Jordan B. Peterson discussion [Open College transcript]

Jordan Peterson: Dr. Stephen RC Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at the Atlas Society.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Guelph in Canada and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He’s published four books, translated into 16 different languages. He published Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault in 2004 and expanded in 2011. In 2011 he published Nietzsche and the Nazis. In 1994 he published The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis, co-edited with David Kelley, and he published Entrepreneurial Living, co-edited with Jennifer Harrolle, in 2016. He’s also published in academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Teaching Philosophy, and Review of Metaphysics as well as other publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Cato Unbound, and the Baltimore Sun. In 2010, he won his University’s excellence in Teaching Award. He has been visiting professor of business ethics at Georgetown University in Washington DC, a visiting fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, senior fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York, and visiting professor at the University of Kashmir the Great in Poland.

Dr. Hicks’s book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault in particular has been quite controversial, so I thought we’d start with that.

Stephen Hicks: Good, thanks for having me.

Peterson: You published Explaining Postmodernism in 2011 in the revised [expanded] version.

How has it been selling first of all, and what sort of reaction are you garnering?

Hicks: Sales have been steady, which is gratifying for an academic book, and then in the last three to four years sales have picked up again just because postmodernism has spilled out from being a primarily intellectual movement to a more broadly cultural movement. As a result of that I’d say the reactions have been strongly polarized. Particularly among philosophers, the reactions tend to be positive. As we talk with intellectuals outside of the area of philosophy, the reactions start to become more mixed to outright hostile. Interestingly, among the broadly thinking public there’s been a lot of response to it, so that’s been gratifying. Of course, the reactions are polarized because postmodernism is a very strong, vigorous movement that makes some very audacious and, in my view, destructive claims, and then, as we’re seeing when they spill out into the cultural arena, people realize the stakes are high and we have the usual kinds of social media debates that we have.

Peterson: Maybe if would be useful, to bring people up to date, for you to give us a brief overview of your view of postmodernism­—like a definition. It’s one of those tricky terms like existentialism or phenomenology that is bandied about by educated people on a fairly regular basis, but the definition itself is slippery and difficult to pin down. So talk a little bit about how you view postmodernism and also what argument you made with regards to the history of its development.

Hicks: It makes sense that it’s slippery, in part because postmodernism philosophically avoids categorizations and broad sweeping statements, although they do make some. So anytime you try to make a precise broad sweeping claim about what postmodernism amounts to, you will get push-back. But there is a broadly unifying set of themes.

If you start by breaking the term down to “post” and “modernism”, first you have to say what is modernism such that postmodernism is reacting against it or saying that we need to go beyond it. And modernism is used variously in different fields of modernism in art in literature. I’m using a philosophical and historical understanding of postmodernism, and that’s how it’s mostly used now. That is to say we look at the modern world, essentially the last four to five hundred years of history in the in the Western tradition.

What’s going on in the world five hundred years ago is a revolutionary transformation of Western society. We have Columbus crossing the ocean, and so we’re entering into a new era of globalization. The Renaissance is in full swing and its impact—late 1400s early 1500s—is now being felt all over Europe. There is the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, so religious life in the West is being dramatically transformed. You see the beginnings of science with thinkers like Copernicus [in astronomy] and Vesalius in anatomy, so scientific method is being developed and all of the investigations that we now recognize as the scientific disciplines are being founded. So that’s the modern world starting four or five hundred years ago. Philosophically, we start looking at the analyses being offered by thinkers like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and others, and we see that they are putting thought on a different foundation from what had gone on earlier.

Peterson: What happened with the modernists, if we tried to sum it up, is that there seems to be this emerging consensus that the world was rationally intelligible and that human beings could explore both physically and mentally and also come to predict and control the transformations of the material world. It seems to me that that’s the fundamental element of, let’s say, the scientific and, therefore, also the modernist perspective, but I also think that what went along with that was the idea that genuine progress in knowledge was possible and, along with that, the benefits of progress both conceptually and technologically. It seems to me to be fair to point out that movement bore substantive fruit.

I mean, yes, argue about the misery that the modernist movement caused along the way, say with regards to the advancement of military technology and so forth, but it seems indisputable to me that the average human being is far better off now than he or she was certainly 200 years ago and absolutely 500 years ago, right?

Hicks: So there was this revolution in thought with the subsequent developments in science and technology. We certainly can judge philosophies by their fruits, and so we can then say, absolutely, we’re living longer, healthier, less painful lives where we’re able to enjoy more art, more leisure, and so forth. Now, this is a value judgment. If you think those are all good things, then we’re doing a whole lot better as a result of that philosophy.

The other aspect I want to emphasize: along with modernism came the claim that the world was rationally intelligible to each individual, rather than there being an select number of people who have special cognitive insights into the mysteries of the universe or that there are certain authoritative institutions that are controlled by elites and only they are the ones who have cognitive and, therefore, social authority to make various pronouncements.

Part and parcel of the rise of modernism is a universalizing of that—that each individual is born with the rational capacity, and that with proper training, education, literacy, and so forth, they can come to understand the world for themselves. They can be self-responsible. They can take charge of their lives, and as a result of that, we should have an extension of rights that used to be prerogatives only of the few and an expansion of freedom; you can do whatever you want with your life, broadly-speaking. So what we see, then, is that it’s not only a religious elite or a political elite that is empowered but, rather, every human being. Then we can see systematically over the course of the next century, it gets extended to not only males who own property but to all males, then to women, and then to people of other ethnicities and other races. So we have this notion of universal rights, universal self-responsibility, and universal freedom that I think is also part and parcel of the modern movement.

Peterson: The thing about science that makes it so peculiar is that science is actually a technology that enables people who are bright, but not that bright, to genuinely produce advances in knowledge because of the method, meaning if you’re a careful scientist. When we studied what predicted academic achievement, for example, both in graduate school and among faculty members, creativity didn’t even enter the equation. I think it’s partly because, with the scientific method, you can you can actually break down your knowledge-seeking into a set of implementable technological steps, and that enables it to be implemented on an incredibly broad scale. And even if a lot of it is error-ridden, which is obviously the case—and to a scandalous degree lately—it still means that as hundreds of thousands of us, and increasingly now, millions of us grind away slowly at this careful technology of knowledge-acquisition that, overall, we do seem to be able to predict and to control the world better. Then that started to become questioned. One of the things that seems to characterize postmodernism is skepticism of meta-narratives.

Hicks: That’s from Jean-Francois Lyotard, and he is the one credited with labeling postmodernism philosophically, defining it as a skepticism toward meta-narratives. What does that mean? There are a couple of things built into that. One is, of course, the skepticism, and philosophy for the last century-and-a-half or so has entered an increasingly skeptical mode, so that pushes back against the very broad claims that the early modernists are making—that the power of reason is great, highly competent, and that we can figure out all of the important truths of the world. We can come up with a big story that explains everything ultimately, not necessarily that any one individual will contain all of that knowledge in his or her mind, but communally, we will have a huge amount of knowledge. We will slowly, as you’re putting it, piece together a big-picture story about the way the world works, and then, in principle, there’s nothing about the universe that we can’t figure out. There are just things that we haven’t been able to figure out yet.

So the skepticism that Lyotard and the others are talking about is a skepticism about that grand set of claims—a meta-narrative that encompasses everything. Instead, we’re left with smaller narratives. Then, as the movement develops, we should be skeptical even about the truth status or the knowledge status of those smaller narratives. So what becomes important in the postmodern tradition is a skepticism about our ability to know the world, and in milder form, as much as the modern thinkers thought we could, and in stronger postmodern form, at all—that maybe there is no such thing as truth or knowledge. Instead, all we have are opinions and beliefs that are subjectively held but don’t have any objective influence.

Peterson: Postmodernists who are influenced by Saussure, for example, seem to be convinced in some strange way of something that disturbed me when I first really discovered dictionaries when I was a kid. I’d look up a word in the dictionary, and of course, it would just refer to another word in the dictionary, and that would refer to another word in the dictionary. The French intellectuals that were so influential in the postmodern world seemed to think of meaning in exactly that way. They exactly understand that linguistic meaning is necessarily embedded in a larger linguistic context so that each word is dependent on each phrase and each phrase is dependent on each sentence. And so there’s a contextual dependency on linguistic framing, but they seem to me to—and this is one of the major problems I think of postmodernism in university—to deny, or ignore, the existence of any world whatsoever outside of linguistic construction. That’s something that strikes me as extraordinarily curious, that it’s a real denial of nature, but it’s also something tremendously dangerous because, assuming you think that physics and biology and chemistry actually have any sort of genuine reality, it denies the existence of a substrate of existence that the purely linguistic relates to. I mean, I always think of words as not so much descriptions—they’re tools that you use to operate on the world with, and the consequences of those operations are actually manifest in the world of sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, and embodiment rather than purely on a linguistic level. So I also don’t really understand how our intellectuals could come to the conclusion that—and this seems like a primarily French idea—our ideas are primarily constructed linguistically. I mean, how do animals exist under those circumstances?

Hicks: That strong form of linguistic skepticism that you’re articulating is most pronounced in Jacques Derrida, and he does bill himself as a post-structuralist, and that’s a linguistic version of postmodernism. The challenge here is that consciousness is a relational phenomenon. It’s responsive to an external world, and that should be the fundamental realist commitment that we make. That is the problem that the post-structuralists are coming up with by the time we get to Derrida. I should say, not all of the postmodernists will buy into the idea that there isn’t any sort of ontological substrate as strongly as Derrida does. They might say there’s something out there, but we just can’t know what the relationship is between our concepts and our words and an external reality. The point, though, is that the words that we use are abstractions, and they do come along fairly far or high up in our cognitive development, and if you want to argue that consciousness is a response to reality or that consciousness is a relational phenomenon, as I do, then you have to take up all of the skeptical arguments that put consciousness out of relationship or that say that there’s no way to bridge this gap between the subject and the object.

If you want to say, for example, that perception is fraught with illusions or hallucinations or that we can’t tell the difference between a veridical perception—when our sensory organs are in contact with reality—and a hallucination, then you have a gap between our conscious apparatus and reality.

If you want to go on and argue, as empiricists do, that our concepts and the words that we assign to the concepts are based on empirical observations or perceptual observations, but you now believe that those perceptual observations are subjective and out of relation with objective reality, then you’re going to say these abstract concepts and words are also out of relation with reality. But what gives them their meaning if you can’t establish a connection between the words and reality? Then you’re into the dictionary: you’re saying that what gives the words their meaning is their sideways or network connections to other words. Then a generation or two later you’re into Derrida, when he says that language is all of reality.

Peterson: That’s also where the postmodernists’ claim about the primacy of power seems to sneak in. If the words are only related to one another in terms of their verbal relationship, they don’t seem to have any mode of force. As soon as you enter a landscape of linguistic consideration that has no mode of force, then there’s nothing to do.

I’ve been criticized very often for, let’s say, conflating postmodernism and Marxism, but it seems to me that the postmodernists have had to default to what are essentially Marxist preconceptions to add any motive to their thinking. What they’ve done is to say that words are related to one another, and that’s how they derive their fundamental meaning, and they’re not really connected to the world in any real way except insofar as they privilege one group or another or one person or another in terms of power and status.

Hicks: Exactly. Go back to your dictionary analysis. The next step would be to say if words are in these linguistic relationships to other words and we can find out what they are in dictionaries, then we should be concerned with who writes the dictionaries. At that point, you’re not asking an epistemological question anymore. You are asking a social and psychological question. So who are the authors of the dictionary? What authorizes them with the power to decide what words mean? At that point we step directly out of narrow epistemological arguments into social and psychological arguments about linguistic communities.

Peterson: The words only have meaning in relation to one another and there’s this gap between words and empirical reality. By the way, I don’t think anybody disputes this. I mean that’s why we need five senses. That’s why we need to communicate with each other. That’s why we need the scientific method—because it’s difficult to establish a useful one-to-one relationship between words and reality. But if words serve power then it seems to me that what the postmodernists have done is taken biological motivation, let’s call it the motivation for power, and sneaked it through the back door and reconnected the world of linguistic abstraction to the world of reality. But they say that the only connection is one of power, and then they leave out why people want power. The idea that people want power is a complicated idea because you have to define power and you have to define what, and those aren’t trivial issues by any stretch of the imagination. So you sneak it in the back door as self-evident, and then that seems to undermine the general postmodernist claim. If the words are only embedded in a network of meaning that’s related to other words, then it isn’t a fair move ontologically or epistemologically to reinsert power-striving like a Nietzschean or Adlerian power-striving, as the fundamental and sui generis motivation that characterizes human beings. I don’t understand how they get away with that, except that it seems to be a mask for the continuation of a Marxist move under a new guise.

Hicks: Well, I have no problem with seeing power as a positive. Coming back to all of the suspicions that you’re announcing about inappropriate understandings of the relationship of power, I think we should be able to say our cognitive capacities are a power that we have, and they are a tool and the whole point of using that tool is to increase our power in the world to achieve our goals. What the postmodernists are doing is undercutting the two things that make that understanding of power legitimate. One is to say that when I am making a cognitive claim, I am successfully saying something about the world, so we can use the words knowledge and truth. If you are skeptical about any sort of a knowledge claim or truth claim, then you’re just going to say, “No, your claims merely are subjective beliefs that are peculiar to you or peculiar to your group, and they don’t have any special cognitive status whatsoever. And, if you want to act on or use those beliefs to empower yourself, then you are in an out of reality connection now.”

The other thing, though, is we want to say that power should be a tool that we use for good—for advancing genuine values in the world. But another part of the postmodern skepticism is to say that we cannot ground any values objectively. Instead, values are merely subjective preferences either individually or group-oriented. So if you have your value framework, then we’re into the problem of relativism: I have my value framework, you have yours, and neither of us is able to adduce any facts that give an objective grounding to those values or to argue that those values should be universally embraced. Then we’re just left with: you have a certain amount of power to advance your interest, I have a certain amount of power to advance my interests, and it’s a naked power struggle in the suspicious way that you’re worried about. To come back to this issue of how Marxist or not the postmodernists are, you’re right that at least the great-grandfather move was made by the Marxists in one generation and the Nietzscheans the next generation to strip power down to that amoral, ontological status that you are worried about.

Peterson: But what’s the motivation for it?

Hicks: I think there are two kinds of motivations. One thing we know is that there are people who just like power; they want to control other people, and they have their agendas. Now, we can talk about the sociological and the psychological foundations of that, but that is an ongoing fact. Some people just want power, and they will then rationalize their use of power over other people by a variety of means.

Peterson: So we’re willing to accept that as an extra-linguistic reality?

Hicks: Yes.

Peterson: That’s the thing that’s so surprising to me. I’m not disputing that. That’s obviously the case.

Hicks: If you think of the way some lawyers argue in a courtroom, they will use all sorts of rhetorical power plays. They will make fallacious arguments if they can get away with it. They will browbeat witnesses and make up facts and so forth. Now, they are not really skeptical; they believe that there’s an external world. They just believe that life is a power struggle, and any tactic is fair in order to achieve their ends. So they’re not postmodernist lawyers. They’re just old-fashioned, power-seeking lawyers. That is one motivation It comes up in religious circles, in political circles, in the schoolyard, and so on.

The other one, and the one that I think that we are worried about, is that those who get to that view about the amoral ontological substrate being power are those people who are smart and who do some thinking about philosophy, politics, and so forth, and they argue themselves into that position because they find the power of those skeptical arguments to be convincing rationally to them. So even though they are rational individuals, they are following the logic of certain skeptical arguments to its conclusion, and the legitimate conclusion of those arguments is that amoral power rules the universe.

Peterson: Okay, let’s examine that for a moment. This is another thing that strikes me as specious, to say the least. First of all, I’m very skeptical of people who try to reduce all complex phenomena to a single explanatory mechanism. I look at things biologically. It’s obvious that human beings have a multitude of primordial motivational systems and that we share them with animals. There’s pain, fear, incentive, reward, rage, play, hunger, lust and so on. There’s more than that, and those motivations get integrated across time into hyper-motivations. That would be something akin to an integrated narrative—one that is manifested interpersonally but also played out socially, and higher-order values emerge from that. Postmodernists accept the idea that there’s almost nothing but hierarchy and that people’s fundamental motivation is to climb up the hierarchy. My experience has been, whenever I talk about hierarchy, the postmodernist types go after me hammer and tongs because I’m making the claim that hierarchy is a natural phenomenon—not necessarily a beneficial one but an inevitable one in some sense with its pros and cons. But they accept that uncritically when they presume that power is the fundamental drive.

And then the other problem is—and this is an even more serious one as far as I’m concerned—that the evidence that the most effective way for human beings to occupy positions of authority and competence in human dominance hierarchies isn’t through the naked expression of power. That’s actually unbelievably unstable. Even Frans de Waal, when he was studying chimpanzees, the female chimpanzees are more empathetic than the male chimpanzees. But of all the chimpanzees, the alpha males are the most empathic. They’re the ones that engage in the most reciprocal interactions with the members of the troop, and there’s evidence occurring from all sorts of areas including developmental psychology. The developmental psychology of Piaget for example, that suggests that something like cooperative game-playing aimed towards a particular important end is a much more stable means for establishing hierarchical relationships between people than power. It’s like power only rules in tyrannies, and I guess maybe that’s part of the reason that the postmodernists also insist that the Western hierarchy is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy because that justifies their claim that power is the primary motivator and mover of the world. But I just don’t see how that’s a tenable position.

Hicks: Well, I think ontologically it’s fair to say that most postmodernists buy into the notion that power is fundamental. There’s not anything that can be reduced to that. But my reading of them is that is not the entire philosophical story because power is just a tool or means to an end, and that still leaves open the question of what ends to which one is going to use that power. And, here, I think the postmodernists are rightly diverse in their views. There is a strong streak of them—and this is something that goes back to Marxism or socialism in general—that will say, “Yes, we all want power, but we recognize that power is unequally distributed in the world.” And that connects to your points about hierarchy, but what is your value-reaction to that unequal distribution of power in the world? Now, there are the Nietzscheans who will say, “The unequal distribution of power is fine, and our sympathies are with those who have more power because we want them to advance the human species by some evolutionary mechanism.” That is a subjective value-preference that they are adding to previous facts—that power is fundamental and that power is unequally distributed. Now we’re adding, “My sympathies are with those who have more power.”

The socialist or, more narrowly, Marxist response to this is to say, “Power is fundamental, power is unequally distributed, but our empathy is with those who are on the losing side of history, so to speak.” What that then means for them is that they will accept that power is operating in a hierarchical context, but they want to use whatever power they have to more equally redistribute the power in an egalitarian fashion. The only thing that one needs to talk about is going to be that third component about what your value-reaction is to what you take to be the metaphysical substrate.

Peterson: There’s another form of real world smuggling that goes along with that, which is both ontological and ethical. The ontological smuggling would be, there are definitely power structures and that people compete for power. That’s claim number one, which seems to be extra-linguistic. Claim number two is that the proper moral stance of a human being is empathy, so there’s a claim that something like empathy exists and that it should be reserved for people who are on the lower end of the hierarchical distribution.

Hicks: That’s right. Postmodernists like Foucault make that very clear. Richard Rorty even more clearly makes that claim. Jacques Derrida is a very interesting case because most of his work is not overtly social, ethical, or political, but at various points—particularly toward the end of his life—he says that his entire sympathies are with the oppressed, and he talks about reinvigorating something in the spirit of Marxism. But he recognizes that he has no philosophical resources to justify that value claim, and he doesn’t want to say that it’s just a personal, subjective preference that he has, so he does appeal to a kind of Kantian regulative idea or, in more old-fashioned terms, a kind of platonic form that we need to appeal to if we’re going to justify in some way. It’s kind of interesting that recognizes exactly the problem that you’re pointing out. Where do we get that empathy claim from and justify that? Postmodernists recognize the predicament, and some of them are trying to point to extra-linguistic sources for it.

Peterson: That opens a big can of worms if your initial claim is that there’s no such thing as an extra-linguistic source, because you let one extra-linguistic source in—especially something as complicated as the interplay between power, hierarchy, and empathy. I mean, yes, those are major motivational forces, but if you’re willing to admit to the existence of those major motivational forces, then it’s hard to exclude pain, anxiety, hunger, the proclivity for cooperation and play. It’s like all of biology sneaks back into the postmodern project as soon as those initial extra-linguistic realities are allowed.

Hicks: Absolutely. What we’re finding a lot of our debates right now about psychology and biology is that a certain number of psychologists and biologists are pushing back and saying, “There is a reality here, but we’re getting great resistance from the postmodern second and third generation.”

Peterson: You said the philosophers that have reviewed your book have been basically positive, so why are you receiving positive feedback? What is it about philosophy and about philosophers or about your work eliciting a positive response from them?

Hicks: Well, my book is primarily an intellectual history. To some extent I am polemical and pushing back against postmodernism, so people don’t understand that I’m taking a stance as well. But the primary purpose of the book is to do a solid intellectual history. Where does this confusing, sprawling, but nonetheless, very vigorous and powerful movement come from? It doesn’t come out of thin air, but rather, there’s a lot of deep thinking that’s behind it. So what I’m doing is tracing what I see as the important intellectual movements of the last two centuries. I’m starting with Kant and Rousseau. I’m talking about Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the others. All of those figures are difficult, complex, and important in their own right, and there are scholarly debates about, say, how skeptical or not Kant is, or whether there’s an element of liberalism or not in Nietzsche, or about Heidegger’s connection to the Nazis, and so forth. There is a range of scholarly movement, and most of these major intellectuals have two or three major schools of interpretation attached to them. The pushback that I am getting on Kant or Nietzsche or Heidegger or whatever will be from those who are in a different school of interpretation with respect to them, but typically among philosopher’s it’s a respectful engagement because they will recognize that there is a very good argument that can be made for interpreting the philosopher the other way. Typically what I’m doing is emphasizing the skeptical elements or they ultimately negative and nihilistic elements that get sifted out and woven together into the postmodern framework, and along the way the philosophers who want to argue that a particular thinker is not that bad are the ones who will criticize me on various things.

What I typically find, though, outside of philosophical circles is that they will know something about Nietzsche or Heidegger or Kant, but they’re not up on the scholarly literature. They’ve read one book or one article about that person that was written from a certain perspective, so if I make the argument for the other perspective on that thinker it’s new to them and it seems outrageous to them, so they will react negatively to it.

Peterson: You wrote this book back in 2004, so you were a pretty early observer of the vital importance of the postmodernist debate. There had certainly been a rise in political correctness in the early 90s, but that seemed to disappear by the mid 90s. 2004 is, I would say, five or six or maybe even eight years previous to the to this new burgeoning of political polarization and the debate between the politically correct types and those who take a more biological perspective. What clued you into the fact that this was an issue of potentially fundamental importance?

Hicks: Well, thanks. I think it’s a testament to the power of philosophy, the power of ideas, and the power of logic, that when you identify abstract principles and their adoption and you have a good sense of logic, you can make predictions about how they’re going to play out when they are applied in real life. This is one of my major career beliefs—that philosophy is not disembodied, abstract, head-in-the-clouds. No matter how abstract and speculative various philosophical positions seem to be when they are believed and acted upon, they make a real-life difference. So in part, that’s what I was doing. I actually wrote the first draft of the book twenty years ago this year. I had a sabbatical in 1999, and so I had an outline of the book written. Then by the middle part of the year 2000, I had fully written the book, but it didn’t come out till 2004 because I had some challenges with getting it published.

I think what has happened in the last five years or so is that we are now into second or third generation postmodernism depending on how you count things, and the first generation of postmodernists were very successful inside academic circles at educating large numbers of students, getting a significant number of them through graduate school and then to themselves becoming professors and public intellectuals. Things reached a critical mass, I would say, starting six or seven years ago, and then we start to notice it significantly starting to transform the internal demand dynamics of the university, but we also now have a critical mass of activists who are now graduated with bachelor’s degrees or master’s degrees. They’ve gone into activist organizations, and they are trying to and successfully shifting the terms of the debate outside of the academic world. Then the broader public starts to notice this, and that’s where we are right now with the culture war manifesting itself on two major fronts: the academic world and the broader cultural space.

Peterson: So what are your concerns about that like when you look out at the world? You were obviously concerned enough about postmodernist thinking to devote a substantial portion of your academic career to it and then to put yourself on the line to some degree as well. What do you think the advantages, if any, are to the postmodernist view or the inevitability of it and what you think the dangers and disadvantages are?

Hicks: Well, those are two big questions. First, why am I worried about it? There’s a question about what degree of worry one should have. Interestingly, in my home discipline of philosophy postmodernism is not that strong. Philosophy flirted with postmodernism for a while. I think philosophy did generate most of the arguments that postmodernists use, but philosophy does have built into its DNA, so to speak, a very healthy respect for argumentation and a liking for new arguments. So what has happened mostly in the philosophy profession is a serious development and engagement with all of these negative, skeptical arguments but then a realization that a lot of them don’t work in various ways, and then people started moving off in other directions. Once we start seeing the same arguments being recycled and retreading, a certain amount of boredom occurs with it because smart, active-minded people like new things. Someone comes along with a new, positive argument or a new, positive program, and philosophers get excited about that. So postmodernism is a bit passé in those disciplines, but I am worried about it because philosophy, demographically, is a tiny proportion of the overall academy, and the postmodern arguments have been picked up by the larger and more influential academic disciplines such as psychology. English literature, to some extent law schools, and the fields of history and sociology are very polluted. And then in the big rise of all of the various special studies programs like gender studies, race studies, ethnicity studies, and so on, you find a much higher percentage of postmodernism there. I have not seen good journalistic sociology about the prevalence of postmodernism in higher academics, whether it’s eight percent or forty percent of people who are postmodern, but there clearly is a statistically significant increase in the number of people who are adopting postmodern viewpoints and then educating the next generation of students.

Peterson: It’s dominant among the activist types.

Hicks: Absolutely. This is a non-philosophical issue. This is a journalistic or a demographical issue about measuring to what extent it’s a rising movement, how widespread it is, and so on. My concern professionally is with the arguments that generate postmodernism and refuting those. This is important because I’m a professor, so I’m always dealing with young people who are at the early stages of their careers, and, in my view, the most important thing that we all need, as thoughtful people who want to be passionately engaged with the world and want our lives to be meaningful, is a philosophy of life that’s going to set us up for the best chance of succeeding in our lives as possible. I’m basically an optimist. In my view, we need, as young people with our whole lives ahead, to have some sense that our lives are going to be meaningful and significant and that there are important values that we can strive for. The romantic in me wants to say my life can and should be this great adventure, and having that fundamental commitment and helping students sort out what are the genuine values that are worth pursuing in life is important. Otherwise they will just drift through life, and then they will get to their older years and realize that their lives have been frittered away.

Peterson: That’s an interesting observation, because I’ve been trying to account for, let’s say, the surprising and surreal popularity of my public lectures. I’ve gone to about 150 cities now and have spoken to about 300,000 people, and I lay out a fairly straightforward case. I would say that it’s very much analogous to the case that you just described. That is, we looked for some unassailable truth. For me there are two unassailable, pessimistic truths. One is that a substantial proportion of life is going to be suffering because we’re finite, and even if things are going well for you now, you’re subject to illness—mental and physical. You’re subject to the decimation of your dreams. You’re going to lose the people that you love. The world that you know is going to change in ways that you find disconcerting and unfortunate. Suffering is built in.

Hicks: If you don’t mind me interrupting, you used the phrase unassailable truth. What we should be doing, though, in education is saying that there are no unassailable truths. Part of a good education is, any previous generations truth should be assailed—at least intellectually—by the students. They should challenge, question, and look at those and make their own judgments about whether they agree that this truth is in fact a truth or whether it needs to be rejected and move on.

The great danger of postmodernism, though, is its skeptical stance toward the idea of there being truth at all, and in its activist manifestation, the professors are function as, “I just have my subjective preferences, and I have power in the classroom, and my view as a professor is simply to indoctrinate students in my subjective preferences.” In that case, what you are doing is not only giving students a very cynical, negative, and empty view of the world, but you are also not training them in the ability to think for themselves and to compare competing viewpoints and make their own judgment. That’s the danger.

Peterson: I should reconsider my use of the word unassailable? I was thinking more clinically, in some sense. My experience has been that you don’t have to scratch very deeply beneath the surface of people’s lives until you find the struggles they’re dealing with.

Hicks: I know you’re not saying this, but from the student’s perspective, it can’t be that Professor Peterson with all of his years of experience and wisdom has announced that this is a truth. Therefore, it’s a truth. They have to go through the process that you went through. Hopefully you can accelerate that process for them, but they have to go through that process.

Peterson: I do that in the lectures by telling stories and illustrating the fact that there are limitations that are placed on us that produce suffering. I invite people to draw their own conclusions about how they regard that reality in their own lives. The second proposition, let’s say, is that the suffering is often made worse by malevolence, and that can be a sort of impersonal malevolence of nature or the more personal malevolence of society or the individual. So we’re faced with that set of problems—that vulnerability that’s characteristic of existence. And that vulnerability, because it constitutes a real set of problems, calls to us to generate solutions. It’s in that attempt to generate solutions that adventure, as you described earlier, seems to manifest itself. So it seems reasonable to me to suggest to young people that they do have a destiny that gives their life significant individual import, and that is to take arms up against the inequities of existence at whatever levels they can to act forthrightly and courageously to minimize unnecessary suffering and to constrain malevolence. And it’s also actually a vital importance that they do that because their failure to do so is more damaging than they think. Their nihilism and cynicism that might entice them into nihilistic and destructive acts is more destructive than they think, and their capacity to do positive things in the world on a large scale, individually and in their family and community, is much larger than they think. It’s very difficult for me to see how young people can be left uninformed of that as, at least, a potential reality without falling down the rabbit hole of nihilism and cynicism and subjectivism and relativism. That seems, to me, to be at least one of the primary dangers of postmodernism.

Hicks: Yes, I agree 100 percent on the latter part of what you were saying. I think on the initial question of should we be open: yes, there is suffering and malevolence in the world, but we should also be open to the fact that there is pleasure, beauty, romance, adventure, and genuine love in the world. What proportions of benevolence versus malevolence and happiness versus suffering is possible and natural to human beings. That should be part of the conversation early on.

Peterson: That’s a conversation about the potency of your tools. You can you can admit that these fundamental limitations exist, but you don’t have to draw the conclusion that they’re constraining in any finite manner.

Hicks: Well, it’s not just about the tools. It’s also about the nature of reality that we are confronting. There are, of course, people who are Pollyannaish and have this view that the world is on our side, that there’s a benevolent God or the forces of the universe are lined up such that I lead a charmed life and everything will go well for me. There are people at the other end of the spectrum who argued the opposite; the fates are against me. The gods hate me no matter what I do. The forces that govern the universe will just grind me down. That’s got nothing to do with my toolset, so to speak. That’s a metaphysical claim about the nature of the universe. When we do turn to the toolset, whatever your position is along the spectrum of benevolence to malevolence, there is the question about how much power I have to craft my own tools and to force myself into the kind of being that can take on life’s challenges.

Here, I think postmodernism is dangerous in two important respects. In my view, the most important development of education, schooling, parenting, and so on is giving students and young people the critical thinking or rational power to be able to understand the world, to be able to conceptualize it, to know how to do the experiments to analyze the results to sort out good truth claims from bullshit, and so on. All of that cognitive development can only come from a commitment to the idea that the evidence matters, that doing the experiments matters, that being excruciatingly honest with respect to the to the power of the arguments for and against positions that one might want to argue or adopt. That’s absolutely important in the development of a student’s rational, logical, critical capacity. Postmodernism is an assault on that, and what that means in practice is that students do not develop that most important life skill. They are put out into the world without the tools that they need, and I think they are then more likely to feel disempowered and overwhelmed, and then we get the angry, despairing, activist type of person that we see in larger numbers now.

Peterson: If the postmodernists are concerned, ethically, with the re-establishment of genuine power at the bottom of the power hierarchies, why do you think it’s the case that the doctrines postmodernists tend to be teaching young people seem to be so absolutely infantilizing and undermining rather than strengthening and increasing resilience? Jonathan Haidt speaks to this. Is it that they’re not interested at the individual level? It seems so paradoxical that these things are happening simultaneously.

Hicks: Yeah, a couple things on that. One is, in addition to developing a person’s rational capacity, we do need to develop their emotional capacity. Life has a capacity for a great adventure and great positivity, but as you emphasized, there is also going to be a significant amount of pain and suffering. So what we need to do is develop our emotional capacity for handling all of that. Resilience is an important part of that.

One unfortunate part of the postmodern package is that they are focusing on a very narrow range of emotions, typically negative emotions, and they don’t see those emotions as having any connection to rationality or any connection to a response to an actual objective reality out there. So the emotional life of human beings is both cramped and a mystery if you take the postmodern framework seriously. I think what happens, then, is when those postmodernists become teachers or professors or in a position of authority, a large amount of emotional communication is going on, but it’s going to be a negative, rage-focused, despair-focused, cynical, jaded kind of emotionalism. To the extent the students pick up on that, they’re going to be turned off, or if they have some predisposition toward that, they just get sucked into that emotional universe.

To speak to Jonathan Haidt’s point that you’re raising, let me just say one thing that is striking to me. I find it interesting among our public intellectuals that three of the most prominent people on the public intellectual sphere are you, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker. All three of you are, professionally, psychologists. I don’t think that that is accidental because what all three of you are doing in different ways is noticing that philosophy, of course, is a very abstract set of arguments and principles, but all of those do need to be operationalized in actual living, breathing human beings. When you see how they are actually operationalized in human beings, a large part of what you’re doing is psychology, so I think it’s not accidental that psychologists are of significant importance in the public intellectual space right now. I think what Jonathan Haidt is pointing out is that we are now into a second and third generation of postmodernists, and there’s a devolution in the intellectual quality of the movement. That makes sense because if your first generation of a movement is quite skeptical and relativistic but, nonetheless, very educated as Rorty, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard were, but the end conclusion of their position is that we don’t need to take rationality, logic, or the quest for objectivity too seriously, what will happen in the next generation will be a whole generation of people with Ph.D.s who don’t take logic and rationality in the quest for objectivity very seriously, and they will be not developing those skillsets at a very high level, so there will be a devolution. There will be more emphasizing of emotionalism and activism, and then in the third generation, there will be a further devolution.

Peterson: Where is that going? It’s self-defeating.

Hicks: I think it is self defeating intellectually, and one of the things that people who are intellectuals who have been following the arguments for a while notice is this is just a recycling of arguments that I heard five, ten, or twenty years ago, and so it becomes self-defeating in the sense that it fails to attract the ongoing interest of the smart, active-minded people. I think that this is something built into human nature, and so I’m optimistic that when young people come to university, however under-prepared and damaged they might be by their primary and high school education, they are nonetheless, particularly in North America, still optimistic, gung-ho people who believe that they can make something of their life. When they start going into classes where the professors in word and action and just in their physical bearing are communicating messages of defeatism and cynicism, some students who are psychologically healthy will just avoid those classes. They will go into fields that hold some promise of positivity for them. It will be the entrepreneurial fields.

Peterson: They may avoid universities all together.

Hicks: Sure. What’s the point of going to a university where there is wallowing about what a victim you are or what a bad person you are because you have white skin or you’re a male or whatever? I’m going to quit university and get on with living.

I do think there also will be corrective mechanisms in place. To some extent, universities are driven by dollars and who is writing the big checks. When some terrible manifestation of political correctness happens at their institution, the million-dollar donors won’t write the check the next year. That will be noticed, and that will be communicated in various ways. So the universities have their problems, but I am ultimately optimistic that they will be able to heal themselves. There are market mechanisms in place to do so.

Peterson: That’s interesting to me. I waver between optimism and pessimism because I feel that the strata of postmodernists are relatively young and relatively entrenched and protected by tenure. And, of course, I think tenure is a good idea. They’re also unbelievably good at fomenting activism. I think political surveys indicate that only about 4% of the general population has views that might be regarded as radical Marxist/postmodern. It’s a tiny minority, but it’s bigger than that in the universities. They swing beyond their weight. Also, I think, serious academics really ignored the second-rate postmodern discipline for decades, feeling that the arguments that they were making were weak enough so that they didn’t even require a strong rebuttal. Even when Steven Pinker wrote his book about the blank slate, I read that book and I thought that it was an interesting book, but I thought no one has believed that people are blank slates for like thirty years. As a biological psychologist, it just seemed to me to be absurd that that case had to be even made. He was obviously right about that, and I was obviously very wrong about that.

Hicks: Predictions are hard to make, and I think it goes back to the fact that we need better journalism about the demographics of higher education and what’s going on there. So is it 4% or 12% or 25%?

Then to speak to this issue you’re raising about punching above their weight, that does seem to be true. But how much above their weight are they punching? Is the major problem in the classrooms? As we know, most academics don’t like committee work, but a significant number of the first-rate people are off doing their real academic work and they’re trying to avoid committee work, but the second and third raters don’t mind committee work, and they see it as a vehicle to power within the university. So if the postmodernists are, as we like to think, second or third rate, a higher percentage of them will be doing the important committee worked, and they have a certain amount of power.

An overlooked part of the university demographics from my perspective is student life, are the people who look after the residents, the hall, the entertainment, and who decide what student clubs are authorized or not. There’s been a significant infiltration of postmodernism in that area that’s not on the academic side or, at least not directly. But if you look at the orientation programs, and we need better journalism here, but you find a significant number of them are devoting the whole orientation week when the first-year students are coming in to lectures on privilege and oppression and whatever the buzzwords are. That also is an important issue.

Peterson: There was an article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education excoriating faculties of education for producing precisely the kinds of internal university activists that are pushing exactly that kind of agenda.

Hicks: Right. I do some work in philosophy of education. Faculties of education are all over the map, but there has been a significant shift, with postmodernism being the reigning philosophy of education. That, of course, has an impact not just in higher education but because that’s training the next generation of teachers. One of my younger colleagues, a man named Andrew Colgan who recently got his Ph.D. from Western University of Western, Ontario, wrote a dissertation that documented the significant demographic shift among the Ontario high school teachers toward basically buying into a postmodern framework, and that’s a going to be a very important generational shift for Ontario.

Peterson: You talked about market forces and the corrective ability, and we spoke before we started this podcast about optimistic and positive elements. I have two questions for you before we conclude, and one is: You seem optimistic and positive, so what do you see is the route out of this, and what will replace it, and what’s the time span?

Hicks: One thing that we are noticing is an increasing number of first-rate people who are now engaging in the debate within higher education. You can mention someone like Steven Pinker who’s not just doing academic psychology now, and said he’s devoting resources to defending, in a public intellectual sphere, the Enlightenment project. Jonathan Haidt is an excellent psychologist doing clinical work as well, but nonetheless, is formative in creating that Heterodox Academy, which is bringing together academics from a wide variety of political spectrums and positions, but nonetheless, all agreeing that academic freedom, free speech, and so forth are important.

The work that you’re doing is great, and stepping out onto the public space stage as well. So there is a major uptick in very good academics taking postmodernism and its offshoots seriously and pushing back, and I think that augers well. I think there also is a financial clout. I think young students take postmodernists courses when they come in, but they don’t go back for more. They plug into the student grapevine and learn which courses to avoid. In many cases, the postmodern, activist-type professors are really ghettoized in marginal departments. They might be outsized in their voice, but they’re not attracting a huge number of students, and in my view, the students that they are attracting are ones who are already predisposed to that. They’re not necessarily converting.

Peterson: It seems that the least invasive way of dealing with postmodernism, if it if it does have the negative attributes that we’ve been discussing, is something like a market solution, which can convince them that there are viable philosophical and political alternatives and alternative courses they could be taking that would enrich their lives instead of enhancing their sense of victimization.

That’s the safest route, rather than political intervention or some kind of attempt to radically change the structure of the universities, which seems more dangerous than useful.

Hicks: Exactly, and I’m very gung-ho on the internet. The internet, of course, is just a tool can be used for good or ill, and there’s a lot of crap as we all know on the internet, but it also is the case that young, open-minded, hungry students, when they are at a university and they’re not getting the education that they want, now have access to all sorts of viewpoints, and they’re actively exploring them. I’m sure you get hundreds of contacts. I get lots of contacts from students from all over the world who come to me through the internet, and I know that that’s a worldwide phenomenon. I also do think that there’s lots of very interesting entrepreneurial experimentation going on in higher education. Some of it’s driven by the cost demographics, you know, people asking the reasonable question: Is it really worth a quarter of a million dollars to get a good higher education at a traditional bricks-and-mortar university or should I spend just a hundred thousand dollars and maybe get only a 75% quality education at an online institution or some other vehicle?

So there’s lots of experimentations that are going on there, and the technology is just getting better and better. So instead of the only avenue being taking on the universities head-on from the inside, there will be other arenas. That battle inside the universities has to be fought, and some of us are doing it, but there will be a significant number of people who will just avoid the universities altogether, and there will be new institutions that are created. That will be a market solution.

Peterson: Did you know that seventy about 75% of the cumulative student debt in the United States is held by women, and a disproportionate number of those women are black. It’s perverse. Part of the explanation for that is that these women were enticed or chose to enter disciplines where the probability of making enough money over a reasonable span of your life, especially given the high interest rates that are associated with student debt, is extraordinarily low.

Hicks: That’s a perverse unintended consequence. I was not aware of that statistic. I was aware that about 60% of our university graduates are women compared to only about 40% male, so there’s a demographic shift there, but I was not aware of the racial component of that

Peterson: It’s brutal because these poor women are laboring under these debt loads that it looks like they’re never going to be able to clear.

So that’s optimism—it’s long-term optimism—but it is optimism. That’s good to hear.

Can I ask you a little bit about what your life has been like over the last couple of years as you have used social media more and as your work has become much more disseminated and discussed publicly. What are the pluses and minuses for you? What has changed for you?

Hicks: Overall, the pluses outweigh the minuses. The main minus has been that it’s cut a lot into my writing time I’m a stereotypical nerd. My ideal day is to go to the library with my computer and read and write with a stack of books, and I envisioned my professor’s life as being dominated by that. But, for the last couple of years, my writing and thinking time has been has been lessened. The other major negative has been the crap you have to put up with, with people who are on various hobby horses who disagree with you, but who don’t have the social skills or the know-how to have a fruitful discussion, so they send to you ad hominem emails and just resort to insults because you disagree with them. There’s been a steady stream of that, but part of my learning curve has been to be able to ignore that or filter that out and focus on the positive responses and the critical responses that are raising good questions.

I did want to mention that I have an Open College Podcast series, and I’ve got two podcasts in the works where I’m taking up the serious and, in some cases, good criticisms that have been raised of my work. That’s just part of the ongoing, fun, scholarly back-and-forth that that should be going on and, while I am down on postmodernism, I should say that I do think it’s an important part of any person’s education to, at least for some time, consider the most skeptical and nihilistic arguments that are out there. Postmodernism should have a seat at the table in any person’s education. It really should be a three or four-way debate that’s going on there, and students need to process those arguments for themselves.

The other pluses are that I do enjoy travel, so in addition to my normal academic conferencing and academic lectures, I’ve been giving some public intellectual lectures and interacting with the general public more, and that’s been a lot of fun. It’s actually been very encouraging to realize how many smart, knowledgeable people there are out there in the world living full lives and doing very interesting things, but they also have an interest in intellectual matters and you can have a very good conversation with them about Nietzsche or Marx or the current state of higher education. So, I’ve found that the tourism part that comes with the travel and just interacting with people that I never would have interacted to be very pleasurable.

The other big plus has been, since I am a professor, I just love young students in their first and second year of university when they realize bow big the intellectual world is and how exciting it can be that when they come alive intellectually. Also, I am having a lot more students from around the world who will email me or Facebook me with very interesting questions, or they have their own podcast and when I can I’ll have conversation with them on their podcast.

Peterson: The thing about the public exposure and the social media exposure is that it’s so interesting. The people who come to listen to you only come because they want to listen to you.

Part of it’s a real pure form of the university because there’s no compulsion as there is with, say, mandatory classes and grades and so on. There is this tremendous public hunger for philosophical discourse that’s really been undiscovered up until now, and it’s massive.

Hicks: That’s right, and that’s why I think optimistically. I am optimistic because I think it is built into human nature to want to be vigorous and to engage with the world, and since we’re such a smart species, to engage with the world intellectually. So young people in their teens, when they are becoming more fully aware of themselves as independent of their parents and that their whole life is ahead and they’re preparing for life, do have this hunger, and it’s beautiful to see it activated.

Peterson: Obviously, all the controversy that surrounded your work hasn’t soured you in the least on the intellectual enterprise. It sounds like quite the contrary. What are you working on now?

Hicks: I’ve carved out in my schedule, starting the end of this academic year, a significant amount of writing time, so I’m making progress. I’m optimistic that by the end of this calendar year I’ll be almost done with this next book. What I’m doing is focusing on the positive. The postmodernism book is negative, and the Nietzsche and the Nazis book is negative going into some dark philosophical and political territory, but to put it positively, what are the positive philosophical issues and positions that need to be developed to reinvigorate the Enlightenment to correct its deficiencies to make people realize that the postmodern arguments are powerful but they’re based on some often easy philosophical issues or mistakes to make?

So my value added is as a philosopher. The way I’m going to package this is to say that we do have huge debates along any number of dimensions about politics and so on, but in fact, most of our debates about politics are not at all about politics; they are about underlying philosophical issues.

For example, we’re having debates right now about the proper political status of transgender individuals, but we’re spending very little time actually talking about the politics of it. Instead, we are having arguments about human nature and to what extent things are fixed causally, and to an extent, things are a matter of human volition. What things are subjective? What things are objective? And so on. Really, we are having philosophical arguments. It should be informed by biology, but even that is itself a philosophical debate because some people want to say we should approach this as a scientific method type of question and look at the facts and experiments, and others have a more free-floating, ideological commitment. That is to say they’re operating on a different epistemology, so really what we’re doing is we’re having a debate about epistemology and human nature not really debates about politics. The politics is just a manifestation of that.

My hopeful professional value-added is to bring clarity and some fresh perspectives on those philosophical debates. One of the things that has plagued philosophy is a whole number false alternatives that have been entrenched in the discipline for generations. In many cases, if you can notice two apparently opposed arguments but realize they have a shared implicit premise, then asking what the alternatives to that implicit premise would be once you make it explicit can be very illuminating. I’m working that territory a lot.

Peterson: Maybe one of the consequences is that out of the rather murky darkness of moral relativism and postmodernism and the claim that power is the fundamental motivation of human beings—I mean, these are very pessimistic philosophical statements taken almost to their logical extreme—will come something like a philosophy that’s genuinely optimistic without being naïve.

Hicks: Exactly. That’s nicely put. I’m reminded of a line from the Roman poet Horace, who was reflecting on some of the skeptical and nihilistic trends of his time, where they were denying the natural world. The line is, “Though you drive nature out with a pitchfork, ever she will return.” The optimistic return is what we’re working on now.

Peterson: There does seem to be a tremendous hunger for that. I usually begin my lectures on a fairly pessimistic note, detailing out the problems of human nature and society and, to some degree, the natural world, trying to make a vicious case for the for the atrocity of life. It means that there’s nothing hidden when the argument begins. Then I try to make a case that, despite that, we have within us the capacity to transcend that, and that capacity is actually more powerful.

Then you can derive an optimism out of the pessimism that’s even more optimistic because of the depth of the pessimism. You can tell students that they have real problems to deal with, and it’s no wonder that they’re suffering from the existential dilemmas that they’re suffering from. They’re real, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a set of viable solutions that you can learn and practice and engage in that make a genuine difference to your life and a genuine difference to the lives of the people around you. This is even more real than the reality of the relativism and nihilism and pessimism. I’ve been aligning that with the idea of responsibility—that it’s possible to find sustaining meaning in your life through the adoption of a substantive of a responsibility as you can manage, and it’s really quite remarkable how ready people are for that idea. It usually reduces the audience to silence. to speak of that

Hicks: All of that is touching on the profound themes that human beings do need to engage with.

My approach is typically different, particularly with my first-year students. My reading of them is a lot of them are coming into university feeling somewhat constrained. Sometimes they’re in university because they have to be in university, or they have the sense that their lives are largely predetermined or that things have been mapped out either by their parents’ expectation or by certain social forces. So I try to get them to see that the world is a lot more open to them and there are a lot more possibilities than that. They have more power to shape their own destinies than they otherwise might have been taught. Higher education can be transformative in the sense of liberating them from constraints that they felt themselves to be put in, and I’ve found that that has been useful in tapping into the hunger that we are both talking about. That can be suppressed, but once they get a taste of the fact that they are free agents, the world is a lot more open-ended to them.

Peterson: That was very exciting thing about university for me. I came from a small town and went to increasingly large universities, and every time I made a transition, the sense that the world was opening up to me continue to increase.

Hicks: In a part, that’s what makes postmodernism unsettling, because it really is a cramped intellectual vision, but it also tends to put people into smaller and smaller categories. You’re only a member of this group, and you’re an exemplar of it. Your identity has been shaped by forces beyond your control, and you can’t engage with other cultures and other individuals except on the basis of hostility, which just means people retrench, so it’s a very closing-in kind of intellectual movement. The optimism and romance and adventure in the sense that you can take charge of your own life and make yourself and the world a better place, that’s the point that we need to emphasize. But, of course, it can’t be a naive one, so we do need better intellectual tools for that.

Peterson: One of the reasons I’ve always loved teaching undergraduates is because even those who have that brittle and thin-skinned cynicism—of the prematurely intellectually hopeless—have this dynamism of youth that wants exactly to know that call to adventure exists, and that they will respond with unbelievable enthusiasm.

Hicks: I agree entirely.

Peterson: The other thing that struck me too is that, I’ve talked to hundreds of people after my lectures now, and it’s almost inconceivable the degree to which people are starving for encouragement, how little they get and how little it takes to make a massive difference in their life just to say, “You are a sovereign individual of divine value and that you’re a cornerstone of the community and that’s the fundamental presupposition of our society that happens to be true. You can put your life together with truth and courage, and things will work out better. And, even more importantly than that, whether it works out or not, that is the adventure and destiny of your life, and it actually matters.” People are dying for that idea.

Hicks: That’s beautifully put, so thanks for saying that.

Peterson: I’d like to know when you put up those podcasts that respond to the criticisms of your book, so if you would be kind enough to let me know, I would love to publicize them. It might be an opportunity for us to have another conversation, because I’m very interested in the criticisms. I relied on your book a fair bit in my discussion of postmodernism. It’s not an area of expertise of mine. I was one of those academics who tended to ignore it while I was pursuing my own studies. Your book was extremely useful, and it’s not necessarily the case that because I’m not as philosophically versed as I might be, that I can evaluate all the criticisms I would definitely like to know more about that, so please let me know. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me again. I always find it extremely illuminating.

Hicks: I appreciate the invitation and spending time with you as well. It’s good fun and important.

Peterson: Good luck with your ambitions, and I wish you even more success in the public domain because I think that what you’re doing is extremely helpful.

Hicks: Well, thank you. You too. The regard is mutual.

Peterson: Hopefully we’ll have a chance to meet at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Hicks: Perfect.

Peterson: Very good to see you.

Hicks: You too. Bye for now.

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