the minds of many.
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So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later,
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that King is appealing to this idea
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that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence
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writes these words, all men are created equal
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and endowed by their creator
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with certain inalienable rights,
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Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, didn't have in mind
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when he wrote those words, the people who were slaves.
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But by the time you get to 1963,
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King is invoking this idea, all men,
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and of course he means all persons.
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He doesn't only mean men.
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He means men and women are created equal.
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He wants this idea to be embraced by the country
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in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.
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The legacy of slavery would be erased,
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that the position of African Americans would be equalized
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within the political community,
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which is the United States of America.
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That's my sense of it in any case.
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So on a very basic level, the worth of a human being
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It's just literally the worth of a human being.
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So I mentioned to you offline
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that I came from the Soviet Union.
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My grandfather fought in World War II,
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and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person
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as they were captured, there's different numbers,
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but it's in the hundreds to one German
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in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.
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So he wanted Germany to expand
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and conquer a large part of the world.
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And within that future world, that Third Reich,
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the worth of a Russian or a Slavic person
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is one hundredth or one thousandth of a German person,
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of a pure German person.
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So that has to do with not some kind of public policy
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or politics or all that kind of stuff.
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It has to do with the basic worth of a human being.
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And that's what Dr. King is speaking to,
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that all people on some kind of deep level
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are worth the same.
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If you're somehow weighing the value of a person,
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we're equal in that basic fundamental worth.
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Yeah, I think that's correct.
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I think that's very well said.
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I don't know that he had in mind
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the position of Slavic people in Central Europe
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in the middle of the 20th century,
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or the first part of the 20th century, King.
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I don't know that he had that in mind.
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He might well have done.
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But certainly that's the idea.
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So you don't think he was really thinking
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about this particular civil rights struggle
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and the particular struggle
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against the backdrop of the history of slavery in America
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and thinking about African Americans.
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He wasn't thinking about the basic,
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he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.
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No, I don't mean to say that.
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The speech in Washington.
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In 1963 at that march was within the context
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of the United States.
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And it was within the context of the civil rights movement.
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There was a movement that was going on.
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He was an actor in a political drama that was American
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that had to do with the fight over equal rights
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for voting, for housing, for employment,
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for citizenship of blacks in America.
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But King was informed, I think,
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by a much broader Christian ethic of the equality
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I mean, he gets killed in 1968.
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The five years after that speech in Washington,
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he spends developing his worldview
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and the things that he had to say, for example,
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about the war in Southeast Asia that was going on
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at that time made appeals to universal principles
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He was a pacifist to some degree.
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He was against war.
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He was a socialist to some degree.
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He might not have worn that label publicly,
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but he believed in a decent society
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where the poor would not go untended,
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where healthcare would be available to people who needed it
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and this kind of thing.
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A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life
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was not dependent upon the color of the skin,
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upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken,
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upon whether male or female.
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All persons are created equal.
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This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King,
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on my understanding.
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Broadly speaking, what do you learn about human nature
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by looking at the history of slavery in America?
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So what does that tell you about people?
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Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head.
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One is about the capacity of people
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for looking the other way in the face of
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unethical and morally profoundly problematic practice.
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So, I mean, slavery was controversial.
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It was controversial going all the way back
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to the founding of the United States of America.
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The country was founded on a compromise
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where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent
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and would not have had it countenanced in the Constitution.
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The other half of the country were steeped
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in the dependence on the labor of these African captives
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and their descendants.
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The economy depended upon it.
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They owned them as property.
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That was their wealth.
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Their wealth was invested to some degree
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in the value of these human beings.
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And in order for the United States to come together
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as a confederation of the several colonies,
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there had to be a compromise made.
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And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist
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and the people who were against it
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or who thought it morally problematic
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were able to countenance the practice
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in the Southern states where slavery flourished.
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And that went on for 75 years
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after the founding of the country
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until the crisis of the late 1850s
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that led to the Civil War
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and ultimately to the emancipation.
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So one thing I think about human nature
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from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people
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to live with terrible, morally questionable practices
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and have that as a part of their institutions.
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It took a movement, a massive movement of abolitionists
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struggling against slavery for the better part of a century
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before that practice could be eradicated.
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But the other thing about human nature that I see
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is the ability of people to sustain their humanity
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under the most awful, oppressive conditions.
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The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children,
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I mean, they were chattel,
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they were bought and sold like horses or cattle.
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And yet their humanity was not destroyed by that.
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And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree
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in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive,
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the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved
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and who were set free were able to over the following decades
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build a foundation for the development of African Americans
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within the context of American society
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that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement
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of the middle of the 20th century
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and has led us into the present day.
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So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil
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but human nature can also survive
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in the face of terrible evil.
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That's what I take from slavery.
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That survival, that flame can burn even when the world
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around it tries to put it out.
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There's still a little flame of human consciousness,
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of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is
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that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful
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That's very well said.
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Yeah, I think you put it very well.
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There's gotta be some poetic way of expressing that.
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Leave it to the poets.
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What about the people that look the other way?
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How many people do you think, just regular people,
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knew that something is, this is wrong?
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Or do people through generations convince themselves,
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most people, most regular people,
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convince themselves that there's nothing wrong?
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I ask this question because I wonder
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what we're looking the other way on today also.
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Because you have to ask yourself these difficult questions
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of assuming we're the same people we were back then
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then we can be flawed in that same kind of way.
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We can look the other way just as others have in history.
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Yeah, you spoke of the European context
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and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people
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had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes
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that were committed by that regime were being undertaken.
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I mean, railroad cars full of human beings
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being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death
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in labor camps or to be gassed, et cetera.
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A lot of people had to know about what was going on
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and look the other way or enthusiastically supported
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the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on.
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And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840.
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My sense of the matter is that like many practices
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that are unjust, most people thought
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that's just the way it is.
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I mean, that's the world that they inherited.
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They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries.
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They just wanted to go along.
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Some people might've been troubled by it
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but thought there's nothing that can be done.
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Some people might've thought, well,
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they're these black Africans, they're not really like us
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and they are lucky to be here.
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If they were in Africa, they'd be worse off still.
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Some people might've thought that.
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Some people might've been disturbed
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but not been able to see what it is
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that they could do about it.
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They might've thought, oh, this is disgusting.
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This is not something I would wanna have anything to do with
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but not knowing whether there's any practical way
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of opposing it, that's why you need a movement.
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You need for the people who are troubled by the practice
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to know that there are others like themselves
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equally troubled and as they gather together,
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collectively, they can exert their influence.
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I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery,
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as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.
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There were abolitionists and there were people
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who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents
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and institutions that created the United States of America,
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opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.
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But it took a while before that could come to a head
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and produce the crisis which ultimately led
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to the eradication of slavery.
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I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States.
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It's not unique to the Western Hemisphere.
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The enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel
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is something that one sees on a global basis,
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one sees it going all the way back to antiquity.
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So we might ask, how is it that people finally came
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to turn their backs and eradicate the practice?
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That might be the thing worth really trying to understand
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because the practice itself is,
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there's a wonderful book by the sociologist
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Orlando Patterson called Slavery and Social Death
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that was published in 1982, which is a comprehensive history
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and social analysis of the institution of slavery
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over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek
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and Roman civilizations, finding slavery in Africa
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amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East,
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finding slavery in the Far East,
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finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people,
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the practice of taking someone as a captive in war
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and then instead of killing them, which you could do,
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making them into your property was very, very widespread
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So I mean, I'd like to make this point sometimes
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when people are talking about how wrong slavery was
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and I agree without any question
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that the practice was profoundly morally problematic,
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but I'd like to make the point that given how wrong it was,
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think about how impressive was the accomplishment
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of the eradication of slavery.
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Now, that was something, I mean, there were 600,000 dead
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in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865
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in a country of 30 million people.
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That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives
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not to eradicate slavery in every instance,
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probably most of them were just fighting for,
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they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces
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and they fought and they died,
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but the net effect of their having fought and died
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was to push along a process
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that led to the eradication of slavery.
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That's an amazing achievement.
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The slaves themselves were largely uneducated
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and backward in their,
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of course, what else could they have been?
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They were kept in captivity,
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they were prevented from developing their human potential
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and yet after the end of slavery,
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that population, that 4 million plus African descended people
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became the foundation for what a century later
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leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall
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and giving that great speech
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and now here we are 150 years down the road
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and Barack Obama is president of the United States.
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Now, he did not descend from slaves,
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I think we must not lose track of that,
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but he identified as an African American
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and was a part of the population
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that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves
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and we are, we African Americans are
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for all practical purposes,
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fully equal citizens of this great republic.
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That has happened within a century and a half
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and I don't know that you can find any parallel
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to that kind of transformation in the status of people
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from human chattel to full citizens of the republic.
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Anywhere in human history,
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it's certainly worth celebrating the achievement
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of the eradication of slavery, I would say.
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And it probably started with a few people
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that inside their mind dared to rebel.
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You know, it's interesting to think about how it all started,
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how in the state of injustice,
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the revolution percolates, like where it starts.
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You said people that see something is wrong find each other.
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It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals
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that not only know that something is wrong,
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but are able to tell others about it and be convincing
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and then together gather and rise up.
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It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress
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from slavery to where we are today
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to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal.
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The power of individual,
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because I don't know what you think about it,
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but I tend to think that a few small individuals
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probably originated this.
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Like it's the power of the individual,
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because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world,
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what can I possibly do?
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But I tend to think one person can be the seed
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of starting to fix the injustice.
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One person here, one person there.
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One thinks of course of Frederick Douglass,
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this massively significant figure who was born in slavery,
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who stole his freedom because he was property
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and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore
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and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally
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and who became an educated, a powerfully articulate,
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massively influential person in the United States
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and in England going around presenting himself
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as an embodiment of human dignity
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and commitment to ideals of equality.
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And I mean, he's just one person,
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but there were others like him.
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All it takes is just one person.
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So here we are on this topic of equality
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in the 21st century.
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So what does equality mean today?
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If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome
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or the injustice of inequality,
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at which point does equality of outcome is just,
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at which point is it unjust?
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Sort of looking at our world today
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and looking at inequality,
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how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice
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and some is the way of life?
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So what does equality mean when we look at the world today,
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different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity?
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I don't think King's speech, I have a dream
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that one day my four little children will be judged
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not by the color of their skin,
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but by the content of their character
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requires equality of outcome.
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He says his children will be judged
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by the content of their character.
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That's a conditional statement.
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That is the judgment will depend upon the content
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of their character, not the color of their skin,
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but it doesn't follow from that,
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that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth
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and economic power,
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position within the society,
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representation in the various professions,
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the various measures of social achievement
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doesn't follow from judging by the content of character
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and not color of skin,
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that when we look at the end of the day
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at the social outcomes that they will be equal
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across the different groups.
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In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea
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that groups will be equal
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in all of the various social outcomes,
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that they will be equally successful in business,
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that they will be proportionately represented
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in the various professions,
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that they will have the same educational achievement,
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that the occupational profiles will look the same.
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If they are, in fact, distinct groups
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with their own cultural traditions and practices,
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with their own ideals and norms,
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various immigrant populations,
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people coming to the United States of America
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from all corners of the world,
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the descendants of the African slaves,
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the black Americans here today,
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who are ourselves various with different backgrounds,
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different origins and so on,
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the different religious practices and commitments
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that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever,
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however we parcel up the total population
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into the various groups,
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these groups are themselves different from one another.
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They have different norms
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within their own cultural practice.
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How would we expect,
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if in fact we recognize
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that the groups are different from one another,
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that in a world that is fair,
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they would all come out equally represented
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in every undertaking.
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They're not equally represented,
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and that fact, I'm arguing,
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is in and of itself insufficient
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to justify the conclusion
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that they're not somehow being fairly treated.
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Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes
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in a world in which the populations in question
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are themselves different
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with respect to their culture, their practices,
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their norms, their traditions,
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their beliefs, their ideals, and so on.
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The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs,
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cultural orientations, and ideals
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will have consequences
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in terms of their different social outcomes.
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So I just think it's a mistake
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that people are making
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fairness of treatment
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implies equality of outcomes.
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Is the process by which we're speaking now
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in the midst of the National Basketball Association's
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I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan.
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it's a very good team, and I'm excited about my Celtics.
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I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant
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and Kyrie Irving and company, okay,
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in a playoff series.
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and we're on our way to
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the Eastern Conference Finals,
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and we're on our way to the NBA Finals,
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and I'm, you know, if I were a betting man,
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I'd put down a few bucks
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that the Boston Celtics, underrated as we are,
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have a very good chance of winning the NBA Finals.
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Okay, so that's the NBA.
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That's the National Basketball Association.
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I like basketball.
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Slightly biased prediction, but yes.
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Yeah, it is somewhat biased.
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All I'm saying is,
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if you take a look at who the star players are
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in the National Basketball Association,
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you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans.
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You know, there's some really good basketball players
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coming out of Eastern Europe,
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and more power to them,
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and there are a lot of African Americans.
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We're overrepresented.
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There are not that many Jews, as far as I know.
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No offense intended there, Lex,
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equally representative
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of all of the different populations in the United States.
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Now, we could go into the reasons why,
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but I'm just saying the process
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by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.
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If you can play, you can get on the court.
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All they're looking for is people who can play.
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I think something like that is true
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in many different venues.
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I expect, if you're a really good technical engineer,
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companies are gonna employ you,
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and if you can make money, they're gonna advance you,
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and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.
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I expect that the people who are engaged
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in financial transactions,
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who are actually making bets on the market,
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by and large, are the people who are good at that activity,
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and if you're good at that activity in this world,
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in this modern world,
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you're gonna rise to the top.
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I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.
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Of course, there are of many different sorts,
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but I'm saying that to expect that there would be,
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okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code.
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Let's look at who's actually trading bonds.
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Let's look at who's actually starting businesses and so on.
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To say that in a fair world,
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I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population,
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they'd be 10% of every one of those things,
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is to ignore the reality that the differences
link |
in the culture and practices and norms
link |
of the various population groups
link |
will lead to differences in their representation
link |
amongst people who are outstanding performers
link |
in one or another activity.
link |
How do you know if the difference in culture
link |
accounts for the difference in outcomes,
link |
or it's the existence of barriers,
link |
especially barriers early on in life,
link |
of discrimination that are racially based?
link |
So if you think about affirmative action,
link |
in which ways is affirmative action empowering,
link |
in which way is it limiting
link |
for these early development of different groups,
link |
but let's just speak to African Americans.
link |
We should say that you went to some no name
link |
Northwestern University at first,
link |
but then you ended up with the great university of MIT.
link |
So that's your, not early, but middle development.
link |
So speaking of the development,
link |
the opportunities, the equality of opportunity,
link |
how do we know we got that equality right?
link |
Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that.
link |
We were talking about results,
link |
now we're talking about opportunity.
link |
I was taking the position that
link |
when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world
link |
where his children will not be barred
link |
from the good things in life
link |
because of the color of their skin,
link |
we're talking about opportunity, not about results.
link |
But opportunity is not just something
link |
that depends upon what the law is
link |
and what public policies are.
link |
Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions
link |
in which people are raised,
link |
the social and economic conditions.
link |
So the child of a poor family that has no resources,
link |
it doesn't have the same opportunity
link |
as a child of a wealthy family
link |
to realize their full human potential.
link |
You asked me, how can we tell whether or not
link |
a difference in outcomes is a reflection
link |
of unequal opportunity,
link |
or it's a reflection of differences in culture
link |
and interest and practice?
link |
And I don't know that there's a single answer
link |
but I think one wants to look at the data,
link |
one wants to try to measure.
link |
As a social scientist, I would say what you wanna do
link |
is you wanna estimate the significance of various factors
link |
for determining the outcome.
link |
If the outcome is how much money does a person make
link |
when they work in the labor market?
link |
So you look at their wages and you think,
link |
well, that depends upon a number of things.
link |
It depends upon how educated they are,
link |
what kind of skills they have,
link |
what kind of work experience they have, and so on.
link |
And those things are all legitimate factors
link |
that might determine how much they end up making
link |
in the labor market.
link |
But you also wanna perhaps, controlling for those things,
link |
see whether or not the fact that they are black
link |
or they are Latino or whatever,
link |
fact that they are male or that they are female,
link |
the fact that they do or do not speak English
link |
as their native language, this kind of thing,
link |
whether those factors also are implicated
link |
in determining how successful they are in the labor market.
link |
And if you find that after you have controlled
link |
for the things that are legitimately determining success
link |
and failure in the labor market,
link |
like skills and education and experience,
link |
having controlled for those things,
link |
the fact that a person is black or is a woman
link |
or is an immigrant or is of Latino background
link |
also affects their earnings,
link |
then you might conclude that to that extent,
link |
they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market,
link |
that kind of idea.
link |
But I wanna focus a little bit more here
link |
on what we mean by opportunity
link |
because it's not just whether employers treat the worker
link |
on a fair and even basis,
link |
irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background.
link |
That's one opportunity issue,
link |
but that's at the end of the development process.
link |
They are now presenting themselves to the market,
link |
trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage.
link |
That's the end of the line.
link |
What about the developmental opportunity,
link |
the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place?
link |
That goes all the way back,
link |
that goes all the way back to birth.
link |
It even goes back to before birth.
link |
Or the mother carrying the infant in the womb,
link |
she has certain nutritional practices
link |
as she might be smoking or drinking alcohol
link |
or something like that.
link |
I'm not saying she is, I'm not saying she isn't,
link |
I'm just saying whether she is or she isn't
link |
that will affect the development of the fetus.
link |
The newborn, now there's a question of environment.
link |
There's a question of the development
link |
of their neurological potential.
link |
Do they learn how to read?
link |
Are they stimulated verbally?
link |
How many words have they heard spoken?
link |
Are they being nurtured in a home environment
link |
so as to maximize the possibility
link |
of them achieving their human potential?
link |
What about the peer group influences?
link |
What about the values and norms of the surrounding
link |
human communities in which they're embedded?
link |
Do they encourage the young person
link |
to apply themselves in a systematic way
link |
to their studies and to their focus
link |
on their acquisition of language command
link |
and of their educational potential?
link |
So development is not only something
link |
that is controlled by the society's practices,
link |
it's also something that is influenced
link |
by the cultural background of the individual.
link |
And those things are not equal.
link |
Those things vary across groups in a very significant way.
link |
And that too will be a factor
link |
determining disparities of outcome.
link |
So when I see outcomes that are different,
link |
I see wealth holding that's different.
link |
I see educational achievement that's different.
link |
I see representation in the professional schools
link |
and law school and medical school
link |
that's different between groups.
link |
One question is are the institutions treating people fairly?
link |
But another question is do the background
link |
in social and cultural influences
link |
equip people in the same way?
link |
And we know that the answer to that,
link |
not in every instance do they equip people in the same way.
link |
And so it makes the judgment, the moral judgment
link |
that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated.
link |
Inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree,
link |
but it is also a cultural factor to some degree,
link |
I wanna say, and that's controversial, I know.
link |
A lot of people, they think of themselves
link |
as being progressive.
link |
They wanna point a finger at society
link |
whenever they see a disparity.
link |
But I think that that's a mistake.
link |
I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem.
link |
You think that if you get the right law,
link |
if you have the right public policy,
link |
if the right politicians are elected to office,
link |
suddenly those disparities will go away.
link |
And I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope.
link |
And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.
link |
But I mean, we could go into that.
link |
You were talking about affirmative action,
link |
which is something else altogether.
link |
And you were talking about me and my education,
link |
which is also something that's a little bit different.
link |
And I'm happy to talk about those things.
link |
Northwestern University, by the way, was a great university.
link |
I'm just joking, it's one of the great universities
link |
of the world, yes.
link |
And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University,
link |
which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place.
link |
And I got a very good technical training in mathematics
link |
when I was at Northwestern, so.
link |
You love both mathematics and human nature.
link |
And so, which is why you ended up going into economics
link |
at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT
link |
and getting your PhD there.
link |
So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist,
link |
which allows you to think systematically and rigorously
link |
about the way the world and the way humans work at scale.
link |
Trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans,
link |
like a psychology perspective, economics allows you to do.
link |
Well, economics is one of the social sciences.
link |
I think there's value in psychology and in sociology.
link |
There's a lot to know that doesn't come up
link |
within the study of economics.
link |
We study markets and the dynamics of economic development
link |
and trade and so on.
link |
But yeah, speaking personally, as I was coming along,
link |
I was fascinated by mathematics.
link |
I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern
link |
and took a lot of courses there in functional analysis
link |
and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems
link |
and stuff that I ended up employing
link |
in my graduate studies in economics.
link |
But you're right, I was not satisfied simply
link |
to be proving theorems.
link |
I wanted to be addressing issues of social significance
link |
I discovered to my delight was a field of study
link |
that allowed me both to develop
link |
rigorous analytical frameworks,
link |
modeling and precision of logical deduction
link |
and inference on the one hand,
link |
satisfying my mathematical interests,
link |
but on the other hand,
link |
could address questions of social significance
link |
like why does racial inequality persist?
link |
Why are some countries prospering and growing
link |
and others less so?
link |
Why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate
link |
in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth?
link |
And I ended up falling in love with the application
link |
of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues.
link |
What do you use beautiful about mathematics,
link |
about mathematical puzzles, about logic,
link |
all those kinds of things?
link |
Because it's still there.
link |
The love for math is still there for you.
link |
So is there something you could speak to?
link |
What is the kernel, the flame of that love?
link |
I mean, you know, being able to prove something
link |
and I mean, you know, I think of offhand,
link |
you know, there's no largest prime number, okay?
link |
So how would somebody know that?
link |
Okay, what's a prime number?
link |
So a prime number is a number that has a whole number
link |
that has no divisor other than one.
link |
There are no divisors of the number
link |
that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37,
link |
So they're prime numbers.
link |
There's no largest prime number.
link |
There are infinite number of prime numbers.
link |
There's no largest prime number, okay?
link |
You can get your mind around it in an instant.
link |
It doesn't take a whole lot of depth to see the question.
link |
There's no largest prime number.
link |
I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics.
link |
Oh, they don't show up in economics except cryptography.
link |
I understand that's important.
link |
For code, you know, in coding stuff.
link |
And that shows up in economics.
link |
But in terms of models, probably not.
link |
That's, so prime numbers are little,
link |
you know, in abstract algebra,
link |
it's like they show up in all these places
link |
that are just like beautiful mathematical puzzles
link |
that don't immediately have an application,
link |
but somehow maybe challenge you,
link |
and as a result, push mathematics forward.
link |
Like Fermat's last theorem, you know,
link |
as far as I know, no obvious real world application,
link |
but it has challenged mathematicians
link |
throughout the centuries.
link |
And somehow indirectly progressed the field, but.
link |
That the rational numbers are countable.
link |
They can be put in one to one relationship
link |
with the integers and, you know,
link |
but that the real numbers are not countable
link |
and there's a lot more real, quote unquote,
link |
more real numbers.
link |
These are orders of infinity.
link |
This is Cantor, Georg Cantor, and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Or Gödel's theorem, I studied this as an undergraduate,
link |
you know, the incompleteness theorem
link |
that there are propositions within any logical system
link |
that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic.
link |
There are going to be propositions
link |
that you can formulate that are true,
link |
but that you cannot prove to be true.
link |
So the idea that you could systematically develop
link |
a logical framework for mathematical inquiry
link |
that could demonstrate the truth or falsity
link |
of any proposition is not a feasible goal.
link |
This was Hilbert's project as I understand it
link |
and Gödel showed that there was no hope ever
link |
of being able to demonstrate the closure
link |
of logical systems that were rich enough
link |
to accommodate the real numbers.
link |
They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians
link |
and scientists alike and humans
link |
because maybe you can't prove everything.
link |
I remember, you know, when I was a junior college,
link |
a community college student
link |
before I transferred to Northwestern
link |
and I took a calculus course and it was a lot of fun
link |
and it was differentiating algebraic expressions
link |
and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions
link |
and it was a lot of simple problem solving.
link |
I get to Northwestern,
link |
I take a course in differential equations.
link |
And again, it was a lot of formulaic applying
link |
if you get a differential equation of this structure
link |
like if it's linear, you got exponentials, et cetera,
link |
And then I took a course that showed me, you know,
link |
where the question was not how to solve
link |
any particular functional expression,
link |
but it was proving the existence of a solution
link |
to a differential equation where it was like X dot equals
link |
F of X and T and F is just some arbitrary function.
link |
What do I have to assume about the function F
link |
in order to know that there exists a solution
link |
to the differential equation,
link |
dx dt equals F of X and T.
link |
And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition.
link |
It's a condition about the bounding of the slope
link |
of the function F as a function of X that it doesn't,
link |
that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope
link |
on that function and then you can use a iterative process
link |
to show that the sequence of, you know, partial solutions
link |
to the thing converges to something that's a solution
link |
to the real thing.
link |
Anyway, again, I'm not gonna bore you
link |
or pretend that I'm a mathematician, I'm not.
link |
But what I'm saying is the difference
link |
between a specific algebraic formula
link |
that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand
link |
and the abstract question of whether there exists
link |
a solution in the general case is like a huge,
link |
was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics
link |
and the techniques that you have to employ
link |
to address these larger questions and so on.
link |
So I, you know, when I was an undergraduate,
link |
I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis
link |
at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician
link |
named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory
link |
and learned about some early functional analysis ideas
link |
and when I saw that those ideas were being applied
link |
by advanced study in economics, I was delighted.
link |
I found an intellectual home.
link |
So one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics
link |
is to think how can you, which echoes
link |
the challenge of economics, what are the properties
link |
of an equation that allow you to say something profound
link |
and say it simply?
link |
And so the question of economics is how do you
link |
construct a model where you can generalize nicely
link |
and say something profound and say it simply?
link |
So one of the questions, one of the challenges
link |
of economics is macro versus microeconomics is,
link |
you know, the world is made up of individuals.
link |
So there's a connection to this, our discussion
link |
of race and discrimination and outcomes
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
The world is made up of individuals,
link |
but in order to say something general,
link |
we have to construct groups in order to analyze the data.
link |
We have to aggregate that data somehow.
link |
We have to make an average over some set of people.
link |
So what are the pros and cons of looking at things
link |
like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
link |
based on groups versus based on individuals
link |
and what are the groups, if there's any pros
link |
to looking at groups that we should be looking at?
link |
Okay, well, those are big questions.
link |
I mean, in economics, you're right.
link |
I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals
link |
make decisions about spending their money
link |
on this consumption side and about how enterprises
link |
make decisions about what to produce, how much of it,
link |
what inputs to use, what techniques of production
link |
and so on, individual firms, individual consumers,
link |
and then you want to aggregate.
link |
So there's a so called theory of general equilibrium
link |
where you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets,
link |
you think prices that move to equilibrate,
link |
but you recognize that the price in one market
link |
affects people's behavior in another,
link |
the markets are interacting with each other.
link |
You realize that the behavior of one individual
link |
affects the supplies and available resources
link |
and for other individuals, so they're knitted together
link |
in some kind of systematic way.
link |
And you want to try to demonstrate the fact
link |
that notwithstanding all these interdependencies,
link |
there exists a solution to the system of equations
link |
that equates demand and supply
link |
across all the different markets.
link |
This is the existence of general equilibrium.
link |
Then you want to try to say something about the properties
link |
of an equilibrium, if it exists, is it efficient?
link |
What do you mean by efficiency?
link |
Well, the idea of so called Pareto efficient outcomes,
link |
these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon,
link |
everybody can't be made better off
link |
by an alternative outcome.
link |
You want to demonstrate the efficiency
link |
of competitive equilibrium.
link |
What do you mean by competition?
link |
You mean that people take their actions
link |
to do the best for themselves that they can.
link |
Profits of firms, well being of consumers,
link |
they try to do the best for themselves that they can,
link |
but they do so in reference to a set of prices
link |
that they believe they cannot control.
link |
That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance.
link |
So does a competitive equilibrium exist?
link |
Do there exist a set of prices
link |
which if everybody recognizes them as given
link |
and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest,
link |
the outcome will be supply equaling demand
link |
in all the markets where people are interacting
link |
with one another, and that requires the use
link |
of some concepts and topology, fixed point theorems
link |
and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics,
link |
not very deep mathematical results,
link |
but important to economics.
link |
That's all about general equilibrium and whatnot.
link |
But you ask about groups.
link |
By the way, amazing whirlwind summary of all of economics,
link |
but yes, go ahead, that was great.
link |
Markets of competition of operator efficiency anyway,
link |
And prices. And prices.
link |
And by the way, there are some very beautiful
link |
formalizations of everything that I'm saying here.
link |
You end up in vector spaces,
link |
you end up with sets of bundles of consumption
link |
and production, you end up with convexity,
link |
you end up with hyperplanes,
link |
which are in this finite dimensional vector space,
link |
which are all of the bundles that have the same value
link |
at a certain price.
link |
You end up with inner products.
link |
Yeah, but you almost forget that it's just a bunch
link |
of humans transacting with each other.
link |
That markets are made up of individuals.
link |
Markets are made up of individuals.
link |
And in order to carry out this formalization,
link |
you have to make assumptions about the individuals.
link |
And the end result is true in a formal sense,
link |
but may not be true as a representation of the reality,
link |
because it depends upon assumptions
link |
that themselves may not hold.
link |
But at least you know what it is that has to be true
link |
in order for your formal framework to be relevant,
link |
which is already a step in the right direction, I think.
link |
I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition.
link |
There aren't your intuition where we sit back
link |
and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about
link |
because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way.
link |
I'm in favor of the formalization.
link |
People, they think, what is mathematics
link |
and the social sciences?
link |
After all, we're dealing with people.
link |
People are not automata.
link |
I agree with that.
link |
But the analysis of the interaction of people,
link |
I think, to be rigorous, requires us to be specific
link |
about what we're talking about, about markets,
link |
about consumers, about firms, about profits,
link |
about technology, about preferences.
link |
And that's the language of economics.
link |
But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life,
link |
depends upon their goals and their objectives.
link |
Those things are at play.
link |
They can be pushed this way or that.
link |
So, I mean, nationalism,
link |
fighting and dying for your country,
link |
religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal
link |
of the good or of what is the human situation
link |
and what is the meaning of life.
link |
Economists have to assume that these things
link |
are some particular thing
link |
before they can turn the crank on their machine
link |
to analyze the outcomes of human interaction.
link |
And yet these things, belief in my identity,
link |
but the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die
link |
for purposes of life that I affirm
link |
and pass on to my children are important preconditions
link |
for actually carrying out any economic analysis.
link |
And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time.
link |
And that's not something that economics
link |
has a whole lot to say about.
link |
Well, is there some general things
link |
that are really powerful in terms of,
link |
you said nation, religion, those are groups.
link |
Can you group people nicely
link |
in helping you understand human nature?
link |
So group them into nations based on their citizenry.
link |
That's geography, right?
link |
The geographic location of your birth
link |
or your long term residence, or maybe religious belief,
link |
what religion you believe over time.
link |
Is there groups like that?
link |
And then race, is that useful?
link |
What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes
link |
based on these kinds of groups, race in particular?
link |
I think they're pros and I think they're cons.
link |
I mean, I am myself, Glenn Loury sits before you right now,
link |
a black American, an African American.
link |
I quote unquote, I identify as,
link |
that's the way they talk about it nowadays.
link |
I identify as a black American.
link |
My skin is brown, my hair is coarse, my nose is broad,
link |
relative to the way other people's noses look.
link |
My lips are thicker.
link |
That's a consequence of my ancestral descent
link |
from the human population resident in the African continent
link |
in millennia past, my race.
link |
Here in the United States,
link |
we have various quote unquote races defined crudely
link |
in the way that I just tried to define myself.
link |
You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument
link |
that these are superficial differences.
link |
Why should it matter that your eye color
link |
or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face
link |
or the color, the tone of your skin,
link |
the amount of melanin,
link |
how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation
link |
in terms of your skin, what is that the basis of anything?
link |
I mean, that's arbitrary, that's not meaningful.
link |
Could there really be meaning
link |
in these superficial differences among human beings?
link |
Isn't that a archaic or barbaric way
link |
of thinking about ourselves,
link |
to look at each other's skin color or hair texture
link |
and then to decide, oh, that's a black or that's a white
link |
or that's a Latin or that's an Asian or that's a whatever.
link |
That's something that we should outgrow, a person might say.
link |
That's a relic of a kind of tribal society
link |
of a kind of pre modern society
link |
where we built real structure
link |
on the basis of such superficial difference.
link |
A person could say that.
link |
On the other hand, I am a black American.
link |
I mean, that's part of my identity,
link |
that's part of my heritage,
link |
it's part of the stories that I tell myself
link |
about who my people are.
link |
Why do I need a people?
link |
Why do I need a narrative of descent
link |
in which I affiliate with a racially defined people?
link |
Do I really need that?
link |
I mean, I think that's an important question.
link |
In fact, this is a confession, think of myself as black.
link |
I could think of myself as simply human.
link |
I could not identify specifically as black.
link |
I could say, my eyes are brown too, so what?
link |
I mean, I'm gonna invent a group based on my eye color.
link |
I weigh 290 pounds.
link |
I'm gonna have a body size group.
link |
I'm a plus 200 and that's quote, who I am, close quote.
link |
I came from Chicago.
link |
Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown.
link |
I'm a Chicago born person,
link |
but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979.
link |
That's a long time.
link |
I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly.
link |
I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland
link |
or St. Louis and fight to the death
link |
with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person
link |
based upon the fact that we come from different cities.
link |
And you have even abandoned in your heart
link |
the Chicago Bulls.
link |
There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose,
link |
but it's not very deep.
link |
It's not quote, who I am anymore.
link |
And I'm wondering, here I'm trying to pose the question,
link |
why is it that being a descendant of African slaves
link |
should be who I am?
link |
So there's some answers.
link |
One answer is people will look at me
link |
and deal with me differently based upon what they see.
link |
I don't have control over that.
link |
I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group,
link |
whether or not I elect to affiliate myself
link |
with that group or not.
link |
Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact
link |
that regardless of what my internal orientation is,
link |
the world will perceive me in a particular way
link |
and will perceive me differently
link |
based upon the color of my skin.
link |
So a police officer who stops me at two o clock
link |
in the morning because my tail light is out
link |
and ask me for my automobile registration
link |
and I reach quickly to the glove compartment
link |
to get my registration.
link |
And the police officer says, show me your hands.
link |
And I don't quite hear what he says
link |
or I ignore what he says as I'm getting my document
link |
out of my glove compartment.
link |
But the police officer thinks because I have not responded
link |
to his demand to show my hands
link |
that I might be reaching for a weapon.
link |
And the police officer sees that I'm black
link |
and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon
link |
is higher because in that town at that time,
link |
a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car
link |
happen to be black and male and so on.
link |
And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it
link |
and I'm bleeding out there and I'm dead now.
link |
And all of that is a possibility that's very real
link |
and it's based upon the color of my skin.
link |
And therefore, when he stops me,
link |
I keep my hands on the steering wheel
link |
and I don't go to the glove compartment.
link |
And I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me
link |
for a criminal, et cetera.
link |
Or I walk into a high end store, clothing store.
link |
I see you're nicely dressed there, Lex.
link |
I'm not, but that's okay.
link |
I do have some good clothes at home.
link |
I just didn't wear them here today.
link |
But you know what I mean.
link |
And the salesman in the clothing store
link |
either treats me like an old friend
link |
and is warm and welcoming.
link |
And what can I do for you, sir?
link |
And let me show you this and that.
link |
And what are you looking for?
link |
Because he thinks I'm gonna spend $1,000 there that day
link |
and he's gonna get a 5% commission or whatever it is.
link |
And he either does that or he ignores me
link |
and looks at me with suspicion
link |
and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something
link |
or thinks I'm only gonna spend $50 and not $500
link |
and therefore I'm not worth his time.
link |
And I'm aware of the fact
link |
that when I go into the clothing store,
link |
especially the high end places where I can buy a good suit
link |
or buy some really good dress shirts or slacks
link |
that fit me well and so on,
link |
I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously
link |
by the salesman based upon the fact
link |
that he's looking at me and he sees a black person.
link |
And therefore I dress up
link |
before I go out to buy clothes to get,
link |
cause I wanna present myself
link |
as not someone who just walked in off the street,
link |
but as one of those black people
link |
who is really prepared to spend some money in the store
link |
so that I can be treated with respect.
link |
And I have to carry the burden such as it is
link |
of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously
link |
being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions
link |
that people may have about me
link |
based upon the color of my skin, something like that.
link |
Or I ask myself, what am I gonna teach my children
link |
about who they are and where they come from?
link |
What stories am I gonna tell them about their ancestors?
link |
Who are their ancestors?
link |
Every African American has European ancestors.
link |
Every black person in the United States of America,
link |
I think that I can say that almost without exception.
link |
We could go to 23andMe and look at the DNA.
link |
They have European ancestors, they're not purely African.
link |
That's a fact and that's a consequence
link |
of the experience of African descended people
link |
because it's a mixed population.
link |
My name is Lowry, spelled L O U R Y
link |
but pronounced as if it were L O W E R Y.
link |
And I gather if you trace the history of that name
link |
that it's Scottish.
link |
So somewhere back then.
link |
So you could identify as a Scot.
link |
Well, or I could claim some Scottish descent, but I don't.
link |
I don't know who those ancestors are.
link |
And frankly, I don't know who my enslaved ancestors are.
link |
I can't trace my family history back very far
link |
into the 19th century.
link |
So what stories do I tell my children about who we are,
link |
about who their ancestors are?
link |
I mean, I wanna tell my children some story
link |
and that story is gonna be colored, quote unquote,
link |
So even though it is superficial
link |
and in an ideal world, you might think,
link |
why would human beings, I mean, I read science fiction.
link |
So there's this Chinese writer, Chixin Liu is his name.
link |
I might not pronounce it exactly right, C I X I N L I U.
link |
Chixin Liu, he has a trilogy of The Three Body Problem,
link |
The Dark Forest, and Death's End.
link |
Those are the three books of Chixin Liu's trilogy
link |
about how Trisolaris, which is another star system
link |
within a few light years of the solar system,
link |
and Earth get into a conflict.
link |
And when the Trisolaris come down to dominate Earth,
link |
suddenly all of these differences between the Chinese
link |
and the North Americans and the Europeans
link |
and the Africans and the South Asians
link |
become kind of insignificant because after all,
link |
the Trisolaris with their advanced civilization
link |
whose star system is dying,
link |
have their eyes on the solar system,
link |
which has a planet, the third rock from the sun
link |
that is pretty habitable and the difference between us
link |
become pretty insignificant.
link |
So we shouldn't need for an invasion
link |
by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen
link |
before we would recognize the common humanity
link |
that we all share that is profound and is deep.
link |
We all descend in effect from the same ancestral population
link |
of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago
link |
and have survived amongst all of the different possible
link |
variations of species and whatnot,
link |
of humanoid population, the Homo sapiens have flourished,
link |
the others have died out and here we are
link |
and we can just look at the genetic endowments
link |
that characterize our biological essence
link |
and we can see that we are quote unquote
link |
the same beneath the skin
link |
and yet we end up freighting so much weight
link |
onto these superficial differences.
link |
So I can see both sides of the issue is what I'm saying.
link |
I can see the argument race is an irrelevancy
link |
because at the end of the day, deep down it is.
link |
But I can also see the argument
link |
that I hold on to racial identity because A,
link |
my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me
link |
but B, because everybody needs a story.
link |
Everybody needs an account.
link |
You tell me you're Jewish.
link |
I mean, I don't know how deep that is.
link |
I don't know how genetically profound that is.
link |
I do know that it's a culturally profound identity
link |
for a lot of people based upon maybe some of the same
link |
kind of forces that I'm talking about.
link |
A, they won't let you not be Jewish.
link |
You could say you're not Jewish
link |
but when Hitler is rounding people up,
link |
what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do
link |
with what the Gestapo was about.
link |
And B, you need to tell your children a story.
link |
That's the fascinating thing about this tribalism
link |
that you spoke about that we form tribes as humans
link |
throughout human history, form tribes
link |
and have directed hate toward other tribes
link |
and sometimes violence and destruction.
link |
And yet tribalism allows you to tell a story
link |
to your children, allows you to grow a culture.
link |
There's something about defining yourself
link |
within a particular tribe that allows you
link |
to have a tradition.
link |
You have an article that you wrote
link |
called The Case for Black Patriotism.
link |
So I should also say it's so interesting
link |
because for me personally, I feel, identify as,
link |
believe I am an American.
link |
And yet within the American umbrella,
link |
it feels that there's a longing for other tribes.
link |
You mentioned Jewish but what I honestly feel is,
link |
I mean a lot of it is humor and culture and so on
link |
is Russian and Ukrainian because that's where I come from.
link |
That's where my family is from.
link |
You know, there's like stereotypical things
link |
that are funny, humorous type of thing about Russians
link |
that's showing no emotion, good at chess and math,
link |
into wrestling, drinking vodka.
link |
I mean, there's literally every single stereotype.
link |
I'm in the embodiment of that.
link |
So there's a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways.
link |
There's a tradition there within the American umbrella
link |
and some of it is humor, some of it is little quirks
link |
of culture but now with the war in Russia and Ukraine,
link |
interestingly enough, even that little thing,
link |
it becomes also a source of negative tribalism.
link |
But anyway, that context aside, what is black patriotism
link |
and why do you feel?
link |
I mean, I'm speaking in an article called
link |
The Case for Black Patriotism in a Particular Context
link |
and what I'm saying basically is very simple.
link |
I'm saying we are African Americans
link |
and the emphasis should be on the American.
link |
I actually don't even much care
link |
for the framing African American
link |
but I'm not gonna fight with people about it.
link |
It's, I don't think it's worth fighting about.
link |
That's not how, I would just say we're Americans
link |
or if you want, we're black Americans.
link |
We're certainly not African.
link |
That is the African American population
link |
is a population of people who come into existence
link |
here in North America through the cauldron of slavery.
link |
There are also immigrants, immigrants from East Africa,
link |
immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa,
link |
immigrants from the Caribbean who descend
link |
from an ancestral population which is African.
link |
The history of the world since 1500 is a history
link |
in which people of African descent are scattered
link |
because of slavery throughout the Western hemisphere.
link |
And so here we are.
link |
But the institution of slavery ended in 1863
link |
in the United States.
link |
The struggle that we started out talking about
link |
which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech
link |
that you say is the greatest speech in American history
link |
and I'm not gonna argue with you about that,
link |
happened right here in the United States.
link |
We are, what is the United States?
link |
The United States is a nation of immigrants.
link |
The population of the North American continent
link |
was sparsely populated by an indigenous population
link |
which was destroyed in conquest by a European population
link |
that settled here in North America and appropriated the land
link |
and have built a civilization here
link |
which has been peopled by a large influx of immigrants
link |
of individuals from Europe, Irish and Italian
link |
and Greek and Slavic and Jewish, Russian Jews
link |
coming in large numbers and so on
link |
and wave after wave after wave of immigration,
link |
Asian, Latin American population of people
link |
who have come to reside here in the United States
link |
and we black Americans who descend from slaves.
link |
We African Americans who descend from slaves.
link |
This is a great nation.
link |
I mean, this is a monumentally significant political force
link |
which is the United States of America founded in 1776, 1787
link |
fought a war of independence from the British,
link |
established a republic which is a confederation
link |
of these independent colonies
link |
which has grown into now the 50 states
link |
of the United States of America, continental nation.
link |
The richest and most powerful nation on the planet
link |
with massive influence throughout the world
link |
for good and for ill.
link |
That's who we are, I wanna say to black people.
link |
There is no other home for us.
link |
This fantasy of we being a people apart
link |
back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s,
link |
there was something called
link |
the Republic of New Africa Movement
link |
and they wanted some states in the South
link |
given over to black people
link |
and we were gonna have our own country.
link |
And that's a joke, it's a fantasy.
link |
It's a mythic, unbalanced,
link |
the unrealistic fanciful politics.
link |
It's not a serious politics.
link |
We're Americans, we're not going anywhere here.
link |
The idea that, and I wanna say this
link |
in a number of different registers,
link |
I wanna say first of all,
link |
we need to make peace with the fact
link |
that that's who we are and that's where we are.
link |
So nobody is coming, the world court
link |
is not gonna litigate our disputes.
link |
The United Nations is not gonna set up a desk
link |
for people of African descent who reside in North America.
link |
We have to work out whatever our concerns are
link |
with our fellow Americans right here
link |
within the context of American politics.
link |
That means compromise.
link |
That means looking for a framework for political expression
link |
which is broader than our racial identity, et cetera.
link |
So I wanna say that.
link |
But I also wanna say there's no reason
link |
to apologize for this.
link |
There's something positive to affirm.
link |
I take on this question about slavery in brief,
link |
because in fact, slavery was awful and it was wrong
link |
and it was on the backs of the enslaved Africans
link |
and it had consequences that have endured
link |
long after the termination of the thing.
link |
But I also wanna say, look at what has happened
link |
in the last 150 years for African Americans.
link |
And I wanna say, look at the vitality
link |
of the institutions here in the United States of America,
link |
of the Democratic Republic of the United States of America.
link |
Again, not perfect, which are malleable enough,
link |
these institutions to allow for the transformation
link |
of the status of African Americans
link |
such as has occurred since the end of slavery.
link |
And I wanna say there's a lot to celebrate in that.
link |
So this is our country.
link |
We are full members of the polity.
link |
We have burdens and responsibilities
link |
as well as privileges that are associated
link |
with our membership in this Republic.
link |
That does not mean that we should not fight
link |
for what we believe to be right,
link |
although we are not one voice here, we black Americans.
link |
It does not mean that we should not protest things
link |
that we think are deserving of protest.
link |
But I wanna say, it does mean that we should not reject
link |
the framework that we're operating in
link |
because we basically don't have any alternative.
link |
And because when viewed in full context,
link |
a noble and profoundly significant achievement,
link |
the United States of America and a beacon
link |
to the rest of the world, I don't wanna go off
link |
in some starry eyed kind of jingoistic celebration
link |
of America as the greatest civilization, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But this great nation is our nation.
link |
And I think we do best by beginning,
link |
we black Americans do best by beginning,
link |
this is my argument in the piece,
link |
by beginning from a framework which accepts that fact
link |
and then builds on it.
link |
So black patriotism is, if not exactly the same,
link |
rhymes, echoes American patriotism.
link |
So a black American is first and foremost an American.
link |
Yeah, a black American is first and foremost an American
link |
and it's a good thing too.
link |
Let me return to the question of Dr. King
link |
and another powerful, impactful individual, Malcolm X,
link |
to ask you the question.
link |
Well, first, people often perhaps inaccurately portray them
link |
as representing two different ideals, approaches
link |
to the fight for civil rights.
link |
So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach,
link |
the peacemaker, and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary.
link |
What do you think about this distinction?
link |
And broadly speaking, in black patriotism,
link |
in the future of black Americans in the 21st century,
link |
what is the role of anger?
link |
What is the role of protest?
link |
Even violence encompasses a lot of things,
link |
but just aggression and the fuck the man,
link |
we're going to have to make change, force change.
link |
Okay, I think you put your finger on something
link |
really important in the context of,
link |
we were just discussing my black patriotism essay.
link |
It's not the only story.
link |
There is another story and Malcolm X is someone
link |
you identify and his memory lives on
link |
and is powerfully influential.
link |
And I think you see it in Black Lives Matter,
link |
and I think you see it in the protest and rioting
link |
and so forth that has broken out periodically
link |
going all the way back to the 1960s and before,
link |
but especially since the 1960s.
link |
You saw it in Los Angeles in 1992,
link |
the Rodney King civil disturbances
link |
that broke out there and the balled up fist,
link |
the radical afrocentric rejection
link |
of the American story that Martin Luther King,
link |
He believed in a magnificent promissory note.
link |
And a lot of people are rolling their eyes
link |
and saying, as you say,
link |
fuck the man, magnificent promissory note.
link |
I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
link |
That's what you can do for me.
link |
Don't ask me to believe in your BS
link |
about some magnificent promissory note,
link |
some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway.
link |
I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
link |
Now, I can relate to that.
link |
As I mentioned, I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s
link |
I remember Malcolm X, I mean, literally in real time.
link |
I remember when he was murdered in 1965
link |
in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem,
link |
in Manhattan, in New York City.
link |
I remember my uncle, I was raised in a house
link |
where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house.
link |
And my mother and my sister and I lived
link |
in a small apartment upstairs in the back
link |
of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned.
link |
And my uncle was a small businessman,
link |
a barber and a tradesman.
link |
I mean, legally, he did what he had to do to make money.
link |
He was a very enterprising, not especially well educated,
link |
but a very intelligent and disciplined
link |
and resourceful provider for his family,
link |
which included myself, my sister,
link |
and my mother in their household.
link |
And we called him Uncle Mooney
link |
because he had moon shaped eyes
link |
that protruded and were round.
link |
Uncle Mooney, James Ellis was his name.
link |
Uncle Mooney, James Ellis Lee was my Uncle Mooney.
link |
But I'm saying all that to say this.
link |
He admired the nation of Islam.
link |
I mean, King and Malcolm X,
link |
Martin King and Malcolm X differed
link |
along a number of different dimensions.
link |
Malcolm X was a Muslim.
link |
And Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister.
link |
My Uncle Mooney didn't have any time
link |
for these Christian ministers.
link |
He thought that was the white man's religion.
link |
And back in that day, you'd go into a black church
link |
and you'd see a portrait of Jesus
link |
and he'd be blonde hair, blue eyed.
link |
He didn't even look like a Mediterranean.
link |
I mean, he didn't look like somebody who came from Palestine.
link |
I mean, he looked like somebody who came
link |
from Northern Europe or something like that,
link |
the picture of Jesus.
link |
And my Uncle Mooney rejected that whole thing.
link |
He would be damned if he was gonna bend his knee
link |
to some white Jesus.
link |
But he was not a Muslim either.
link |
But he respected the Muslims.
link |
He brought home their newspaper.
link |
It was called Muhammad Speaks.
link |
This is the nation of Islam,
link |
which is the black Muslim movement
link |
founded in American cities in Detroit and then Chicago,
link |
going back to the early middle 20th century
link |
and growing into a very significant movement
link |
that had a lot of influence,
link |
Louis Farrakhan and controversial figure
link |
descends from this movement.
link |
It has fractured now
link |
and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims
link |
has assimilated itself into Islam proper.
link |
Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina
link |
and came back with a very different vision
link |
about what it meant to be a Muslim
link |
and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition
link |
and religious culture of Islam that has a global reach.
link |
And he had a different vision when he came back from that.
link |
Some people say that's why he was killed and so on.
link |
I certainly find that to be plausible
link |
that he became the constituted threat to the sect,
link |
which was the black Muslims
link |
and had to be dealt with.
link |
I don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that.
link |
But anyway, what I'm trying to say is
link |
the black Muslims were there, Malcolm X was there.
link |
And in my experience,
link |
they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king,
link |
which depended on a kind of respect
link |
for the best of the tradition of American democracy,
link |
appealing to the better nature of our oppressors,
link |
live up to the full meaning of our creed.
link |
I mean, these are words that he would use.
link |
A magnificent promissory note is what he would think of
link |
as the declaration of independence
link |
and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln,
link |
a unfulfilled ideal.
link |
And the black Muslims were like, fuck that.
link |
We're gonna take care of our own.
link |
We're gonna build our own schools.
link |
We're gonna build our own businesses.
link |
We're not waiting for the white man to do anything.
link |
Get your knee off my neck and get out of my way
link |
and let me take care of my own.
link |
And my uncle respected that.
link |
He respected the straight back,
link |
the stand up straight with your shoulders back.
link |
That's a Jordan Peterson.
link |
But I mean, that was way before Jordan Peterson,
link |
but that was his philosophy.
link |
Stand up straight, but just raise your children.
link |
Don't be depending upon welfare.
link |
You're taking welfare from the white man.
link |
You need to get busy.
link |
You need to educate yourself.
link |
You need to clean up your act.
link |
Put down the fried chicken because it's gonna kill you.
link |
My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad,
link |
they called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad,
link |
who was the founder and the leader of the nation of Islam.
link |
He had a book and all the book said was,
link |
be smart, eat green vegetables, don't eat fried food.
link |
Don't eat pork and take responsibility for your diet
link |
And don't be putting a whole lot of pills into your body.
link |
You don't need to do that
link |
if you just get control of your diet
link |
and you eat properly.
link |
My uncle loves this idea of responsibility for self
link |
and a determination to build.
link |
He respected that in the Muslims,
link |
even if he didn't buy the religious part of it.
link |
And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983,
link |
he left me a bequest.
link |
It wasn't money, unfortunately.
link |
It was his complete collection
link |
of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
link |
And I have these albums.
link |
These are 33 and a third LPs.
link |
There's six of them.
link |
And I have a complete collection,
link |
as best as my uncle could assemble,
link |
of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
link |
Now, why did he do that?
link |
He did that because he did not want me to forget.
link |
Don't be dependent upon the white man.
link |
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
link |
Proud black man, take care of your business.
link |
Take care of your children.
link |
Pick up the trash in front of your house.
link |
This was this philosophy.
link |
So violence now, that's another story.
link |
I mean, Malcolm X would say,
link |
we're gonna defend ourselves.
link |
You're gonna mess with us,
link |
you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever.
link |
We're gonna arm ourselves and we're gonna fight you back.
link |
You racist police who are oppressing
link |
and persecuting and abusing our people,
link |
well, you better be ready
link |
because we're gonna fight you back.
link |
And that too was the spirit that my uncle,
link |
that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture.
link |
My uncle was not a radical.
link |
He was a businessman, but he respected this idea.
link |
You take your life in your own hands when you mess with us
link |
because we're prepared to defend ourselves.
link |
So that blood runs in you too.
link |
That thread is, when you write about black patriotism,
link |
that thread is there too.
link |
It's like you embody both the ideal that we're all American,
link |
but also that there is this oppressive history.
link |
There is the powerful that are manipulating you,
link |
that are oppressing you, and you can't just wait around
link |
for things to fix themselves.
link |
You have to take action.
link |
You have to take things into your own hands.
link |
And sometimes that means being angry.
link |
Sometimes that means being violent.
link |
Yeah, it's there, but here, and the but is,
link |
I don't, me today, Glenn Loury in 2022,
link |
think that that is the answer.
link |
I don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere
link |
at the end of the day.
link |
I think we're past that.
link |
There aren't Knight Rider, Ku Klux Klan,
link |
people breaking down your door and dragging you away.
link |
There are not nooses thrown over a tree limb
link |
where you hang somebody from the tree
link |
because they whistled at a white woman
link |
or they got too much property in your community
link |
and you became, they were uppity Negroes
link |
and whatnot like that.
link |
That is a thing of the past in America
link |
that the situation is no longer the one
link |
that requires that kind of violent reaction
link |
and that there is, if we look at the net effect
link |
of the so called rebellions in American cities,
link |
The George Floyd protests, which became violent
link |
and arsonists in the aftermath of civil disturbance
link |
and whatnot in the summer of 2020,
link |
I think set back the program for African Americans.
link |
I don't think it advanced it.
link |
I think there are things to be concerned about,
link |
schools that are not working,
link |
police that are not respecting citizens and so forth.
link |
But I think that those are things
link |
that affect white Americans as well
link |
and that the way to ultimately correct those things
link |
is to make alliance and associate oneself
link |
with Americans who are concerned to change these things.
link |
And I don't think it's properly framed
link |
as a racial problem.
link |
I certainly don't think that violent rebellion
link |
I get the historical salience of that posture
link |
and it made a lot of sense
link |
in the early and the mid 20th century.
link |
I don't think it makes very much sense at all
link |
in the early 21st century.
link |
Well, thank you for allowing me for a brief moment
link |
to try to channel your Uncle Mooney
link |
and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation
link |
as we look forward to the 21st century.
link |
You mentioned that in part,
link |
you're troubled by the term African American.
link |
So words are funny things until they're not.
link |
So let me ask you about what I think
link |
is one of the most powerful and controversial words
link |
in the English language, the N word.
link |
So this is a word that I can't say
link |
that only certain people have the right to say.
link |
I have a friend, Joe Rogan, who has,
link |
what would you say, there was mass pushback
link |
or highlighting of the fact that he didn't just say N word
link |
but said the full word many times
link |
throughout his conversations
link |
when referring to, in a meta way,
link |
about the power of words,
link |
especially when related to certain comedians
link |
using those words.
link |
What do you think about this word?
link |
Is it destructive?
link |
What does it mean for race in America?
link |
What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan
link |
were essentially, there's an attack to cancel him
link |
for using the word?
link |
Just as a scholar of human nature,
link |
what do you think about this whole thing?
link |
This is a phenomenon that interests me.
link |
The N word, nigger, I can say it because I'm black.
link |
But I mean, I can also say it because I like hip hop.
link |
And when I listen to hip hop, I hear the word all the time.
link |
These niggas ain't, you know,
link |
you better watch out for these, et cetera.
link |
I heard the word constantly as I was growing up
link |
as a boy and a young man in Chicago.
link |
Niggas ain't shit.
link |
That was, you know,
link |
and that could be a reflection of some kind of pathology
link |
within the African American community of self hatred
link |
It could be, or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way.
link |
I mean, I assume other groups also have their various,
link |
I don't know how the Irish talk about their Irish brothers
link |
and, you know, whatever.
link |
And I don't know how the Jews talk about
link |
the Jewish brothers and whatever.
link |
But black people, when talking about other black people
link |
use the N word all the time.
link |
My nigger, N I G G A, you know, my nigger.
link |
That is a term of endearment.
link |
My friend, Randall Kennedy,
link |
the law professor at Harvard University
link |
has a book called Nigger.
link |
And he uses the word in the title of the book,
link |
the history of a strange history of a provocative word.
link |
At some point there's a subtitle,
link |
but the title of the book is N I G G E R colon.
link |
And then he has a subtitle.
link |
I think, of course, the use of the word as a slur
link |
and an insult, which is a part of the history
link |
of black people in the United States,
link |
the use of the word by the Southern racist segregationist,
link |
we don't want no niggers up in here.
link |
Yall, you know, niggers have no place in my restaurant,
link |
in my store, et cetera.
link |
That's meant to be an insult.
link |
It's an insult to people.
link |
It's a fighting word.
link |
It's a way that you say that to somebody.
link |
It's a invitation for conflict.
link |
That said, what is it that about this particular word
link |
and also the asymmetry of it,
link |
that do you think it's empowering
link |
to the black community to own a word?
link |
My honest answer to you is I don't know.
link |
I don't fully understand it.
link |
It has become symbolic in a way.
link |
And the policing of the use of the word,
link |
I can say it, but white people can't say it.
link |
I'm not a self hating black.
link |
I'm just speaking the language of colloquial English
link |
that has emerged amongst African Americans
link |
in which that word plays a big role.
link |
But the prohibition on its use by others.
link |
And of course, in the Joe Rogan case,
link |
it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an N word.
link |
He was simply pointing out that people had said stuff
link |
in which the N word was a part of what they said.
link |
Now, he did make the statement about,
link |
how did he put it?
link |
The planet of the apes,
link |
that one of the offensive things that he said,
link |
he walked into a room,
link |
there's a bunch of black guys standing around.
link |
He says, like planet of the apes.
link |
He said it's like Africa, planet of the apes.
link |
Yeah, he should have been a little bit more careful.
link |
That was an insult.
link |
That was something that if you say that
link |
and people are offended,
link |
they have a right to be offended.
link |
And if you didn't mean to offend them,
link |
you can apologize.
link |
And he did apologize.
link |
I accept his apology.
link |
Joe's okay with me as far as that goes.
link |
In fact, John McWhorter and I at the podcast that I do,
link |
The Glenn Show, had a conversation,
link |
part of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
link |
And we concluded he didn't really do anything wrong.
link |
I mean, you can like or you can hate him or whatever,
link |
but the idea that he's a racist is kind of ridiculous.
link |
So frankly, I mean, if that's your test
link |
of what constitutes a racist, the utterance of the word,
link |
then it's kind of silly as far as I'm concerned.
link |
What do you think about the rigorous testing of people
link |
to the degree they're racist or not?
link |
The accusation of racism being a way to attack,
link |
to bully, to divide.
link |
So what are the pros and cons of that once again?
link |
Because it does reveal the assholes and the racists,
link |
but it can hurt people who are not.
link |
Well, I think we have a history here in the United States
link |
of blatant racism that goes back a long way.
link |
And that has present day echoes.
link |
So there are racists.
link |
I mean, there are people who will look and see,
link |
oh, those are black people.
link |
They're patronizing this business.
link |
I don't wanna patronize this business anymore.
link |
Who if their daughter or their son is dating somebody
link |
that is black, they will say,
link |
I really wish you wouldn't do that.
link |
I mean, why are you hanging out with those people?
link |
Don't you know who they are?
link |
There are people, there are racists, okay?
link |
There are black racists.
link |
That is black people who see somebody who's white
link |
and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever,
link |
or have a visceral dislike based upon nothing
link |
other than the color of the person's skin.
link |
Such people exist.
link |
Racism is a real thing, et cetera.
link |
On the other hand, I think this,
link |
throwing around the accusation of racism,
link |
a college professor is teaching a course.
link |
He says in the context of teaching the course
link |
that the underrepresentation of blacks
link |
in physics program at this university
link |
is because they score lower on the test than other groups
link |
and they're not qualified.
link |
So say the professor gives a lecture and he says,
link |
we don't have more blacks in the physics department
link |
at this university because there are not enough
link |
Somebody in the classroom who hears that,
link |
a black student, objects.
link |
He's a racist, okay?
link |
That's a power move.
link |
It's a move to try to control the conversation.
link |
It's not an argument, it's an epithet.
link |
You've said that a person who has a particular idea
link |
that you don't like, maybe that idea is,
link |
I'm against affirmative action, I think it's unfair.
link |
I was just with Dorian Abbott.
link |
Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of Chicago
link |
who published a piece in Newsweek magazine
link |
in which he said that he thought affirmative action
link |
and racial balancing was unethical.
link |
He was invited to give a lecture at MIT,
link |
a very distinguished lecture in his field
link |
based on planetary science.
link |
I don't know exactly what it is.
link |
I'm not a scientist.
link |
But in any case, because he had said
link |
that he didn't like affirmative action
link |
and he thought affirmative action was racist,
link |
that's basically what he said.
link |
Why are we looking at people based upon their race
link |
and decide we should just do it on the merit?
link |
That was his position.
link |
Now, people protesting at the university
link |
where he was invited, MIT, saying that he's a racist
link |
because he had that opinion.
link |
He gets disinvited.
link |
Charles Murray is a popular social science writer
link |
who is famous for his book about IQ, The Bell Curve,
link |
one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences
link |
between black and white in performance
link |
on mental ability tests and speculates about the extent
link |
to which such differences may be connected
link |
with the genetic inheritance of these racially diverse people.
link |
Now, he could be wrong about everything that he's saying.
link |
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist
link |
because he observes that there are racial differences
link |
in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans
link |
of different racial descent.
link |
He could be wrong.
link |
Let me stipulate that he is wrong.
link |
I mean, I don't wanna argue about whether he's right
link |
I don't wanna argue about whether he's right
link |
or about whether he's wrong.
link |
He's addressing himself to a factual issue.
link |
And now the issue becomes instead of grappling
link |
with the factual questions at hand
link |
and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness
link |
about those questions, the issue becomes his character.
link |
That's, in my mind, a lot like calling him a witch.
link |
And the use of that word now, I think,
link |
has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft
link |
because they have views about substantive questions
link |
that bear on racial inequality or racial difference
link |
that a person finds unacceptable
link |
or that a person disagrees with.
link |
And you think you can shut somebody up.
link |
Crime in the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore,
link |
Philadelphia, Washington, DC is out of control,
link |
some person might say.
link |
Murder rate is high.
link |
Who's committing those crimes?
link |
They're mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings
link |
and who are doing the shootings.
link |
They're killing each other.
link |
They're making our city unlivable.
link |
Now, that's a hypothetical statement that I offer.
link |
It might be correct, it might be incorrect.
link |
It might be appropriate, it might be inappropriate.
link |
It may be true, but something that we would be better off
link |
if people didn't focus on, I don't know.
link |
Responding to someone making that statement,
link |
have you seen what has happened to my city?
link |
It used to be that you could go to North Michigan Avenue
link |
and you could find one after another
link |
after another high end shop.
link |
This is in Chicago, my hometown.
link |
And tourists would come and they'd go to the theater
link |
and there were restaurants and they'd go out.
link |
They don't do it anymore.
link |
Half of those stores are boarded up now.
link |
Because when George Floyd was killed,
link |
black people mobbed in the city and they burnt
link |
and they rioted and they looted
link |
and it hasn't been the same ever since.
link |
And I'm moving to the suburbs.
link |
I'll be damned if I'm gonna send my children
link |
A person could say that.
link |
They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
link |
They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
link |
Calling them a racist is exactly not
link |
a rebuttal of what they said.
link |
It's a move to try to take control of the conversation
link |
by accusing someone of having bad character
link |
because they said something that made you uncomfortable,
link |
which you can't deal with.
link |
So you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist.
link |
You might as well be calling them a witch.
link |
You might as well be calling for their head on a platter
link |
because they believe that Satan is Lord
link |
because that's the kind of quote argument, close quote,
link |
which is precisely not an argument
link |
that people who invoke that term are using.
link |
And here's what I have to say about that.
link |
It's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody
link |
by calling them a witch.
link |
Likewise, it's a fool's errand to try to rebut
link |
the contrary forces in American politics
link |
that are a reaction often to real things
link |
that are going on on the ground in black communities
link |
in the cities across this country
link |
by calling people a racist.
link |
You may shut them up, but you won't change their minds.
link |
And you know what?
link |
At the end of the day, they're gonna go to the ballot box
link |
and they're gonna vote.
link |
They're gonna pick up their store
link |
and they're gonna move it to the other side of town
link |
or to another town altogether.
link |
They're gonna keep their children away
link |
from places where they think the influences
link |
are harmful to those children.
link |
They may not even talk about it in public.
link |
You can believe that in private
link |
that they're talking about it with each other.
link |
You had better find a more effective way
link |
of dealing with the conflicts in this country
link |
that fall along racial fault lines
link |
than calling people witches,
link |
which is what this, you know, anti racist,
link |
you're a racist because you think
link |
that the out of wedlock birth rate amongst black Americans
link |
is seven babies out of 10 are born
link |
to a woman without a husband.
link |
Their families are falling apart.
link |
Now, no one says that in public
link |
because they'd be called a racist
link |
if they said it in public.
link |
But as a matter of fact, the families are falling apart.
link |
You didn't change that in the least
link |
by telling people to shut up about it.
link |
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist
link |
in the 1960s, the late Senator,
link |
the New York Senator who was a federal employee
link |
and an intellectual writing reports
link |
and he writes a report about the Negro family,
link |
he called it in those years.
link |
If I use the word Negro,
link |
now they're gonna call me a racist if I'm a white person.
link |
I can't even use the word Negro,
link |
which is a historically legitimate reference
link |
to the descendants of the enslaved people,
link |
which we were as black Americans proud to use until yesterday.
link |
So all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness.
link |
It's false black power.
link |
People will seed you the ground.
link |
Okay, you don't want me to use that word?
link |
I won't use that word anymore.
link |
Okay, you don't want me to talk about that in public?
link |
All right, I won't talk about it in public anymore.
link |
I don't wanna be called a racist, okay?
link |
So I won't express my opinion.
link |
You haven't changed anybody's mind.
link |
And you've also mentioned that for that,
link |
you haven't changed anybody's mind,
link |
but also for things like in universities and institutions,
link |
there's a diversity inclusion
link |
and equity kind of meetings and education and so on.
link |
And I believe I read somewhere,
link |
I've been, like I mentioned to you offline,
link |
big fan of your Glenn show, people should listen to it.
link |
There's also just interviews of you that I've listened to.
link |
I believe you mentioned somewhere
link |
that even those kinds of meetings,
link |
people might sit through and nod along,
link |
but that doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress,
link |
that they may actually be bottling up a frustration.
link |
The fear is that that's going to result
link |
in a pendulum sort of push back towards this idea
link |
of forced appreciations, like forced anti racism kind of thing.
link |
I talk about this often in my podcast,
link |
that's the Glenn show, you can find the Glenn show
link |
on my YouTube channel and also at Substack.
link |
Yeah, you have a great Substack.
link |
You and your friend do Q and As
link |
and all that kind of stuff on Patreon.
link |
So yeah, so people should definitely follow you.
link |
It's a brilliant conversation.
link |
But yeah, I mean, one concern is that the policing,
link |
the superficial policing,
link |
this is a part of political correctness,
link |
the insistence that you only use certain words,
link |
that you only talk in a certain way,
link |
is a phony kind of power
link |
because it doesn't actually persuade people
link |
about the issues that are at hand.
link |
Instead, it forces them underground
link |
in their talk about these issues,
link |
and that's problematic.
link |
Much better that we have overt and explicit
link |
and honest disagreement
link |
to the extent that there are disagreement
link |
about things that are going on
link |
than that we have a superficial kind of conversation
link |
that is purged of any real biting,
link |
discomforting confrontation with the realities
link |
of the situation at hand.
link |
And for black Americans,
link |
I think one big part of the reality
link |
of the situation at hand is violent crime, violent crime.
link |
A police officer is afraid when he stops the car
link |
because it's an 18 year old driver in the vehicle.
link |
He's got dreadlocks.
link |
He's a black person.
link |
The car doesn't have the right license plate.
link |
He's afraid to deal with that person.
link |
And one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them
link |
is because a few who look like him are behaving violently.
link |
Their violence is usually perpetrated
link |
against others who look like themselves, but not always.
link |
And that reality doesn't get changed
link |
by telling a newspaper writer who writes about it
link |
that they are racist or enforcing within a newsroom.
link |
You can't cover that story in that way
link |
because to do so would be racist.
link |
I think it's a monumental mistake
link |
to enforce a closure on public discussion
link |
based upon a calculation that if we allow people,
link |
if Twitter allows this kind of post,
link |
if the Washington Post runs this kind of story, et cetera,
link |
you end up with a superficial politeness,
link |
a superficial politeness,
link |
but a subterranean seething resentment
link |
that only makes matters worse.
link |
If I can get your comment, maybe you have ideas
link |
because it does seem that this kind of attack works
link |
of being called a racist, being called, maybe not sexist,
link |
but somebody, like we're going through a Johnny Depp trial
link |
It's a defamation trial, and the reason it's a defamation
link |
trial is because all it took is a single accusation
link |
of Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually
link |
and physically abused Amber Heard.
link |
And all it took is just a single article.
link |
No proof was given except the accusation itself,
link |
and the world believed it.
link |
So it's effective.
link |
So how do you fight back if it's so damn effective
link |
that you can just call anybody racist?
link |
It's hard to wash off.
link |
It's, you're not proven in the court of law
link |
or anything like that, but we get those articles,
link |
we get that label, and then the world moves on
link |
and just assumes that person is racist.
link |
So how do you, do you have any ideas how to fight back?
link |
No, I don't, frankly.
link |
Just highlighting the fact.
link |
Listen, Roseanne Barr, who made this statement
link |
about Valerie Jarrett, she made some kind of ape
link |
like reference to the whatever, and her show
link |
got canceled, and she's a racist.
link |
So first of all, pointing it out, I suppose,
link |
is one of the most powerful things that this,
link |
the hypocrisy of it, the.
link |
You say it works, I guess you're right.
link |
It used to be that calling someone a communist worked.
link |
I mean, going back to the late 40s, early 50s,
link |
Red Scare, McCarthyism, and whatnot,
link |
and the person might've belonged to a club
link |
that was pro Soviet Union in the 1930s
link |
when they were in college.
link |
They might've voted for the socialist candidate,
link |
Henry Wallace, in the presidential election of 1948.
link |
They might belong to the Communist Party.
link |
They might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot
link |
of stuff about capitalism and whatnot,
link |
and they got called a communist or a Marxist,
link |
and it could've ruined their career,
link |
could've ruined their lives.
link |
And a lot of people shut up about it,
link |
and it took, and it went on for a long time.
link |
And in a way, it kind of still is going on.
link |
I mean, you call somebody a Marxist,
link |
if you can make that stick, they're certainly not gonna
link |
get elected president of the United States.
link |
But I don't know about this.
link |
I think, you know, I once read this book
link |
by a German political scientist
link |
called Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
link |
That was the writer's name, Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
link |
The book was called The Spiral of Silence.
link |
And the argument was there can be some views,
link |
some issues in society that get defined
link |
in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views.
link |
And as a result, people who don't want to be shamed,
link |
who don't want to be ostracized don't express those views.
link |
And when they don't express them,
link |
anybody holding the view because they don't hear it
link |
said by others think that they're the only one
link |
and one of the few who hold the view,
link |
and so they don't want to be the only one
link |
out there saying something, so they keep it to themselves.
link |
So now this view, this attitude in society
link |
could be held by a large number of people,
link |
but because of the fear that if they were to express it,
link |
they'd be ostracized, no one says it.
link |
And since no one is saying it,
link |
the others who hold the view don't know
link |
that they're not alone,
link |
that they are not the only ones who hold the view.
link |
And hence they keep silent.
link |
That could be an equilibrium.
link |
It could be a relatively stable situation
link |
in which the emperor has no clothes.
link |
Everybody can see that this dude is naked, okay?
link |
But everybody thinks that, you know,
link |
I don't want to be the only one to say it.
link |
And so we all kind of collaborate in this charade
link |
of keeping the view to ourselves.
link |
Then along comes an event that somebody decides
link |
to defy the consensus and to speak out.
link |
It could be a little kid who in the story
link |
about the emperor has no clothes,
link |
doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say
link |
that the emperor is naked.
link |
The thing about the kid in the story
link |
who says that the emperor is naked,
link |
it's not that he's saying it.
link |
It's not even that other people hear him saying it.
link |
It's that everybody knows
link |
that everybody else heard him say it, okay?
link |
The kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes
link |
creates a circumstance in which it's common knowledge
link |
that the emperor has no clothes.
link |
Now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge.
link |
It does not even mean widespread knowledge.
link |
It means comprehensive knowledge
link |
of other person's knowledge of the thing, okay?
link |
So the spiral of silence is a equilibrium
link |
that is susceptible to being undermined
link |
by a process of a kind of cumulative process,
link |
a snowballing process of revelation
link |
that you're not the only one who thinks this way, okay?
link |
It's fascinating to think that there's an ocean
link |
of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid
link |
to wake us up to, different little parts of it.
link |
And the little kid, by the way,
link |
could be somebody like Donald Trump,
link |
only more effective than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump,
link |
somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick
link |
takes a knee at a football game and says,
link |
I'm not gonna stand for this president allegiance,
link |
that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that.
link |
Somebody who understands
link |
that when a Black Lives Matter activist
link |
stands up with his ball of fists and says,
link |
burn this bitch down about a city
link |
in the United States of America,
link |
that a lot of people are upset about that, a lot of them.
link |
A person, a shrewd politician,
link |
a shrewd manager of a public image
link |
could build on and create a circumstance
link |
in which more and more people will feel safe
link |
to express that view.
link |
And the more who express it,
link |
the safer those who have yet to express it but who hold it
link |
will feel in expressing it.
link |
And to the extent that the view is very widespread
link |
but is kept under wraps, an explosion could happen.
link |
And you can look up tomorrow and have a very different
link |
country than you had today
link |
because the conspiracy of silence, the spiral of silence
link |
ends up getting unraveled by somebody who steps out
link |
away from the consensus,
link |
dares to take the slings and arrows
link |
of exposing themselves as a naysayer
link |
but taps into a sentiment that's very widespread.
link |
And I fear that with respect to many racial issues,
link |
this is the situation that we actually confront,
link |
that it could unravel in a very ugly way.
link |
But it could also unravel in a beautiful way.
link |
So it's depending.
link |
There is a spiral of silence, you're saying,
link |
and it could be, speaking of children,
link |
charismatic children, there's a guy named Elon Musk
link |
who might be a candidate for such an unraveling, right?
link |
You mentioned the person that speaks out
link |
could be a Donald Trump.
link |
But in this current situation that we live in,
link |
like as this week, Elon has purchased Twitter.
link |
That's what I hear.
link |
And is pushing for, in all kinds of ways,
link |
the increase of free speech on Twitter.
link |
And speaking about some of the issues
link |
that we've been speaking about here with you,
link |
but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact
link |
that you have to, it's okay to point out
link |
that the emperor wears no clothes,
link |
and to do so from all sides in a way
link |
that everybody's a little bit pissed off,
link |
What do you think about this whole effort
link |
of free speech in these public platforms?
link |
Elon in particular, Twitter, your avid Twitter user.
link |
But just public platforms for discourse,
link |
for us as a civilization to figure stuff out.
link |
Yeah, well, the people on the left
link |
are very upset about the possibility
link |
that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to,
link |
more open to provocative public speech
link |
that has heretofore been banned or suppressed.
link |
And I think they might be right to be concerned
link |
that that could happen.
link |
I don't know enough about the technology
link |
and about the market to really,
link |
I mean, social media and whatnot,
link |
it seems like it's a complicated system
link |
of interactions between people and who the users are
link |
and so forth and so on.
link |
I do know that that New York Post story
link |
about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news
link |
and could have affected the outcome of the election,
link |
and it was suppressed,
link |
and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it.
link |
I do know that the question of where the COVID 19 virus
link |
originated and the role that a lab leak account
link |
could have played in the public processing of that event
link |
was real news, and that it was suppressed
link |
by people who were trying to control misinformation,
link |
disinformation, Russian disinformation campaigns
link |
So Twitter has users, I'm one of them,
link |
and it has a lot of users.
link |
It's not as big as Facebook, I gather.
link |
It's not, but it's important,
link |
the ability to construct counter platforms,
link |
people moving around and whatnot.
link |
It's a kind of network dynamic
link |
that maybe I should understand it better than I do
link |
being a social scientist, but.
link |
I don't think anyone understands it,
link |
even people inside Twitter, which is fascinating.
link |
It's a monster because of just the bandwidth of messaging,
link |
and you don't know who is a bot and who is a human.
link |
That's a fascinating dynamic,
link |
and the viral nature of negativity.
link |
All of those dynamics, of course,
link |
you are probably the right person to understand it
link |
from a social scientist perspective,
link |
from an economics perspective,
link |
but nobody really understands,
link |
and it's fascinating within that domain,
link |
how do you allow for free speech,
link |
not allow for free speech, encourage free speech,
link |
defend free speech, and at the same time,
link |
manage millions of ongoing conversations
link |
from just becoming insanely chaotic.
link |
Sort of from Twitter perspective,
link |
they want people to be happy, to grow,
link |
to actually have difficult, critical conversations,
link |
and the problem with humans is they think
link |
they know what that is, and they think
link |
they can label things as misinformation,
link |
as counterproductive or healthy conversations, in quotes,
link |
and the problem is, as we are learning,
link |
humans are not able to do that effectively.
link |
First of all, power corrupts.
link |
There's something delicious about having the power
link |
to label something as misinformation.
link |
You do that once for something
link |
that might be obviously misinformation,
link |
and then you start getting greedy.
link |
You start getting excited.
link |
It feels good to label something
link |
as misinformation or disinformation
link |
that you just don't like, and over time,
link |
especially if there's a culture inside of a company
link |
that leans a certain political direction
link |
or leans, in all the groups that we talked about,
link |
leans a certain way, they'll start
link |
to label as misinformation things they just don't like,
link |
and that power is delicious, and it corrupts.
link |
You have to construct mechanisms,
link |
like the Founding Fathers did,
link |
for somehow preventing you from allowing
link |
that power to get too delicious.
link |
At least that's my perspective on what's going on.
link |
Well, I'll just tell you personally,
link |
I'm excited about the prospect.
link |
I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's making,
link |
and we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth.
link |
You're looking forward for the, what did he say?
link |
Let's make Twitter more fun.
link |
I'm looking forward to the fun.
link |
You've talked about you are at a prestigious university.
link |
Brown University, and you've mentioned
link |
that universities might be in trouble.
link |
I think it's with Jordan, but everywhere else,
link |
that barbarians are at the gate.
link |
Who are the barbarians at the gate of the university?
link |
So first of all, what is to you beautiful
link |
about the ideal of the university in America, of academia?
link |
And what is a threat?
link |
Well, you know, a university is dedicated
link |
to the pursuit of truth, and to the education
link |
and nurturing of young people as they enter
link |
into the pursuit of truth, to doing research and to teaching
link |
in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse.
link |
So free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence
link |
and your imagination may lead you.
link |
And civil discourse means that you exchange arguments
link |
with people when you don't agree with them
link |
on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things.
link |
I think the university is a magnificent institution.
link |
It is a relatively modern institution.
link |
I mean, last 500 years or so.
link |
I mean, there are universities that are older than that,
link |
but the great research universities of the world,
link |
not only here in the United States,
link |
are places where human ingenuity is nurtured,
link |
where new lot knowledge is created,
link |
and where young people are equipped to answer questions
link |
that are open questions about our existence
link |
in the world that we live in.
link |
You can trace to the university much,
link |
if not most, of the advances in technology
link |
and resourcefulness and our understanding
link |
of the origins of the species, of the nature of the universe,
link |
cosmology, et cetera, science,
link |
the pursuit of humanistic understanding,
link |
the nurturing of traditions of inquiry,
link |
so forth, so that's the university.
link |
Barbarians are at the gates.
link |
The people who are trying to shut down open inquiry
link |
at the university on behalf of their particular view
link |
about things are a threat to what the university stands for,
link |
and they should be resisted.
link |
So if I'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence,
link |
and I wanna study differences between human populations
link |
and their acquisition of,
link |
or their expression of cognitive ability,
link |
that's fair game, it's an open question.
link |
If I wanna know something about the nature
link |
of gender affiliation and identity
link |
and gender dysphoria and whatnot,
link |
that's fair game to study in a university.
link |
You can't shut that down, you shouldn't be able to,
link |
by saying, I have a particular position here,
link |
I'm a member of a particular identity group,
link |
suppose I wanna study the history of colonialism,
link |
and there's a narrative on the progressive side,
link |
which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating
link |
and stealing or whatever, whatever,
link |
and I happen to think, well, there's another aspect
link |
to the story about colonialism too,
link |
which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion
link |
of the best in human civilization to populations
link |
that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that.
link |
It brought literacy to the Southern hemispheric populations
link |
that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing.
link |
I'm not taking that position, by the way.
link |
I'm just saying somebody at a university
link |
should be able to take it up and pursue it
link |
and engage in argument with people about it.
link |
I'm talking about race and ethnicity,
link |
but this extends to a wide range of things.
link |
Suppose we're talking about race,
link |
a wide range of things, suppose we're talking about climate,
link |
and one person says the earth is endangered
link |
because carbon in global warming, et cetera, et cetera,
link |
and another person says, no, wait, no, wait,
link |
look at where we stand in the 21st century.
link |
We're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago.
link |
We have much more knowledge about that
link |
and so forth and so on.
link |
250 years from now, human ingenuity will have devised
link |
in ways that we can not even begin to anticipate.
link |
All manner of technological means for managing the problem.
link |
There's no reason that we should shut down
link |
industrial civilization today
link |
because we fear the consequences of it
link |
when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors
link |
and those who come two centuries after us
link |
will be vastly more effective
link |
at dealing with problems than we are now.
link |
I'm not actually making that argument.
link |
I'm just saying the tendency to try to say, oh, no,
link |
that person is a climate denier.
link |
They can't pursue that area of inquiry
link |
is against the spirit of the university.
link |
I think the barbarians at the gates
link |
has to do with the people who think they know
link |
what the right side of history is
link |
and try to make the university stand
link |
on the right side of history.
link |
My position is you don't know
link |
what the right side of history is.
link |
And the purpose of a university is to equip you
link |
to be able to think about what is the right side of history.
link |
What is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us
link |
as human beings living on this planet
link |
with the billions that we are in the condition that we are.
link |
So the identitarians,
link |
the ones who wanna make the university kowtow
link |
to their particular understandings about their own identity.
link |
We now have at Brown University and various other places,
link |
we don't do Columbus Day anymore.
link |
We do Indigenous Peoples Day.
link |
When that day comes up in October,
link |
we don't talk about Columbus.
link |
They're taking down statues of Columbus
link |
all across the country and so forth and so on.
link |
I'm not arguing anything here other than
link |
that the latter day position
link |
BIPOCs, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color,
link |
the latter day position that the university
link |
has to reflect a particular sensibility
link |
about these identity questions.
link |
I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise.
link |
I don't think you're overstating it.
link |
I tend to be, just from my limited knowledge of MIT,
link |
but perhaps it applies broadly,
link |
I think the beauty of the university, broadly speaking,
link |
is the faculty and the students.
link |
And the problem arises from the overreach
link |
of a overgrowing administration
link |
that gives, again, thinks that it knows enough
link |
to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs,
link |
and then based on that, empowers a certain small selection
link |
of students to be the sort of voices of activism,
link |
of a particular idea.
link |
And not, I think activism is beautiful,
link |
but not just activism, but anybody that disagrees
link |
is shut down, and that, I think,
link |
the blame lies with the administration.
link |
So I think the solution is in lessening,
link |
just like the solution with too big of a government,
link |
too big of a bureaucracy, is there needs to be
link |
redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful,
link |
which is the old students and the young students,
link |
old students being professors.
link |
So the scholars, the curious minds,
link |
the people that are in this whole thing
link |
to explore the world, to be curious about it,
link |
on a salary that's probably way too low
link |
for the thing they're doing.
link |
That's the whole point.
link |
And then the administration just gets in the way,
link |
and is the source of this kind of,
link |
I would say that, in your beautiful phrasing,
link |
I would say the administration
link |
is the barbarians at the gate.
link |
So the solution is smaller bureaucracy,
link |
smaller administrations.
link |
I have to, on this point, you had this conversation,
link |
you put on your self stack with Jordan Peterson
link |
about cognitive inequality.
link |
I think it's titled Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality.
link |
This particular topic of just IQ differences
link |
between groups, why is this,
link |
why is it so dangerous to talk about?
link |
Why this particular topic?
link |
Well, it's like you're calling black people inferior.
link |
It's like you're saying they're genetically inferior.
link |
That's what people are saying.
link |
It's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes
link |
by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people.
link |
If you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes,
link |
if you say cognitive ability exists,
link |
people really are different
link |
in terms of their intellectual functioning.
link |
And if you say cognitive ability differences
link |
are substantial between racially defined populations,
link |
the sum of that, there is cognitive ability,
link |
it matters, and the difference by race
link |
is the conclusion that outcome differences by race
link |
are in part due to natural differences
link |
between the populations.
link |
People find that to be completely offensive
link |
So that's what I think is going on.
link |
Can you steel me on that case
link |
that we should be careful doing that kind of research?
link |
So this has to do with research.
link |
It's like the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda.
link |
You can use, white supremacists could use conclusions,
link |
cherry pick conclusions of studies to push their agenda.
link |
Can you steel me on the case that we should be careful?
link |
Yeah, I could do it at three levels.
link |
One is what do we mean by cognitive ability?
link |
So there's many different kinds of intelligence
link |
a person might say.
link |
How good are IQ tests at measuring
link |
other kinds of human capacities
link |
that are pertinent to success in life,
link |
like temperament, like emotional intelligence, and so on.
link |
So intelligence is not a one dimensional thing
link |
The cognitive psychologists talk about G,
link |
the general intelligence factor,
link |
which is a statistical construction.
link |
It's a factor analytic resolution
link |
of the correlation across individuals
link |
in their performance on a battery,
link |
a different kind of test.
link |
And they use that to define a general factor of intelligence
link |
that a person could say that is a very narrow view
link |
of what human mental capacities actually are.
link |
And that it's much better to think about
link |
multi dimensional measures of human mental functioning
link |
rather than a single cognitive ability measure,
link |
so called IQ, which is a narrow construction
link |
that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance
link |
of human difference in functioning.
link |
Functioning is not just the ability
link |
to recite backwards a sequence of numbers.
link |
I say eight, seven, nine, five, three, two.
link |
You say two, three, five, seven, eight, nine.
link |
It's not just that.
link |
Intelligence is a complex management
link |
of many different dimensions of human performance,
link |
including things like being able to stick with a task
link |
and not give up, things like being able to discipline
link |
and control your impulses so as to remain focused
link |
That could be one dimension.
link |
I could start by questioning the very foundation
link |
of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability
link |
by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed.
link |
I could go to a higher level.
link |
I could say what we're really interested in
link |
is social outcomes and the question of what factors
link |
influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability
link |
to many other things.
link |
So here's an example.
link |
Visual acuity, how well do you see?
link |
You're not wearing glasses, I am.
link |
Visual acuity varies between human beings.
link |
Some people see better than other people do.
link |
Visual acuity can be measured.
link |
I can put you at the chart and you can,
link |
can you identify and read that bottom line
link |
in small print or not?
link |
So we can measure visual acuity
link |
and it varies between human beings.
link |
Visual acuity is partly genetic.
link |
I think that's undoubtedly true.
link |
We inherit genes that influence whether or not
link |
we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever.
link |
So visual acuity differs between people
link |
and can be measured and is under genetic control.
link |
On the other hand, corrective lenses allow for us
link |
to level the playing field between people
link |
who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity.
link |
Likewise, social outcomes are what we're really interested in
link |
employment, earnings, whether or not they're law abiding,
link |
how do they conduct themselves and their families
link |
and so forth amongst individuals.
link |
Yes, social outcomes are influenced
link |
by so called cognitive ability,
link |
but they're influenced by many other things as well.
link |
If there are interventions that can be undertaken in society
link |
that level the playing field between people
link |
who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability,
link |
the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability
link |
becomes less significant.
link |
Just like it's less significant that people differ
link |
with respect to how well they see
link |
when corrective lenses allow
link |
for the leveling of that playing field.
link |
There are in fact interventions, educational interventions,
link |
early childhood interventions that have been shown
link |
to level the playing field
link |
to create better life outcomes for people
link |
even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence.
link |
So a second level of arguing against this whole program
link |
of research on human differences and intelligence
link |
is to observe that yes, human beings
link |
and perhaps racially defined groups
link |
may differ on the average in intellectual endowment,
link |
but there well may be social interventions
link |
that level the playing field,
link |
whether it's in education
link |
or in other kinds of programmatic interventions,
link |
especially for the poor.
link |
A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to,
link |
which is that if you talk like this,
link |
you're gonna encourage a kind of politics
link |
which is very ugly.
link |
And it's best to frame the discussion
link |
in ways that don't put emphasis
link |
on racially defined natural differences between populations.
link |
That's an argument that I am myself personally
link |
On the one hand, I think, you know,
link |
those people are just stupid.
link |
It is racist, okay?
link |
On the other hand, I think the calculation,
link |
we shouldn't do this kind of research.
link |
Suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation,
link |
a research team submits a proposal.
link |
The proposal proposes to undertake a study.
link |
The study would explore the extent to which people
link |
and racial groups differ with respect
link |
to their intellectual performance
link |
and how that's influenced by their genetic
link |
and environmental interaction.
link |
And I decide not to fund the study
link |
based on a political calculation
link |
that the subject is too sensitive.
link |
And if you explore that subject,
link |
you might get the wrong answer.
link |
And if you get the wrong answer,
link |
the white supremacist will be encouraged.
link |
Well, that is presuming before the research is done
link |
that I know the outcome of the research
link |
and that I can calculate what the political consequence
link |
of the research outcome is gonna be.
link |
That's assuming the thing before you even know
link |
what the thing actually is.
link |
It's a kind of omniscience.
link |
It presumes that you as the master of the universe
link |
can tell people what it is
link |
that people are being treated like children,
link |
what it is that they're capable of knowing
link |
and what it is that they're not capable of knowing.
link |
It would be like someone saying to Einstein,
link |
I don't know about that special relativity theory.
link |
You know, it could well lead
link |
to the development of technologies
link |
that would allow nuclear weapons.
link |
Or someone saying to Oppenheimer,
link |
who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project
link |
where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity,
link |
don't carry out that project
link |
because the results of acquiring that knowledge
link |
may be more than we can deal with.
link |
Or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research
link |
who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome,
link |
don't carry out that experiment,
link |
that cloning, undertaking, whatever,
link |
because the consequences could be deleterious.
link |
Well, the consequences could be deleterious.
link |
The consequences could also be the cure of cancer.
link |
The consequences could also be
link |
being able to generate electric power
link |
without producing carbon effluent.
link |
So who are you to tell me,
link |
you being the person in the political position
link |
to control the research,
link |
what the consequence of doing the research is?
link |
I think I don't want to cede that kind of power
link |
to politicians over the course of human inquiry.
link |
So yes, I would want there to be regulations
link |
governing the use of biologically sensitive
link |
and potentially dangerous pathogens
link |
in a lab in Wuhan or any place else.
link |
I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire.
link |
On the other hand, I think that the tendency
link |
to try to shut down inquiry
link |
on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences
link |
is the road to ignorance and impoverishment
link |
at the end of the day for humankind,
link |
denying ourselves the potential benefits
link |
of that kind of inquiry.
link |
I think we need to take our chances with inquiry
link |
rather than to try to control it.
link |
And I feel that way about the exploration
link |
of human intelligence as much as anything else.
link |
So you've asked me to steel man the case
link |
against research on IQ of the sort
link |
that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing.
link |
And I've said A, your measure of intelligence
link |
is single dimensional and it ought to be multi dimensional.
link |
I've said B, the consequences of people's differing
link |
in intelligence depends not only
link |
on the natural endowments of the people
link |
but also on the environment
link |
and the potential for intervening in that environment
link |
through one or another kind of instrument
link |
as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses
link |
to level the playing field between people
link |
with different visual acuity indicates.
link |
But finally, I've said, yes,
link |
research on racial differences in IQ can foster
link |
political beliefs that we would regard to be noxious.
link |
On the other hand, to presume that what we don't know yet
link |
and might find out from the research is gonna be harmful
link |
is to assume a kind of presumption
link |
or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be
link |
which we ought to be very slow to embrace
link |
because if we had done so in the past,
link |
we wouldn't have nuclear power.
link |
There's a lot of things that we wouldn't know.
link |
I mean, what were people saying about Darwin
link |
and exploration of the evolution
link |
and origin of the species?
link |
They were afraid that it was gonna, in effect,
link |
disprove the religious based accounts
link |
of what were they saying about Copernicus
link |
and et cetera, et cetera.
link |
That was a masterful layering of, quote,
link |
wrestling with cognitive inequality.
link |
You dragged in nuclear research,
link |
Copernicus, Darwin, biomedical research with genetics,
link |
even COVID and the lab leak.
link |
I mean, that was just fun to listen to.
link |
Let me ask you about your politics.
link |
So you've recently said that you're a conservative leaning.
link |
I mean, maybe that's a day to day thing.
link |
Maybe you can push back.
link |
But so you have somebody like your friend, John McWhorter,
link |
who we could say is on your left, to the left of you.
link |
And then you have somebody like Thomas Sowell
link |
who maybe is on to the right of you.
link |
And yet there's a lot of overlap between the three of you.
link |
So to what degree does politics affect your view on race
link |
And maybe to what degree does your view on race
link |
affect your politics?
link |
And that, for people who don't know, has shifted over time.
link |
You've been on quite a roller coaster,
link |
as anybody who thinks about the world should be.
link |
Well, let's begin with the fact that I was trained
link |
as an economist in a tradition of what many people
link |
would call neoliberalism.
link |
I was trained at MIT, which was not a right wing place
link |
by any means, but it was a place where you learned
link |
about markets and about the benefits of capitalism
link |
as a way of organizing society,
link |
the virtues of free enterprise,
link |
the fact that the pursuit of profit
link |
was not necessarily a bad thing,
link |
but it well might be the road to prosperity
link |
and to economic growth.
link |
The idea that private property and individuals seeking
link |
to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth
link |
did create inequality, but it also created opportunity.
link |
And it also expanded the ability to do things
link |
and expanded our knowledge and our control
link |
over the physical environment in which we're embedded
link |
So we were not Marxists at MIT, although we did read Marx.
link |
I mean, those of us who were intellectually curious,
link |
Marx was an important figure in the history of the West.
link |
And I think Marx should be read in capital three volumes,
link |
et cetera, alienation of labor and whatnot.
link |
The implications of modernization,
link |
the advent of industrial capitalism, et cetera.
link |
That kind of dynamic deserves to be studied
link |
and to come at it in a critical way,
link |
informed by the intellectual inheritance of Marx and Marxism.
link |
I think that's a part of a full education
link |
in social philosophy and economic analysis
link |
that an open minded person ought to acquaint themselves with.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
I think that the free marketeers have the better of it.
link |
I think the story of the 20th century
link |
as far as economic development is concerned reflects that.
link |
I think that the experiments where centralized control
link |
over economic decisions was the order of the day failed.
link |
I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China
link |
as a force has a lot to do with the spread of,
link |
in effect, capitalist oriented modes
link |
of entering economic exchange,
link |
freeing up prices, markets, property, and so forth.
link |
Although obviously it's a complicated
link |
political economic system, we're talking about China.
link |
But I think that the story of the 20th century
link |
and the hope for the 21st century
link |
is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange
link |
of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property
link |
by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system.
link |
That's the view that I hold.
link |
I guess that makes me a conservative, I don't know.
link |
I wanna say that's not to the exclusion
link |
of a social safety net.
link |
I'm not saying that old people in an ideal social system
link |
would be left to their own devices
link |
regardless of whether or not
link |
they had saved for their retirement.
link |
I'm not saying that the ideal of extending decent access
link |
to healthcare to all people regardless
link |
of whether or not they can afford it,
link |
decent access to education to people
link |
regardless of whether or not they can afford it
link |
is standing in the way of prosperity.
link |
I don't believe that.
link |
I think the mixed economies that we see in Northern Europe
link |
and in North America are a balancing
link |
of the virtues of free enterprise property
link |
and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand
link |
against the needs to have a decent society
link |
in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless
link |
are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity
link |
that is accommodated by our common membership
link |
within a single nation state,
link |
which is why I think nationalism is important.
link |
And it's why I think borders are important
link |
because without a coherent polity
link |
who can see themselves as in a common situation
link |
and agree through their politics
link |
to support each other to some extent,
link |
you can't sustain a safety net.
link |
You cannot have a social safety net for a global population.
link |
You can only have a social safety net
link |
for a bounded population who have a sense
link |
of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise
link |
which they pay their dues through their taxes
link |
in order to sustain it.
link |
There's a balancing that has to go on.
link |
So that's the first thing that I would say about my politics.
link |
I'm a neoliberal economist.
link |
I believe in markets.
link |
I believe in prices.
link |
I believe in profit.
link |
Corporations are not an incarnation of evil.
link |
Corporations are a legal nexus
link |
through which production gets organized
link |
in which you solicit the cooperation of workers,
link |
of people who provide capital,
link |
of people who provide raw materials
link |
and input of customers and so on.
link |
And that functionality allows for the production of goods
link |
and their distribution and their earning of income
link |
and its distribution,
link |
which at the end of the day is the foundation
link |
of our prosperity.
link |
Corporations are people too.
link |
Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012.
link |
But corporations are nothing but a legal fiction.
link |
The corporation is not a person as such,
link |
but the nexus of contracts and relationships
link |
amongst the stakeholders who intersect
link |
in the context of the corporation
link |
is the way in which we organize
link |
the massively complex set of activities
link |
that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits,
link |
in order to feed people,
link |
in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket,
link |
in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent
link |
to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty
link |
gonna safely take off and land
link |
and in order to be able to build cities and et cetera.
link |
But do the markets, the ideal of the market
link |
collide with the ideal of all men are created equal?
link |
The identity, the struggle that we've been talking about
link |
of what it means to sort of empower humans
link |
that make up this great country.
link |
Do they collide and where do they collide?
link |
Well, markets are gonna produce inequality
link |
and all men being equal is a statement
link |
about the intrinsic worth of people,
link |
not about the situation that will come about
link |
when people interact with each other through markets
link |
because people are actually different
link |
and because there are factors
link |
that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance
link |
that you and I both invest.
link |
It looked a priori like your investment and my investment
link |
were equally likely to succeed.
link |
But as a matter of fact, ex post facto,
link |
your investment succeeds, my investment doesn't succeed.
link |
I don't have wealth and you have wealth.
link |
That is an inevitable consequence of a environment
link |
in which both of us are free to make our investment choices
link |
and where the consequences of investment
link |
depend in part upon random circumstances
link |
of which no one has control.
link |
But you asked me about my politics
link |
and I was just trying to lay down a foundation
link |
by saying I begin as an economist
link |
in the tradition of liberalism, Adam Smith and so forth,
link |
John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth,
link |
that Milton Friedman and so forth,
link |
that Paul Samuelson, Bob Solla, James Tobin and so forth,
link |
Thomas Sowell, yes, that appreciates property,
link |
the virtues of free enterprise,
link |
the set of institutions that allow for security of contract,
link |
a rule of law, things of this kind.
link |
So that's one thing to say about my politics.
link |
Another thing to say about my politics and you're right,
link |
I've moved around, is that I began south side of Chicago,
link |
black kid, I was a liberal Democrat.
link |
I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT
link |
and I became trained in economics
link |
in the tradition that I've just described.
link |
And I encountered also the Reagan Revolution.
link |
This is the late 70s and early 80s.
link |
These are big debates about economic policy and so on.
link |
And I found a lot to admire in the supply side errors,
link |
the people were saying,
link |
let's get the government out of the way,
link |
the people who were worried about national debt,
link |
which is a lot more now than it was then,
link |
the people who were worried
link |
that the welfare state could be too big,
link |
that the incentives of transfer programs
link |
could be counterproductive, that you had a war on poverty
link |
and we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
link |
And that's what I found.
link |
And we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
link |
And there's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty
link |
was lost by the people who were trying to, quote unquote,
link |
eradicate poverty in our time.
link |
That incentives really do matter
link |
and that the state, which is driven by politics,
link |
is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives.
link |
Whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient
link |
and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives
link |
because they can't cover their bottom line
link |
and they won't persist for very long.
link |
If they can't cover their bottom line,
link |
they're forced to respond to the realities of differences
link |
and costs and benefits and so forth
link |
in a way that governments can cover
link |
because they have their hand in our pocket.
link |
They can cover their losses
link |
and they can make accounts balanced,
link |
not withstanding their mistakes
link |
because they can take my property by fiat,
link |
by the power of the state, the tax collector comes,
link |
if I don't pay, he seizes my holdings.
link |
And they can carry on in that way.
link |
They need the corrective influence of markets
link |
in order to be responsive to the realities of life.
link |
I mean, I may not like it that prices are telling me
link |
that something that I wanna do is infeasible.
link |
I may not like it, but what the prices are telling me
link |
is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits
link |
to be derived from doing it.
link |
And if I persist in doing it not withstanding that,
link |
I'm gonna run losses.
link |
And those losses will accumulate.
link |
And the net effect of that over an entire society
link |
is stagnation and ultimate attenuation
link |
of the economic benefits
link |
that might be available to people.
link |
Again, I think if you look at the developing world
link |
in the postcolonial period,
link |
the second half of the 20th century,
link |
that's exactly what you see.
link |
Planning doesn't work.
link |
Centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work.
link |
Okay, so I became more conservative in that respect,
link |
but I also, and this has to do with race,
link |
lost the faith in the posture
link |
that what became of the civil rights movement.
link |
I mean, the civil rights movement, you quote King 1963,
link |
the civil rights movement starts out as
link |
we want equal membership in the polity,
link |
but it becomes a systematized cover I'm going to argue
link |
for deficiencies that are discernible
link |
within black American society, which only we could correct.
link |
That's a very controversial statement.
link |
I make it with trepidation.
link |
I don't take any pleasure in saying it,
link |
but here's what I'm talking about.
link |
So I'm talking about the family.
link |
So the family is a matter internal to the community
link |
about how men and women relate to each other
link |
and engage in social reproduction, childbearing,
link |
the standing up of households,
link |
the context within which children are developed,
link |
are maturing and so forth and so on.
link |
So the African American family is in trouble.
link |
I think I can demonstrate that
link |
by reference to high rates of marital dissolution,
link |
by high rates of birth to out of wedlock and so forth.
link |
You can't even say that
link |
the African American family is in trouble.
link |
Violence, homicide is an order of magnitude more prevalent
link |
amongst African Americans than it is
link |
in the society as a whole.
link |
This is behavior, it's behavior of our people.
link |
I speak of black people.
link |
Of course, we're not the only people in society
link |
for whom violence is an issue.
link |
It's an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities.
link |
I'm talking about schooling and school failure.
link |
So we have affirmative action as a cover.
link |
It's a bandaid on differences in the development
link |
of intellectual performance,
link |
which is only partly a consequence
link |
of the natural intelligence of people
link |
and largely a consequence of how people spend their time,
link |
what they value, how they discipline themselves,
link |
what they do with their opportunities,
link |
how parents raise their children,
link |
what peer groups value and things of this kind.
link |
The Asian students who are scoring off the charts
link |
on these exams are doing it
link |
not because they're intrinsically more intelligent
link |
to other people, but because they work harder,
link |
because their parents are more insistent
link |
on focusing on their intellectual performance
link |
because they're disciplined,
link |
because of the way that they devote their time
link |
and their resources to equipping their children
link |
to function in the 21st century.
link |
This is what I believe.
link |
I think it's demonstrably the case.
link |
And it is a factor in racial disparity.
link |
The way that the civil rights movement has evolved
link |
under the wing of the Democratic Party
link |
into an organized apologia for the failures
link |
of African Americans to seize the opportunities
link |
that exist for us now in the 21st century,
link |
but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century,
link |
the way in which the civil rights movement
link |
has become an avoidance mechanism
link |
for us not taking we African Americans responsible.
link |
This is Glenn Loury.
link |
Not everybody's gonna agree with it.
link |
It's part of what makes me a conservative.
link |
I am tired of the bellyaching.
link |
I'm tired of the excuse me, white supremacy.
link |
It is in my mind, a joke.
link |
I lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric
link |
is so seductively attractive to African Americans
link |
and so widely adopted by others.
link |
And as I am fond of saying, at the end of the day,
link |
nobody is coming to save us.
link |
I mean, higher education, MIT, Caltech, Stanford,
link |
where the future is happening,
link |
that is about mastery over the achievements
link |
of human civilization, such as they manifest themselves
link |
in the 21st century.
link |
There's no substitute for actually acquiring mastery
link |
over the material.
link |
There's no substitute for that to be patronized,
link |
to have the standards lowered.
link |
They wanna get rid of the test.
link |
They wanna tell African Americans to pat us on the head.
link |
We're gonna have a separate program for you.
link |
We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
link |
That doesn't make us any smarter.
link |
It doesn't make us any more creative.
link |
And it doesn't make us any more fit
link |
for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
link |
Now, you wanna be 10% of the population
link |
that's carried along for the next 100 years?
link |
You wanna be a ward of the state in the late 21st century?
link |
Because the Chinese are coming.
link |
You're not gonna hold them back.
link |
The world is being remade every decade
link |
by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing.
link |
If you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement
link |
of the civilization in which we are embedded,
link |
you're gonna end up being dependent on other people
link |
to look kindly upon you.
link |
And this story that you've got, this bellyache,
link |
this excuse, my ancestors were slaves,
link |
is only gonna work for so long.
link |
So that makes me, I suppose, a kind of conservative.
link |
I hate affirmative action.
link |
I don't just disagree with it.
link |
I don't just think it's against the 14th amendment.
link |
The hatred comes from an understanding
link |
that it is a bandaid, that it is a substitute
link |
for the actual development of the capacities
link |
of our people to compete.
link |
I'd much rather be in the position
link |
of having them try to keep me out
link |
because I'm so damn good,
link |
like they're doing with the Asians,
link |
than having them have to beg the Supreme Court
link |
to allow for a special dispensation on my behalf
link |
because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging.
link |
It's not just diversity.
link |
It's not just diversity and inclusion.
link |
It's diversity and inclusion and belonging.
link |
I'm whining because I feel like I don't belong.
link |
That's a position of weakness.
link |
And it's only political correctness
link |
that keeps people who can see this,
link |
and believe me, a lot of people can see it
link |
from saying so out loud.
link |
So you want the black American community
link |
to represent strength.
link |
Correct, and I want us to deal with what it is
link |
that we have to deal with in order to be able
link |
to project strength in an increasingly competitive world.
link |
I know you said you're angry
link |
or dislike affirmative action.
link |
Let me ask you about something
link |
that even to my ear cut wrong.
link |
Now I'm relatively apolitical.
link |
So President Biden, when he was running for president,
link |
gave a campaign promise that he will nominate
link |
a black woman to the US Supreme Court,
link |
saying, quote, the person I will nominate
link |
will be someone with extraordinary qualifications,
link |
character, experience, and integrity.
link |
And that person will be the first black woman
link |
ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
link |
Do you wish he only said the first sentence
link |
and not the second?
link |
Yes, I wish that he had only said the first sentence,
link |
even if his intention was to do
link |
what he said he was gonna do in the second sentence.
link |
In other words, I wish that he had simply said,
link |
if I have the opportunity to nominate someone
link |
to the Supreme Court, it's gonna be
link |
a superbly qualified person to carry out that position.
link |
And he might've kept to himself his intention
link |
to name an African American woman to that position.
link |
And then going ahead and named an African American woman
link |
And I'm sure that Katanji Brown Jackson,
link |
I don't doubt that she's exceptionally qualified.
link |
She has a distinguished career.
link |
She served as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
link |
She's a graduate at Harvard Law School.
link |
She has a background.
link |
You do not have to be a world class
link |
constitutional legal scholar
link |
to get onto the United States Supreme Court.
link |
A lot of members of the United States Supreme Court
link |
have had different kinds of legal careers
link |
before they were elevated to that position.
link |
Earl Warren of the famed Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s
link |
was a politician as well as a leading jurist and whatnot.
link |
I mean, many kinds of people in the US Supreme Court.
link |
I have no doubt that Judge Katanji Brown Jackson
link |
is a qualified member to be on the Supreme Court.
link |
I wish that Biden had not done what he did.
link |
He could have just appointed a black woman
link |
by saying that he was limiting his considerations
link |
And what are black women as a percentage
link |
of all potential appointees to the Supreme Court?
link |
3%, 4%, I don't know, we could look the number up.
link |
By saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment,
link |
but it's worse than that
link |
because she will live down the asterisk
link |
if a person is inclined to do that.
link |
She will have the opportunity to show
link |
through her performance exactly what kind of juror she is.
link |
Just as Justice Clarence Thomas has shown
link |
through his performance that he was qualified
link |
and more than qualified to be
link |
on the United States Supreme Court,
link |
what I dislike was the pandering.
link |
He was seeking votes from black people by pandering to us
link |
and then he's treating us like children.
link |
Why should I care what color the person is
link |
who's on the United States Supreme Court?
link |
What I should care about is what kind of opinions
link |
they're gonna write when they're on the United States.
link |
Do I suppose that being a black woman
link |
means that you're gonna write different kinds
link |
of opinions than others?
link |
Well, perhaps, perhaps that kind of identity politics
link |
at the highest level of American legal establishment
link |
is something that rubs me very much the wrong way.
link |
What I should care about is the nature
link |
and the future of the law.
link |
I mean, I'm actually struck by this
link |
because the court is conservative.
link |
It has six conservative members on it
link |
and it has three liberal members on it.
link |
And if I were and I'm not a liberal Democrat,
link |
the highest concern that I would have
link |
about an appointment to the Supreme Court is,
link |
is this a person who is going to be effective
link |
in advocating my liberal views
link |
within the highest counsel of American law?
link |
Now, the fact that that person is a woman
link |
or is a black person is way down the list
link |
of the things that I would think are important
link |
to the kinds of opinions that they're going to write.
link |
So, I mean, I think Joe Biden,
link |
this is just a piece of a larger political strategy
link |
to cobble together a coalition
link |
that'll be successful at the polls
link |
in sustaining Democrats.
link |
Jim Crow 2.0, this whole characterization
link |
of the conflict in the states
link |
about election security and voting rights
link |
is another part of that strategy.
link |
He is pandering to black voters.
link |
He is trying to frighten us,
link |
thinking that if the Republicans win,
link |
our rights will be taken away.
link |
And I think it is a infantilization
link |
of African American politics.
link |
I think black people are not to be as concerned
link |
about the color of the skin of a person
link |
who is serving in government
link |
as they are about the content of their character
link |
and the focus of their political
link |
and ideological orientation,
link |
which for me would be center or even center right,
link |
And it should not have a significant impact.
link |
Nevertheless, he said she can overcome the asterisks,
link |
but to me it was deeply disrespectful
link |
that anyone would give an extra asterisk
link |
to have to overcome.
link |
He didn't have to say it.
link |
All he had to do was do it.
link |
If he wanted to put a black woman on the court,
link |
then he could have gone ahead and done it.
link |
The reason he said it is because he wanted black people
link |
to vote for him by saying it.
link |
And I'm saying that treats us like we're children.
link |
It's not a political statement.
link |
I just thought as a leader,
link |
that was kind of disgusting.
link |
Let me ask you about Thomas Sowell.
link |
You mentioned him.
link |
He's a colleague and somebody who was an influence
link |
in the space of ideas.
link |
So what broadly, what impact has he had on your ideas
link |
and how do you think he shaped the landscape of ideas
link |
in our culture in general?
link |
I think Thomas Sowell, he's in his 90s now.
link |
He's been around for a long time.
link |
He's still got it.
link |
He's still going at it.
link |
He's still going at it.
link |
Books continue to come out.
link |
I think he's a great man.
link |
I think Thomas Sowell, regardless of his race,
link |
he's black, is one of the 100 most significant economists
link |
of the 20th century.
link |
He has chosen as his subject,
link |
a substantial part of his subject,
link |
subject to investigate the deep causes
link |
and consequences of racial disparity of one kind or another.
link |
He's written fundamental books about that, many of them.
link |
He's a social philosopher.
link |
He is a economic historian.
link |
He is a combatant in the conflict of ideas
link |
around how to think about society
link |
and this beyond racial differences,
link |
although race has been a big part
link |
of what he's written about.
link |
He's been critical of affirmative action
link |
and he didn't just stand back and wag his finger.
link |
He got busy looking at the consequences
link |
of affirmative action in societies all around the world.
link |
And he's written books about that.
link |
He's been critical of the narrative about civil rights
link |
and racial inequality.
link |
He believes in small government.
link |
He doesn't think that efforts to redistribute income
link |
have proved to be the solution
link |
to the problem of racial disparity.
link |
Tom has not been honored by the committee
link |
that hands out Nobel recognition in economic science
link |
and probably won't be because he's controversial.
link |
And I reckon that that committee would be loath to encourage
link |
the blowback that they would be sure to receive
link |
if they were to take a controversial
link |
and politically focus and expressive black conservative
link |
and honor in that way.
link |
So I think another reason is that Tom
link |
as a methodological matter is not especially quantitative.
link |
He pays attention to data
link |
but he doesn't do statistical analysis
link |
and he doesn't do modeling.
link |
So from a methodological point of view,
link |
he's not a cutting edge kind of person
link |
of mathematically sophisticated,
link |
kind of quantitatively statistically oriented
link |
but he does descriptive stuff.
link |
He writes in a style that is much more
link |
like a social historian than it is
link |
like a mathematically trained analytical economist.
link |
On the other hand, he is an economist in the Chicago school
link |
with Milton Friedman and George Stickler
link |
prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory
link |
which is the analysis of the interplay of market forces,
link |
mindful of incentives and so on
link |
to implement the basic insights from economic science.
link |
There is no free lunch.
link |
I mean, there's always gonna be a cost
link |
to anything that you do and so on.
link |
People respond to incentives, demand curves slope downward.
link |
Competition tends to work best
link |
when people are free to enter and not and so on.
link |
I mean, that kind of thing.
link |
But Tom is also a social historian and a philosopher
link |
in the tradition of Friedrich von Hayek.
link |
One of Tom's books I've deeply admired,
link |
"'Knowledge and Decisions,'
link |
is an extension of the Hayekian arguments
link |
about the limits of central planning and whatnot.
link |
So I think Thomas Sowell, African American,
link |
born as I understand it in Louisiana,
link |
raised in New York City, graduate of Harvard College,
link |
a military veteran, a PhD in economics
link |
from the University of Chicago,
link |
a black conservative social scientist
link |
of very high stature, I think he's a great man.
link |
And one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century.
link |
And you're saying implicitly deserves a Nobel Prize.
link |
Yeah, I do think so.
link |
I mean, Hayek was awarded by the committee.
link |
Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist
link |
who wrote about economic development,
link |
wrote a famous two volume work,
link |
"'An American Dilemma,' about the status of blacks."
link |
I mean, I think Tom could be put in that company
link |
very easily without any difficulty.
link |
I agree, Daniel Kahneman, them,
link |
so it doesn't have to be an American.
link |
Psychologist, an economist, Eleonora Ostrom,
link |
the political scientist who was honored in a joint prize
link |
given to her and Oliver Williamson 15 years ago or so.
link |
He could be put in that company really quite easily.
link |
Let me ask you, you mentioned Obama
link |
in the very beginning that we were talking about.
link |
How did it feel, that seems like forever ago,
link |
that in 2008, Barack Obama became president?
link |
Now at that time, perhaps you identify
link |
as conservative already.
link |
So politics aside, just in general,
link |
how did it feel that in 150 years
link |
where this country has come along?
link |
Well, yeah, I didn't identify in 2008
link |
as a conservative to the same extent that I do today.
link |
I was kind of in transition yet again.
link |
I was excited by the Obama candidacy.
link |
At first I was skeptical because after all, he's not black.
link |
The man's father is a Kenyan
link |
and the man's mother is a white American
link |
and he identifies as black.
link |
I find it interesting that the first black president
link |
of the United States,
link |
and I could have put inverted commas around black,
link |
and the first black vice president of the United States,
link |
neither of them descend from American slaves.
link |
Kamala Harris's father is of African ancestry in part.
link |
He's a Jamaican immigrant
link |
and her mother is an Indian immigrant.
link |
She was Kamala Harris,
link |
raised up largely in Canada,
link |
though born in the United States.
link |
Barack Obama is, as I've said, of mixed ancestry
link |
and neither of his parents are the descendants
link |
of American descendants of African slaves.
link |
But blackness is flexible.
link |
It's something that you can put on
link |
or you can take off to a certain degree for some people
link |
I was excited, our time has come, hope and change.
link |
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
link |
These are slogans from 2008.
link |
I can't believe I bought that crap.
link |
Let me push back here.
link |
You talked about, I mean, to me a Jew is a Jew.
link |
Skin color is skin color.
link |
I mean, Barack Obama is black when it matters,
link |
when you're talking to a white supremacist,
link |
when you're talking to, if you're a slave owner,
link |
Just like you said, when Hitler comes around,
link |
It doesn't matter how you identify, it doesn't matter what.
link |
So in that sense, don't you think that Barack Obama
link |
is black in the most powerful of ways,
link |
which is designating how far the MLK, the Dr. King vision?
link |
And look, I said it a little bit tongue in cheek.
link |
Yes, yes, of course.
link |
But I think Obama has been very careful
link |
about manufacturing a kind of public persona
link |
that is intended to position him in the most effective way.
link |
You mean like every politician?
link |
Yeah, like every politician, sure.
link |
And that the racial identity piece is an aspect of that.
link |
I mean, anything I say here would only be speculation
link |
because I have no facts about the personal history
link |
And I accept Barack Hussein Obama,
link |
as Hillary Clinton once said, I take him at his word
link |
about whatever she was talking about.
link |
Well, was he a Christian?
link |
I think is what the question was.
link |
And there was some right wing attack on Obama
link |
for having been raised for some years in the Philippines
link |
and all of that, or Indonesia, I beg your pardon,
link |
in Indonesia and his stepfather and all of that.
link |
But she took him at his word and I take him at his word
link |
about his racial identity.
link |
But you were captivated by the power of his words
link |
and you regret to the degree you were captivated.
link |
Well, I mean, I think in retrospect,
link |
that whole campaign looks like a pie in the sky
link |
kind of fairy tale.
link |
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
link |
I can't quote exactly that speech that he gave
link |
in Grant Park in Chicago when he was announced
link |
as the winner of the election.
link |
But today is the day that the rise of the ocean
link |
stopped words to this effect.
link |
I mean, those who doubted that we could do it,
link |
that tonight is your answer.
link |
This was gonna be a new day, it was gonna be a new regime.
link |
Well, it wasn't a new day and it wasn't a new regime.
link |
It was American politics more or less as usual.
link |
Barack Obama turns out not to be the Messiah.
link |
Maybe there should be no surprise in that.
link |
Race relations got set back during Obama's tenure.
link |
My beef with Obama is that, okay, you're black.
link |
You say you're black, you're black.
link |
You got elected, now we have a black president.
link |
A black president.
link |
You can do stuff that nobody else could do.
link |
You're a black president.
link |
You could tell the people burning down the city
link |
to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it.
link |
You could tell the race hustlers,
link |
they all shocked into the world.
link |
Not only has our time come
link |
for those who supported my campaign,
link |
your time is over for those who wanna carry on
link |
a advocacy rooted in racial grievance.
link |
The election of myself to this highest office proves
link |
that the institution of this state are legitimate
link |
and open to all comers.
link |
I think Barack Obama, when the SHIT hit the fan,
link |
if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
link |
I deeply regret that he said that.
link |
He's president of the United States.
link |
The color of his skin and the color of Trayvon's skin,
link |
the correlation between those two things.
link |
If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
link |
Now he says, when he said it,
link |
he only meant to sympathize with the parents.
link |
But in fact, when he said it from the highest office
link |
in the land and then sent his attorney general,
link |
Eric Holder out to enforce this narrative,
link |
he doubled down on a racial narrative
link |
that I think is actually false.
link |
I think the story that systemic racism in America
link |
as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people
link |
because of the color of their skin is demonstrably false.
link |
I think that the central threat to black lives
link |
is violent crime perpetrated largely by black people
link |
against other black people.
link |
I think there is such a thing as police brutality
link |
and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police
link |
but I think it is a second order issue
link |
in terms of the quality of life of African Americans.
link |
I think Obama could have told the people
link |
who after Freddie Gray died in police custody
link |
in a van in Baltimore and who undertook
link |
to burn that city down to get their asses off the street
link |
and go back to their apartments and stop it.
link |
I think he could have said in the aftermath
link |
of Michael Brown being shot dead by Darren Wilson
link |
in Ferguson, Missouri and there was a grand jury deliberation
link |
that he elected not to indict Officer Wilson
link |
and people took the streets in that city
link |
and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on.
link |
He could have told them we don't mob around courthouses
link |
in this country, we respect the rule of law,
link |
get your butts off the streets
link |
and back into your apartments.
link |
He didn't do that.
link |
To push back a little bit.
link |
Yeah, good, push back.
link |
I think you're asking Barack Obama,
link |
the first black president of the United States,
link |
to do the thing that I think should be done
link |
by the second black president of the United States.
link |
I think his very example, given the color of his skin,
link |
was the most powerful thing.
link |
And actually doing some of these hard Thomas Sowell type
link |
of Glen Lurie type of strong words about race,
link |
it may be too much to ask given the nature
link |
of modern day politics.
link |
He is a politician.
link |
He is a politician.
link |
And he needed to get elected, he needed to get reelected.
link |
It was in his second term
link |
where most of what I'm talking about happened,
link |
so he wasn't facing further election.
link |
But Obama was what, 46 or 47 when he was inaugurated?
link |
He served for eight years, so he's in his mid 50s.
link |
He's got another half century or 40 years of life,
link |
His post presidency, I think,
link |
was what was primarily on his mind.
link |
Not getting elected to anything,
link |
but being enshrined in a certain way.
link |
And the persona that he is now embodying,
link |
which depends upon a racial narrative
link |
that I and Thomas Sowell and others object to,
link |
I think was very much in the forefront of his mind
link |
when he made decisions as the chief executive officer
link |
of the country that we've all now have to live with.
link |
Yeah, but the fact is, he opened the door
link |
in a way that hasn't been done
link |
in the history of the United States,
link |
that I don't see there being even a significant discussion
link |
when an African American, a black man or a black woman
link |
runs for president, maybe a black man, let's say,
link |
because there still hasn't been a woman president.
link |
I just see that that broke open the possibility of that.
link |
That's not even a discussion.
link |
And that example by itself, I mean, to me,
link |
the role of the president isn't just policy.
link |
It's to do the Dr. King thing, which is, I have a dream.
link |
And Barack Obama is an example of somebody
link |
that could give one hell of a speech.
link |
It got you to believe.
link |
Obama is a smooth operator without any question.
link |
He's a master of his craft.
link |
He did the impossible.
link |
I mean, he beat Hillary Clinton in that primary fight,
link |
and he beat John McCain in that general election,
link |
and hats off to him.
link |
And moreover, he remains a iconic figure in American culture.
link |
I don't think there's any doubt about that.
link |
Let me just mention, Clarence Thomas is also black.
link |
Clarence Thomas has a story that is vivid and inspiring,
link |
just like Obama's story.
link |
He overcome obstacles just like Obama did.
link |
I mean, extreme poverty and so forth and so on.
link |
Clarence Thomas has served longer than any other member
link |
of the United States Supreme Court.
link |
He is one of nine justices,
link |
and it's three equal branches of government.
link |
So Clarence Thomas, by my arithmetic,
link |
personifies 1 27th of the American state.
link |
He is an iconic figure.
link |
His example should be an inspiration to Americans
link |
of all races, but especially a black American youngsters.
link |
He happens to be conservative.
link |
He's very conservative.
link |
He too deserves to be in that pantheon.
link |
He is not. By the custodians of American education,
link |
Clarence Thomas's name is not on that many schools.
link |
Barack Obama's name will be on many of them.
link |
I'm not equating them.
link |
They're different people.
link |
The offices are very different.
link |
But the same logic that you just used
link |
to extol the significance of Barack Obama's ascendancy
link |
could and should be applied to Clarence Thomas,
link |
Yes, but it's the office, but also there is a resume
link |
and there's accomplishments,
link |
but then there is oratory and charisma
link |
and a number of Twitter followers.
link |
So there's ability to captivate a large number of people.
link |
And that's a skill.
link |
That's a skill that correlates,
link |
but is not directly connected to
link |
with how impressive your resume is.
link |
I agree, and moreover, the judicial function,
link |
the judge doesn't go out and give speeches of that sort
link |
because it's exactly antithetical to what he's doing.
link |
He's a custodian of the law,
link |
and that's not a popular feature,
link |
figure in American policy.
link |
He doesn't stand for election, and it's a good thing too.
link |
So I take that point.
link |
Here, I want to say something else, though,
link |
that's provocative.
link |
The next black president,
link |
you say the first black president
link |
shouldn't have been the one to do that.
link |
The second one should,
link |
is more likely than not gonna be a Republican.
link |
I'm not, I don't have a particular person in mind.
link |
I agree, I agree, I agree.
link |
And that's why it's gonna be super fun.
link |
Let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat
link |
and give advice to young people.
link |
So if you're talking to somebody
link |
who's in high school, in college,
link |
what advice would you give them about their career,
link |
about life in general,
link |
how to live a life they can be proud of?
link |
Well, I'd say the world is your oyster.
link |
I mean, first order of business, you're not a victim.
link |
I don't care what color you are.
link |
I don't care, you're male, female,
link |
you're gay, straight, whatever.
link |
The world is your oyster.
link |
You are so privileged.
link |
You sit here in the United States of America,
link |
a free country, a rich country,
link |
everything is possible for you.
link |
Believe me, you can do anything, okay?
link |
Secondly, I would say mastery over the medium
link |
in which we're embedded is the key to the future.
link |
So get educated, focus, work hard,
link |
invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need
link |
to be able to navigate the 21st century.
link |
I would say the Chinese are coming
link |
and I don't mean anything against China.
link |
I just mean to say the world's a small place
link |
and it's getting smaller.
link |
And you better get moving and you better get moving quickly.
link |
I'd say your identity, your coloration, your orientation,
link |
your category is not the most important thing about you.
link |
So the temptation to limit yourself,
link |
I give this speech to my kids.
link |
I would say, I quote James Joyce.
link |
He has a passage in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
link |
in which he says, do you know what Ireland is?
link |
Ireland is an old sow that eats her pharaoh.
link |
He says, Stephan Daedalus is the character
link |
that he has in mind in this Chronicle.
link |
He says, your ethnic inheritance,
link |
he's talking about Irish nationalism,
link |
are like nets holding you back.
link |
That your challenge is to learn how to turn those nets
link |
into wings and thereby to fly, okay?
link |
Flying into the open skies of modern society.
link |
Don't be your grandfather, don't be your father.
link |
Don't wear your things so heavily
link |
that it keeps you from being open
link |
to everything that's new in the world.
link |
Yes, everybody comes from somewhere,
link |
but it doesn't have to be where you end up.
link |
So you're not your father, you're not your grandfather.
link |
You are this wonderfully blessed human being
link |
in the middle of, going into the middle of the 21st century
link |
and don't miss it, don't live blinkeredly,
link |
don't live small, live big.
link |
Live big and wear your history lightly.
link |
Yeah, everybody's got a mother tongue,
link |
everybody's got a story, everybody has a people,
link |
but the world is a small place.
link |
I love that you're quoting an Irishman.
link |
One of the greatest writers of the 20th century,
link |
a profound one, but an Irishman nevertheless.
link |
The levels of humor within that is not lost on me.
link |
Let me just mention the great Ralph Ellison,
link |
the African American writer, Invisible Man
link |
is his masterpiece, embodied this spirit.
link |
Okay, we black Americans, we do come from somewhere,
link |
that come in from somewhere is from slavery in America,
link |
that's our ancestral heritage.
link |
But that's not what we are, skin and bone,
link |
these are superficial things, the spirit.
link |
And if I were a more religious person,
link |
I could give a whole disposition about that,
link |
but it's the spirit, it's that light that's inside,
link |
that's who we are and our challenge
link |
is to live in the fullness of it,
link |
as opposed to this blinkered thing
link |
where we don't look left, we don't look right,
link |
we're just fitting within this template that we inherit.
link |
That is a travesty, really.
link |
Glenn, you've lived an incredible life, a productive one,
link |
but just representing some powerful ideas,
link |
some powerful ideals, but life comes to an end.
link |
Do you think about your death?
link |
Are you afraid of it?
link |
Well, it is a really interesting coincidence
link |
that you posed me that question,
link |
because I'm coming from a funeral.
link |
Today is Sunday, on the preceding Tuesday, five days ago,
link |
I was at the funeral of Eugene Wesley Smith,
link |
who was my brother in law, he was my sister's husband.
link |
My sister, Leonette, passed away in August of 2021.
link |
Her husband has died at the age of 68 in April of 2022,
link |
and I was at his funeral.
link |
He died suddenly of a heart attack
link |
that came completely out of the blue.
link |
He seemed to be in perfect health.
link |
He was a magnificent human being.
link |
I could go into the details, but take my word for it.
link |
He was a businessman, a steel trader, metals trader.
link |
He would buy and sell.
link |
He worked mostly from his home office.
link |
He had clients, counterparties,
link |
people he did business with all over the world.
link |
He had three sons, one of whom is in his early 30s,
link |
two of whom are in their late 30s.
link |
These are my sister's children.
link |
She's deceased, now he's deceased.
link |
The older two sons are severely developmentally disabled,
link |
and although they're in their late 30s,
link |
they're not independently viable.
link |
They don't function effectively.
link |
They have to be cared for.
link |
That responsibility has now fallen to the family,
link |
but mainly to the surviving son who lives with his wife
link |
and his two young children,
link |
and has assumed the responsibility.
link |
They've cared at home, my sister and her husband, Wesley,
link |
Eugene Wesley Smith, cared for their disabled sons at home.
link |
They didn't want to see them institutionalized.
link |
They had some help from programs at the state
link |
and social worker and so on,
link |
but they mainly took on the burden
link |
of caring for them at home.
link |
Anyway, I go on at length here,
link |
and I don't know how much of this you will choose
link |
to make use of, and it doesn't matter, really.
link |
I'm just trying to respond to your question.
link |
I was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral,
link |
and I offered them.
link |
And I spoke well of this great man.
link |
He was a great man.
link |
He had a straight back.
link |
He was a standup guy.
link |
He could be counted on.
link |
His word was his bond.
link |
He had broad shoulders.
link |
He carried a lot of people with him,
link |
business associates, family members,
link |
and so forth and so on.
link |
He had a huge heart.
link |
He was a giving and kind person.
link |
He had a great mind.
link |
He was an intellectual, even though as a businessman,
link |
much of his day was taken up with the minutia of contracts
link |
and the details of the order being delivered
link |
and not being delivered,
link |
of the quality of the product,
link |
of the financing, and so forth and so on.
link |
There was still a powerful mind there.
link |
Yeah, he was a powerful mind, and he studied.
link |
He was interested in music and art.
link |
He was a spiritual seeker,
link |
had been ordained as a child minister in his youth,
link |
and while he remained a master of the Christian canon,
link |
he also explored Eastern religion and other spiritual paths
link |
and kind of stood above any particular tradition
link |
as a man who believed in God
link |
but thought that God manifests himself in many ways
link |
to human beings and that there was much to learn
link |
from other religious traditions as well.
link |
We called him Wesley by his middle name,
link |
Eugene Wesley Smith.
link |
May he rest in peace.
link |
That's five years younger than I am right now.
link |
He dropped dead without any warning.
link |
How did that make you feel?
link |
What were the thoughts in your mind leading up to it,
link |
having to give that speech in the days that followed?
link |
Well, first of all, I wondered,
link |
what would I say, what would I say?
link |
And, you know, there was no way to prepare,
link |
and I decided, you know, I rehearsed in my mind this,
link |
you know, he had straight back, he had broad shoulders,
link |
he had a big heart, he had a great mind,
link |
you know, he had a capacious spirit and whatnot,
link |
and I used that as a template for making my remarks.
link |
But my main thought was, my God,
link |
life is precious and life is fleeting,
link |
and death is a part of life.
link |
My death is a part of my life.
link |
And I thought, you know, well,
link |
I want to take better care of myself than I do,
link |
you know, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But I also thought, a lot of this is not in my hands at all.
link |
I thought, one should have his affairs in order.
link |
My brother did not have all of his affairs in order,
link |
in the sense that there is a lot of,
link |
you know, things are going to probate,
link |
there was no will, there's, you know,
link |
it's kind of unsettled.
link |
I don't want that to happen to my surviving family members.
link |
I want to have my affairs such that, should heaven forbid,
link |
I fall over one day and don't get up again.
link |
People don't have to scramble about
link |
how to take care of things from that point forward.
link |
But as a human, are you afraid?
link |
In your own heart.
link |
Now, I read this wonderful book called The Swerve.
link |
It's about Lucretius.
link |
It's about the nature of things,
link |
which is this great classical work from the Roman period
link |
by this guy, Lucretius.
link |
And I'm trying to think of the name of the author,
link |
but you could look it up.
link |
The Swerve is the book.
link |
It won like a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.
link |
And it's the history of the recovery of this book
link |
by one of these Italian, Renaissance Italian people
link |
who would go into the monasteries in Central Europe
link |
and look through the scrolls and they discover
link |
these classical works from antiquity,
link |
which had been lost through the dark ages
link |
and they republish and read these works.
link |
And Lucretius's great work on the nature of things
link |
was one of these books, Poggio Broccolini.
link |
I don't remember the Italian guy's name,
link |
but this all could be looked up.
link |
Yeah, Poggio Broccolini.
link |
15th century and the name of the author
link |
is Stephen Greenblatt.
link |
Yeah, Stephen Greenblatt, a magnificent book
link |
and a terrific story.
link |
Anyway, one of Lucretius's points, he was an atheist.
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I mean, he was a Roman.
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I mean, he didn't believe in mysticism.
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And he argued it's irrational to be afraid of death.
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Why should I fear death?
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Death is coming to all of us.
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The point of being afraid, I mean, I'm wasting my time
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fearing something that I have no ultimate control over.
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It's irrational to be afraid of death.
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Yeah, because you can't predict when it happens.
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You only know that it happens.
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And therefore live every day fully,
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live every day purposefully, you know,
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and so on, but these are all just words.
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You know, I don't wanna die.
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I wanna live forever.
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I'm not gonna live forever.
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I don't wanna suffer.
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I see people suffering.
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I saw my late wife, Linda Datcher Lowry,
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Dr. Linda Datcher Lowry, professor of economics
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at Tufts University, whom I met in graduate school at MIT,
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black woman from Baltimore.
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We married, we raised two sons together.
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She died at the age of 59 from metastatic breast cancer.
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And I watched her suffer and I watched her die.
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And it took a while.
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And we cared for her at home right up until the very end.
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She died in our bed with our sons on either side of her.
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And the dog curled up by the door,
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the porch door in the bedroom, and she expired.
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And I watched her suffer and I watched her die.
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And I don't wanna suffer.
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I don't wanna die.
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I am likely to suffer before I die.
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I am likely to see my death coming and to lament it.
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There's a book by Richard John Newhouse, the theologian,
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called As I Lay Dying,
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As I Lay Dying, Richard John Newhouse.
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He had stomach cancer and he thought he was dying.
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And he wrote this book As I Lay Dying.
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And then he recovered, he went into remission
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and he had another couple of years.
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He thought he was dying and he had another couple of years.
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And I can remember meeting him at a bookstore
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in suburban Boston when he was on a tour.
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He was just a friend of mine,
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a theologian and a public intellectual.
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He founded the Institute on Religion and Public Life
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in New York City, which still exists,
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Richard John Newhouse.
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And he's contemplating his own death
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from the point of view of a Christian minister.
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He was first a Lutheran pastor
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and then he converted to Catholicism
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or as he would have put it, I returned to the church
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because he thought the Renaissance was over.
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I mean, I'm sorry, the Reformation,
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Richard thought was over.
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He says there's only one church, et cetera.
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Get into theology stuff here.
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But I'm saying all that to say,
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I read that book aloud to my wife, Linda,
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as she lay dying in that bed.
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I read that book and it was filled with hope.
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I mean, it first acknowledged the dread.
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I don't wanna die.
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I'm a Christian minister.
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Christ was raised from the dead.
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I'm supposed to believe in everlasting life
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but the fact of the matter is this is me
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and I'm lying here and I'm dying.
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This is the end of me.
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How are you gonna do anything other than dread
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So let's acknowledge that I don't wanna die, okay?
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I'm just gonna tell you that upfront.
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But that is not the end of,
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my death is not the end of life.
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I have lived well and fully.
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I will go and do my best right up until the end.
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I will accept what is inevitable
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and I will hold out this belief.
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And he's a Christian minister so he holds out this belief.
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And he knows that the belief is not rational.
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It's not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion.
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It's spiritual in the most fundamental way.
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It is something that people hold on to and they have hope
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I don't know if I have that hope.
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I used to be, but I'm no longer a Christian
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and I'm no longer a theist really.
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I'm with Lucretius there.
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I mean, there's no magic that's going on here.
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There's no unseen hand behind the scene
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that's arranging things.
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What I believe is that when I look at the natural world,
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I see the evolution of the species
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and I see the organic development of the planets.
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I mean, the earth is going to not exist
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in a finite number of years.
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I think with a very high probability,
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the sun is gonna die.
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It's gonna implode.
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It's gonna go supernova, whatever is gonna happen.
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And there's not gonna be any there, there.
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What's the meaning of life, Glen Lowry?
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That's the meaning of life.
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Yeah, let's go, let's go.
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Or is that something economists and social scientists
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and mathematicians are not equipped to answer?
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You know, I think we try to live well and meaningfully
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We bond, we reproduce, we try to pass on
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and we accept our limitations and our mortality.
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We try to contribute
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and that's through our children and through our work.
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And we're in this together, we're not in this alone.
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We are connected to other people.
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I get a lot of gratitude out of teaching.
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My students are gonna outlive me.
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They're gonna have students.
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My writing is gonna outlive me.
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I don't wanna be self important or pretentious here.
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I doubt that I'm gonna be the James Joyce
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of the 21st century.
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They may not be reading my stuff in a hundred years
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because people will certainly be reading Ulysses
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in a hundred years.
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But I try to have an impact on the world that I'm a part of
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and try to leave a legacy that's dignified.
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I mean, I could give some flowery words
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here, truth seeking and whatnot.
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What role does love play in this life thing?
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Love makes the world go round.
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I mean, without love, I mean, what have we got?
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I mean, we don't have family and, you know,
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we certainly have missed out if love is not a central part
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But stop asking me questions like that.
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Glenn, thank you for doing everything you do,
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for thinking the way you do, for being fearless and bold.
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And the Glenn show and your writing and your work
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and just being who you are.
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Thank you for being you.
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And thank you for giving me the huge honor
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of spending your extremely valuable time with me today.
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It's been my pleasure, Lex.
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I mean, really, and it has been like four hours, man.
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You're wearing me out for me.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Glenn Lowry.
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To support this podcast,
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please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words
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from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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If you can't fly, then run.
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If you can't run, then walk.
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If you can't walk, then crawl.
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But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.