The Atlas Society Asks Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Jennifer Grossman: Welcome to our sixth episode of The Atlas Society Asks. Today we are joined by our Senior Scholar, Stephen Hicks. Before I even get into introducing Stephen, I wanted to remind all of you that are attending on zoom, that you can ask Stephen questions, and which I’ll get to after I asked a few of my own. So there’s a Q&A icon at the menu. At the bottom of the screen, you can just type in your questions, and we’ll get to them. And for all of you that are joining us on Facebook, first of all, welcome. Thank you. And you can just type your questions into the comment stream on Facebook.

So, Stephen, in addition to being our senior scholar is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University. He’s also director of the Center of Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He has written at least five books, Explaining Postmodernism, and he also just wrote the intro to our Pocket Guide to Postmodernism. So stay tuned for that. Also, Nietzsche and the Nazis, Entrepreneurial Living, The Art of Reasoning, and most recently, Liberalism, Pro and Con. Stephen: again, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Stephen Hicks: Thanks, JAG, for having me.

Jennifer Grossman: First of all, the most important question How are you? Where are you and if you would share with us a  bit of your quarantine story. it’s a little harrowing.

Stephen Hicks: I’m back home now in Illinois and easing into my summer schedule. The academic life is wonderful for giving one lots of time for reading and writing over the over the summer. My quarantine story has been a bit of a roller coaster, we had to transition from our normal small-class in-person teaching to putting everything online, and that was a big shift with lots of pedagogical issues for liberal arts institution that we tried to be.

But the other part was interesting, I was in Australia for a lecture tour, and that was going wonderfully. But at the tail end of the lecture tour was when things were ramping up on COVID-19 responses, and we ended up stuck in Australia. There are worse places in the world to be stuck for a while. But it was impossible to get out of the country and back to the USA with all of the flight cancellations and reschedules. So I ended up with a couple of weeks extra in Australia, which was quite nice. Eventually I made it home and everything is back to semi-normal now.

Jennifer Grossman: Well, we will be talking about university, talking about institutions, talking about what’s happening right now and your philosophical perspective on COVID and epidemics.

But right now, my email stream is filled up with a lot of people are seeing is a lot of companies, a lot of people saying it’s really important that we all stand with Black Lives Matter to end structural racism and institutional racism. From just a perspective of words, and what they mean and the importance of words. What do people mean when they talk about structural racism? What is sort of the origin of that even terminology comes from and what is what’s your perspective on it? What does it mean?

Stephen Hicks: Well, start with the racism itself, which is an intellectual and a moral abomination. It’s often reflective of primitive cognition, and in many cases it is a problem of self-esteem. Racism is a kind of collectivism where you group people into what you take to be racial groups and think that there are significant normative differences between the racial groups, that some are cognitively superior and/or in some important way are morally or culturally superior. Sometimes spills over into the idea that they should have different political standings and so forth. And all of that is, is wrong and corrupt.

We are first and foremost individuals: the most important things about us are our own beliefs that we’ve chosen for ourselves, our own goals, our character, our habits. So there’s an obvious dehumanization that’s built into any sort of racism that says the first and most important thing about you is some collective group membership and I’m going to treat you on the basis of that. That’s an injustice. We are individuals first and foremost, and we should be treated as individuals.

So there are issues about whether racial categorizations are real or not. I don’t think that’s a philosophical issue. When we perceive ourselves, we can see differences in hues and sometimes in facial structures, and we wonder about the right way to categorize those things when we’re children. And then very quickly, though, that becomes a scientific issue to be sorted out by geneticists and biologists.

But from a philosophical perspective, it’s very clear that in terms of what philosophy covers, that you are a rational being, that you need to think for yourself, you need to figure out the way the world works, you need to work on your character, you should respect other people’s rights — all of those points are general and universal to all human beings. So for the years that I’ve thought about this, I don’t see any philosophical significance to any sort of racial categorization.

The way I like to think about it is, a lot of people will focus on issues of intelligence differences. And one thing that should be obvious is that people of all races can be more or less intelligent. And there’s something suspect about someone who spends a lot of time worrying about racial differences in intelligence.

Suppose we took someone we all agree was a super-smart guy, like Albert Einstein. And suppose scientifically we were able to prove that Albert Einstein is exactly 2.3 times more intelligent than I, Stephen Hicks, am. What would the significance of that be? Would that mean he gets to vote two times and I only get to vote one time, or that somehow he needs different virtue character traits and so forth. All that would be, would be completely irrelevant.

So now racism. All by way of preamble to your question about the terminology surrounding the topic, some of which is legitimate, and some of which of course is suspect. And some of it is a matter of smuggling agendas into an already fraught, ideological concept.

One kind of racism is just individuals having beliefs about other individuals and wanting to categorize them based on racial differences. So we talk about racism at an individual level. That’s the most important and prevalent version of racism.

We also know that historically, racial differences have been used among institutions: some businesses had formal segregation policies that were not forced upon them by legal frameworks, like separate rooms for people of different racial categories, and so on.

We also know that there has been legal racism where there are different laws for different members of racism and so on. So there is some legitimacy to the concept of institutional racism. That is to say, if you have an institution — a business institution, a religious institution, a sporting association, or a government, which is a kind of institution — if it has as part of its formal policy and their formal practice racism built into it, then that’s an institutional racism. And it’s wrong. It should be something that that we fight against and we should have cause common cause with people, even if they have different philosophical understandings and solutions, to form strategic alliances for eliminating any form of racism.

Structural racism, I think, is a more suspect concept, because all of my readings of it have it come out of certain kinds of sociologies that tend not to see people as individuals. Lots of historical sociology goes back to [Auguste] Comte and [Karl] Marx in the 19th century, and others. They tend to see individuals not as real but as formed by the social structures into which they are born. So those tend to eliminate individual agency. And exactly what these structures are and how they operate and how they undermine or override or shape us is all quite mysterious. And I don’t think any of that is philosophically true or sociologically true. But those people who, now several generations later, are working within those sociological traditions will use a label like structural racism. And they don’t mean formal practices by institutions — they mean this more shadowy, semi-Hegelian, semi-Comtean, and semi-Marxist kind of thing. And I don’t think that’s legitimate.

Now, I do have to be open, if there is some version of structural racism that means something different than legal racism or a formal institution having a policy or practice. I’m open to that argument. But I haven’t seen it. I’ve only seen it coming from suspect philosophical traditions.

Jennifer Grossman: As a follow up to that question about institutional racism. Let’s say laws, which treat people from the government, but government is an institution, universities are an institution. Businesses are an institution, clubs are an institution. What is your perspective from looking at it through historical time when we could point to severe examples of institutional racism, segregation? And slavery? It would seem to me that another question is, Is capitalism in an institution? If it is an institution, is it one that could be argued that is racist? Or is it otherwise?

Stephen Hicks: An interesting network of questions there. You’re asking the long historical question: Have we improved or not on racism? I think, yes, absolutely. We have made huge, huge improvements over previous centuries.

If you go to the 1600s or the 1500s, the was idea that different races and different ethnicities and some are obviously better. That some are obviously worthier — that was a universal belief. It’s not until the 1600s, and especially getting into the 1700s, that we find just a few individuals challenging the racial and ethnic prejudices that had been baked into the human condition for millennia. And then in a short historical time, we’ve made astonishing project progress in eliminating large amounts of individual racism.

All of the surveys that I have seen show that the vast majority of Americans now and Canadians now are not racist at all. You have to look closely and to get into kind of micro-racist types of language, to say: if you look at this particular formulation of this practice by this person — that maybe you can see it as having some hint of racism. The overt racism, the unquestioned assumption of racism that was pretty much universal to the human conditions is now much, much less than historical time.

It’s astonishing how quickly that has happened. The vast majority of legal racisms have been eliminated. Obviously, the biggest of those was the great movement against the slavery that incorporated racisms. The great battle against that started in the late 1700s. And it accelerated over the course of the 1800s. That’s a great human achievement. It’s amazing.

And then the ongoing segregation, Jim Crow laws and so forth, and the battles against those in the 20th century have been largely successful. So I’m optimistic about the future trend line. And as much as I disagree with many of the contemporary analyses of racism, and where they comes from, and what their solutions to racism are, I think that trend line will continue.

You mentioned capitalism, specifically as a kind of, kind of institution, I think it is fair to say it’s an institution. It’s a set of economic and legal principles and policies that are that are put in place. And quite generically, that’s a kind of institution.

Capitalism has been one of the great anti-racist forces in history. Partly because capitalism comes out of the same set of principles that say people should be free to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own dreams, as individuals. That very general set of principles applies to people of all races, all sexes, all ethnicities, all religions, and so forth. So as a matter of philosophical principle, capitalist freedom and capitalist respect for the individual and the individual’s achievements has been applied to racial issues quite successfully.

But capitalism also builds into itself a kind of ethos that says we should treat people as productive individuals, that we should be willing to deal with them based on their productive performance: Can they get the job done or not? As that ethos becomes more widespread in capitalist societies, it obviously puts racism on the defensive. Because if I can hire someone who is of a different race, but is clearly going to be a better worker than someone of my own race, the profit motive is going to make me want to hire that person of a different race. So even if I have some racist attitudes within me, the profit motive is going to help me overcome that.

This is also borne out by the historical record. In places around the world, if you look at the historic free ports — Hong Kong, Tangier, Beirut before its disasters, Amsterdam, London, New York — all places where there been free trade and lots and lots of capitalists or capitalism or proto capitalism. Those are the places you find the most racial mixing and people willing to get along with each other, precisely because they’re there to do business. The desire to do business leads people to set aside any prejudices they have. So capitalism has been a great anti-racist force.

Jennifer Grossman: It’s a great, great answer. Now, we want to remind everybody ask questions in the zoom chat function, ask them on our Facebook stream of this interview. One of the questions I’ve been getting repeatedly on when I do the Atlas, society, Instagram, story takeovers, everyone wants to know, thoughts on Black Lives Matter. That’s, you know, every corporation is, you know, companies, Uber, Lyft. Every everybody you know, we stand by Black Lives Matter. What are you What’s your perspective?

Stephen Hicks: On Black Lives Matter? The movement, the phrase?

Jennifer Grossman: Well, you could do both? The movement, I don’t think it’s a corporation, just the insistence as a movement against structural and institutional racism, particularly with regards to police brutality. What are what are your thoughts are the phrase?

Stephen Hicks: Well, start with the movement. I don’t have expertise here, let me say, but I have poked around some at the Black Lives Matters website and so forth. And looked at some of the people who are proponents of it.

It strikes me as a similar phenomenon to the Tea Party from about 15 to 20 years ago, that it’s a populist, initially grassroots movement with a significant number of legitimate grievances. But then fairly quickly, you have some disparate other people who join the movement and bring other agendas. And when you scale up, you run into some standard issues. So the Tea Party 15 or 20 years ago — I’m fuzzy on the dates — was initially worried about, government overreach, government bloat, and government intrusion into various people’s lives. Fairly quickly it seemed obvious that the Tea Party internally was fighting for its own identity: Who are we really? And there were very disparate elements from strongly religious conservatives to other conservatives who were just small-government conservatives to others who were more libertarian, and even a few anarchists hanging out. The movement fell apart, eventually, because it didn’t have a common theme.

My sense is that Black Lives Matter is in a similar situation. There is one group — and I think this is the healthiest part of the Black Lives Movement — that says: There is a problem with racism, and black people are on the receiving end of more racism than other people are. They do not get a fair deal from various institutions, some in the private sector, but particularly in the government sector, and there are real injustices that need to be faced up to. The rhetorical force of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a kind of inclusiveness that I think is legitimate, which is to say: The point of government is to protect all people equally, and to provide justice and peace for all people equally. And that’s not happening. And so it’s to say, “Black lives also matter” or “Black lives matter too.” So we need to reform various government institutions in a more inclusive direction.

There also is, though, a part of the Black Lives Movement that’s contradictory to that segment. I don’t know how many such segments there are, who are bringing to the Black Lives Movement, explicitly exclusionary approach, which is to say: This is a movement only for black people. The philosophy that we are bringing is one that is adversarial to other racial groups, that we don’t think that we can get along with those other racial groups, that we think that they are the cause of our problem. And this sub-section of Black Lives Matter seems more interested in stoking adversarialism, and more interested in blaming other racial groups and perhaps trying to get special privileges for their particular group.

Now, that’s my initial sense. And to the extent that Black Lives Matter includes both of those groups, they are in tension with each other: one is explicitly inclusive, the other is explicitly exclusive. One is saying: there is such a thing as justice, there is such a thing as proper function of government, and we want government to live up to these American standards. And they have every right, I think, to insist the government live up to those standards. The other is explicitly adversarial and is cynical and jaded and seems more interested in undercutting what should be a legitimate governmental function. So that’s my initial response.

Jennifer Grossman: Okay. Great. Well, another term that could we could have some help unpacking is “woke culture.” What does that mean? Where did it come from?

Stephen Hicks: That’s a much broader concept. It comes out of the left politically. Interestingly, on the right politically — if we can use these labels, they’re obviously problematic — but on the right, there’s the concept of the red pill, which comes from the Matrix movie. The idea is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different.

So the left version of this comes out of the concept of false consciousness. To say that we are all raised to be conditioned into a false narrative, one that says America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and justice and freedom for all, and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been conditioned into all of us. And what we need to do is raise our consciousness, and in some cases get slapped upside the head, so that we wake up and look around and realize that we really are oppressed. An awakening to see the world as it as it really is. So woke is just a slang way of saying: I’ve woken up. Now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is, is false. That one has become sensitized and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.

Jennifer Grossman: Wow, I see that I hadn’t thought of it that way in terms of contrasting that the blue pill, red pill, what versus … whoa, but now I can kind of see the connections.

One thing that enters into conversation, particularly when I talk to people that have a very different perspective — my family is definitely all on the left, my temple, go to services, all very much on the left. And I always looking for opportunities to share a different perspective and to let people know, Hey, guess what, not everybody agrees.

But one thing I hear is when we talk about race, and this gets to sort of the metaphysics and epistemology of reality, is a common refrain: You have your facts, I have my facts, you have your reality, I have my reality. Isn’t it possible to have a consensus on a shared reality? And are you seeing sort of a disintegration not just of sort of racial harmony, but of this idea that we do have a reality exists and we can use our minds to discover?

Stephen Hicks: There’s a simplistic way in which that’s true, but there is also a more corrupt way. If it’s adults who are saying things like that, then it’s more likely the corrupt version of that. I mean, it’s one thing to say: you have your experience, and I have my experience, that you grew up on the farm, I grew up in the city, or you grew up in the mountains and I grew up next to the sea. So we each have different lived experiences. But all that means is that it takes more of an effort for us to understand where the other person is coming from.

When we start talking about more significant experiences, oftentimes, we will say of people who have experienced a trauma of some sort — they were mugged and beaten, or they were raped. And in one sense it’s obviously true to say that if you have not suffered that traumatic experience, your awareness of the badness and the trauma is going to be more distant and more abstracted, and so forth. And all of that is perfectly fine.

But the corrupted version is — and this is where we get into philosophical territory fairly quickly — when we say, Because people have different experiences there is no such thing as a common framework, that we can’t understand an abstract set of principles that we can all agree up on and validate. Or that if I have had certain experiences when I was younger and you’ve had certain other experiences when you were younger, that then certain things are just closed off to each of us, entire realms of being and value. That kind of cognitive relativism is a corruption, it’s a philosophical mistake. And that leads to problems.

Now, one version, is then racial versions, if we start saying people of different races, either that they are biologically born with different cognitive faculties and that necessarily means they’re going to think about the world in different ways. Well, that is an old-fashioned racism. Perhaps 30 years ago, I would have said that’s been thoroughly discredited. It is unfortunately making a comeback for philosophical reasons.

That then feeds into a kind of moral relativism that says: Not only do people think differently, they different values. And then that for people who think differently and have different values, there’s no way for them to communicate with each other on anything important. And if there’s no way for them to communicate with each other, then why bother trying to communicate with each other? If it’s just going to be an exercise in futility.

And then, if you have a different value framework from mine and those are in conflict with each other, then conflict resolution necessarily will not be through discussion, not by the courts. It necessarily becomes a matter of physical imposition and power. And then we have a breakdown of civil society.

Now, that’s a quick and dirty version of going from a strong cognitive relativism to a moral relativism to fighting it out in the streets, but that is in part where we are. So what that would then say is, — when we are looking at the news and despairing at the large number of people who don’t seem open to saying, We should be able to talk about this civilly online, around the water cooler, at temple or wherever. Or that on more serious issues, we should be able to take it to the courts and expect that there are objective adjudication procedures in place. And that we will take other issues to politics, and politics will be a place where we argue peacefully about everything and put it to a vote, and then have the argument again four years later — that we’re going to be committed to the peaceful political process.

That seems broken. And it points up the importance of the philosophical framework. We have been living through a major philosophical shift over the course of the last generation.

Jennifer Grossman: Speaking of philosophical shifts: Stephen Hicks, as many of you know, is the leading expert in America on postmodernism, as it applies to culture, as it applies to art, as it applies to politics and society. Don’t take my word for it. Jordan Peterson interviewed him all the time. And he says this guy is the guy when it comes to understanding postmodernism. That’s why we’re doing our Pocket Guide to Postmodernism, which I had the opportunity to edit. And just seeing it in that format and thinking about all of the philosophical forces that you laid out, and how they kind of had these consequences. It seems to me like we’re seeing an acceleration in so many other areas: an acceleration in technological change, an acceleration in transitions to different kinds of education. Are you are you seeing an acceleration in the consequences or the results of postmodernism? Do you see what we’re going through right now as connected to some of the historical postmodernism that you’ve talked about?

Stephen Hicks: There definitely is acceleration of lots of cultural trends. It’s also the case that lots of things lie relatively dormant while there’s lots of activity under the surface, and then things reach a tipping point and the underground cultural work then spills out. Then things happen very quickly because of that groundwork having been in laid.

Yes, postmodernism is a major contributor to where we are right now. I don’t want to overemphasize postmodernism because there are other cultural forces — there are lots of people in the United States and around the world who are traditional progressives or traditional leftists who believe that they are they are being scientific and rational, and they’re looking at the evidence, and that there really is such a thing as truth and justice, and that equality is an absolute universal value we should be fighting for it. They believe in all of those things not on postmodernist grounds. So we have the traditional debates with them about all those issues.

But the new kid on the block — actually, the not-so-new kid on the block — in philosophical time, is postmodernism. Postmodernism is a skeptical, relativistic movement that brings a very strong adversarial stance toward all aspects of Western civilization and, even more broadly, against civilization itself. If we go back now to the 1960s and 70s, and 80s, in the last century, when the famous intellectual names were Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and the American, Richard Rorty, typically under the label of postmodernism.

In postmodernism you have a set of views that says, reason is not competent to know reality. It’s a strong skepticism — objectivity is a failed myth, we are all subjective — and that our subjectivity is not individualistic one in that we are all born into cultural groups that shape us and mold us — that all of those cultural groups have different traditions and different languages and different frameworks, and they’re all in conflict with each other. And so all we really are going to have is conflict at various at various levels.

But we live in a culture that has these myths about objectivity and truth and freedom and equality, and so forth. And really those are just cover stories for powerful people who like to exploit us along various dimensions. So what we need to do is stick it to the Man, to rise up in various revolutionary fashions and overturn institutions and rip off the mask of the oppressor. That’s the only way that we can achieve our goals.

Now that is a cartoon version of postmodernism, as I have just presented. It became enormously influential in the universities and trained a lot a whole generation of professors and people who went on to become journalists and lawyers and teachers. And so we have lived through a major cultural shift over the course of the last generation.

So, yes, things are spilling out into other cultural institutions and into the streets. I do think that postmodernism is a major force of it.

I want to say that this is now not classic postmodernism, because classic postmodernism, if I can use that label, is it is a skeptical position that says there are no such things as true stories about the world. The immediate reaction, if you think there are no true stories about the world — if all we have is our subjective narratives — then your immediate position is to say: Well, I can’t say that my viewpoint is any better than your viewpoint, or that my values are any better than anybody else’s values. And that seems to push in the direction of tolerance or a kind of live-and-let-live, you do your own thing, and so forth.

But what typically happens, and this partly becomes a psychological point, is that very few people can live with a radical relativism and radical skepticism. They want to have meaning in their lives, they want to be committed to something. So what typically they will do, as the second phase, is say: Okay, maybe my values — I can’t give you a good case for why they are true or objective — but they’re my values, damn it. And I want to make a difference in the world. So what postmodernism teaches me is that I should just make a subjective commitment to what I happen to believe and take it to the streets or to whatever forum I have access to. I should roll my sleeves up and be prepared for the bare knuckle fight that’s out there. So people will find meaning through a subjective, adversarial, take-it-to-the-streets commitment — rather than saying, Well, I guess I just have to put up with everybody just believing their own thing.

[Question and Answer section]

Jennifer Grossman: All right. We’re going get to some audience questions, including some that were submitted in advance. Thank you very much.

One was a couple questions from Phil C. The second is essentially more about the lockdown: Is the proposition that more lives and futures are going to be destroyed by the mandatory lock downs and closings of businesses than could or will be by the virus itself? You’re not an epidemiologist, but you’re probably looking at some numbers.

Stephen Hicks: Yes.

Jennifer Grossman: Take that one.

Stephen Hicks: Right. I think the most important part of that package is to first to recognize that there are trade-offs. One problem we had early on was people saying, Here’s a health threat — and that just blocked out all other considerations and caused a knee-jerk reaction to do whatever it takes to deal with the health threat — and not worrying at all about civil liberties or about economic consequences, and so on.

So the point of the question, then, is to say that the threat to civil liberties and the threats to people’s economic livelihoods, particularly to people who are more vulnerable, are real. And we have to tally those costs. If we’re going to do good public policy, we always should be doing cost-benefit calculations. And as better data comes in, and we’re a little calmer, we should be basing our public policy on much better cost-benefit calculations.

But you’re right, I’m not an epidemiologist, and I’m not going to do a crystal-ball gazing. It strikes me that more than just epidemiology, we will need political scientists to tally up the civil-liberties costs, we need a lot of economists to tally up the economic costs. We need also a lot of sociologists and psychologists because there are psychological-depression costs – an increased number of suicides, an increased number of domestic-battery cases when you coop people up for extended periods of times. All of those are real costs. What the final numbers are going to turn out to be I have no idea, but that’s an important project.

Jennifer Grossman: Getting that definitely trade-off is important. Having perspective is important. Being you know, fact-based is important and not sacrificing others to ourselves or sacrificing ourselves to others is important.

More philosophical question. I mentioned the Instagram takeovers that I do and I can’t get to all of the questions, but there was one that thought was right up your alley. His handle is Luis Romero, and he asked: Is Cultural Marxism a real thing? Where are the greatest dangers? And how can we fight against it?

Maybe Stephen for you know, the rest of us, you could just start with what is Cultural Marxism.

Stephen Hicks: Oh, my goodness, how much time do I have?

Jennifer Grossman: Oh, Stephen, you got to do this again. Yeah, for a few minutes because we got a lot of great coverage.

Stephen Hicks: The quick and dirty version: Cultural Marxism is a thing. It’s a real phenomenon. And it is a danger. The quick genealogy is that you have classical Marxism in the 1800s. And that’s the Marxism is formulated primarily by Marx and his colleague, Friedrich Engels. Fairly quickly, by the end of the 19th century on into the early 20th century, lots of smart people who buy into classical Marxism but recognize that it has problems. But they are committed to Marxism. so they want to introduce some significant changes to Marxism but retain most of the theses of Marxism. It’s fair to say, second-third- fourth generations of Neo-Marxism. Lenin ism is an example of that. So Marxist-Leninism is a Neo-Marxism.

But then there was a school of thinkers after World War One but before World War Two who argued that we needed to make some more fundamental changes to Marxism. Some elements of the Marxist framework that are right — the determinism, the idea that we live in an oppressive society, that capitalism is exploitative, and so forth. All of that is correct Marxism, but Marx was wrong in making economics fundamental. There are other cultural forces aside from economics that we have to understand in contemporary society. We should understand that it’s not just economic oppression, but it’s also family oppression, it’s also racial oppression, it’s also sexist oppression, and so forth. Or it’s also human beings oppressing and exploiting the environment. So if we’re really going to understand how sick our society is, we can’t just be mono-maniacally focusing on economic issues the way classical Marxism does.

Cultural Marxism is a generalization on the Marxist themes to say there are many interacting elements of culture. But it’s still broadly speaking a Marxism and the most important movement prior to World War Two.

Then, after the pause of World War Two, we get into the 1950s. And we start thinking about everything again. The Old Left, which had been dominated by classical Marxism, is widely seen as problematic. And then we have the shift to the New Left that we’re familiar with from the 1960s. And Cultural Marxism was probably the most important framework of the New Left. But of course, things have moved on since then. There are still Cultural Marxists around, but it’s not the only version and I’m not even sure it’s the most important version of leftism anymore.

Jennifer Grossman: All right, we have a lot of really great questions. And seeing the themes of some of them, I wanted to also remind people that if you are not already signed up for a newsletter, where we give you updates on what is happening in the Waterfall section of the Atlas Society site, where Stephen has curated a lot of really spectacular content. Sign up for the newsletter if you enjoy conversations like this. We also have the Atlas Intellectuals, where Stephen also makes an appearance when he can, and that’s really for more of a deep dive into these ideas.

One of the themes, I believe, of an upcoming Waterfall campaign is reparations. So that that is one of the questions. What is your perspective, Professor Hicks, on reparations, a claim that current society must repay current racial minorities for wrongs done in the past?

Stephen Hicks: My view is: Absolutely not. Reparations comes out of a kind of tradition of justice. Justice is absolutely important. If an individual wrongs another individual, they owe restitution or reparation to that individual. If an institution — a business institution, a government institution — engages in an injustice, it does owe reparation.

But reparation needs to be understood in an individualistic framework. It’s individuals who are harmed, and those harms are not transferable to other individuals. So in this case, we would say, slavery was a great injustice of many individuals in some institutions against many other individuals. The bottom line is that unfortunately, all of the individuals who participated in it are dead, reparations is just not possible. The people who suffered from slavery — there is no way to give restitution to those individuals — and the people who perpetrated the injustice, who would properly be required to pay the restitution, they’re not around to do so.

Yet the idea, though, that in some sense that through your group membership, many generations later, you have become a victim — that is just a rank collectivism of the worst sort. I don’t think there’s anybody alive who deserves restitution for US slavery, because unless you were actually a slave, you don’t deserve the restitution.

But it’s also important to focus on the other side of the equation: there’s a great injustice in making people who did not participate in slavery pay for something that they did not engage in. I want to say something about statute of limitations, not so much as a legal principle, but as a moral principle and a psychological health principle. I think there’s a good reason why in the legal system, they say that if an injustice has occurred, then after a certain number of years have gone by, the healthiest thing to do is just to say: We’re going to let it go, just get it out of your system, move on, get on with your life. So if we have successfully eliminated slavery many, many years ago, and the vast majority of people right now are horrified by the idea of slavery. I don’t think there’s anybody now who actually believes in slavery in contemporary America, and the vast majority of people weren’t even around right at the time. So it’s a non-issue.

I think the only appropriate issue is historical: to go back and make sure that the historical record is accurate. Naming the names of the people who were the victims, naming the names of the people who are advocates, and making sure we learn the historical lesson so that we don’t repeat it.

Jennifer Grossman: Great. We have maybe about 10 more minutes and way more questions, than we’re going to be able to. One here is from John Vinson: While no rational person would support racism, would you accept the idea that a person has the right to be racist, in support of the idea that a person has the right to hold any idea? I mean, do people have the right to be have horrible ideas?

Stephen Hicks: I would say you don’t have the cognitive right. You don’t have the moral right to hold obviously primitive and repulsive ideas like racist ideas. But I think you do have the legal right to do so. Yes, just like you have the idea to believe lots of repugnant things like all sorts of religions that believe women should be second-class citizens, all sorts of economic systems like socialism that don’t respect entrepreneurs and people who create enormous amounts of wealth. All of those are atavistic primitive beliefs, but people have a legal right to them.

Now, I think, particularly in the case of racism, since it is such an easily confrontable belief, I really don’t understand why people are afraid of it. Just in my experience, I can count on one hand the number of racist things I’ve heard in my circle. You might argue that I live in a certain kind of bubble. But the racists are pretty much underground, and they don’t really have good arguments. So the best way to deal with repugnant false ideas is let them be out there so that we are aware of them and we can counter them. And we can continue in the process of ongoing cultural education by having better arguments and better facts to point out against the ideas that we think are false.

Jennifer Grossman: All right, we’re going get to a couple more questions. One: Professor Hicks, both COVID and Black Lives Matter seen an overreach on civil liberties. Both seem opposite of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. How much duty do we own any and —

Stephen Hicks: I’m sorry, how much duty do we owe?

Jennifer Grossman: I guess, how much duty do we owe? Any?

Stephen Hicks: I think I understood the first part of the question about over-reach. That true. I think there also was under-reach. We, many of us, underestimated the problem and didn’t react quickly enough. Some of us overreacted to the problem. I think that’s normal anytime there’s a disaster or some new threat that comes along. My view, with respect to COVID in particular, is to take the last six or eight months as a learning experience as much as we can. Because there is going to be a COVID-27 or a COVID-36, or whatever comes along at some point in the future. And hopefully, we’ll then have enough individual and institutional memory to remember what happened last time, so we don’t under-reach or over-reach as much the next time.

Jennifer Grossman: That’s positive perspective. There’s another part of the question which I think I can handle: What is this group? Our society is a philosophy organization. There are a lot of groups that are that are working on policy reforms, legislative reforms, justice reforms, but in the ecosphere of the liberty space, we have a particular focus on philosophy: right, wrong, good, evil, and in particular the Objectivist philosophy created by Ayn Rand. Our focus is on presenting it creatively, visually using new technologies with graphic novels and pocket guides and different social media formats to engage young people. Not everybody can do every everything. I think Adam Smith said it best: the wealth of nations comes from a division of labor. And that’s what we are doing.

Okay. Last question, I thought it touched me, in particular. Some of these questions are a little long, so I’ll see if I can summarize it. But question was: Voicing an opinion that differs even slightly from the consensus can result in termination, cancellation, ostracism. So should one play the game of just going along, or taking a principled stand, damn the consequences? Just as Howard Roark and John Galt did filing and struggled in obscurity, does the context of having a spouse, children or aging parents change that calculus? I know you hear that a lot from students too.

Stephen Hicks: That’s a that’s a hard question. It’s a perennial question. I think the bottom line is, you have to be yourself. You have to know what you stand for, what your values are, why you believe them. And you have to be willing to stick up for yourself and fight for yourself. Otherwise, if you sell your soul in piecemeal ways, you won’t like yourself, and you’re not going to achieve your values anyway.

But it is a perennial problem that when you live in a society with other people who have different beliefs and different values, some of them will try to put you through hell and impose whatever social costs they can on you to try to get you to sell yourself out and shut down your beliefs and your values.

So how do you how do you handle that problem? Well, the couple of things I would say. One is when you enter into social context, choose your friends carefully. Choose your workplace carefully. And don’t hang out in any circumstance with people who are going to be unfair and oppose these kinds of costs upon you.

It should be a bottom line for rational, civil, decent people to understand that people can have differences of opinions, particularly on complicated issues. And that we are going to sort these things out socially through rational civil discussion. So if you know you’re dealing with people in your social circle who are not committed to that, find a way to disengage with from those people.

The other thing is that that’s often hard to do, particularly if you are committed to a certain career. Or in a large institution or you’re a public figure, you don’t get to pick and choose as easily.

Then I think the important thing is to establish your reputation as a certain kind of person. If the first thing that people know about you is that you’re intelligent, you’re decent, you are civil, you are good at what you do. If that’s their baseline assessment of who you are, when they then realize that you have beliefs that are alien to theirs, and perhaps even offensive, they will cut you slack. But if you come across initially as a jerk who’s just announcing weird beliefs, then it’s not going to go so well for you.

The other thing I’d say is, your platform at work or if you’re a public figure and other people are watching, that you will have a lot of initially silent support. In more conformist cultures where there’s a lot of pressure on people to toe a party line, it is the more courageous people who are willing to stand up whom we need — we need more of those people to stand up and make a reasoned case for whatever it is that they believe in. Otherwise, the conformists are just going to prevail and we end up in an authoritarian type of circumstance. But you will, to the extent that you do have a reasonable case and you are making it courageously, you will have a lot more support than you initially think. You will also encourage other people to stand up. And that’s how you will create a counter movement.

Jennifer Grossman: That’s a beautiful answer. And I would also say, you have to know your values, to know what’s important to you. And then to organize those in terms of what is the most important to you, what is less important to you, and to strive to, to act with integrity, to live your values, even though there may be a kind of short-term cost to it, that note the long-term yield is enormous in terms of getting a reputation as somebody who has integrity, who stands for what they what they believe.

I would close, first of all, by thanking you, by thanking you so much. That was a real pleasure.

Great questions. And thanking everyone who is who joined us.

Also, just to mention, this is relevant to the last question. There are different kinds of people right now, in these crises that we have, there are people who are trying to oppose you oppose what you believe in, and there are people who are, who are fighting for what you believe in. And there are those that are helping those who are fighting for what you believe in. And so we, you know, it’s pretty clear what our position is at The Atlas Society, what we are fighting for, if you are not in a position where you feel like you can come out and speak publicly, and fight for these ideas that you believe in, then help us you know, support us in making that argument and making that fight. And there’s a variety of ways in which you can do that.

I want to thank Stephen and the rest of our team, I want others that are watching this to understand that that Stephen is donating 20% of his salary to The Atlas Society. As every other member of the team, we all early on, took voluntary pay cuts to make sure that we could continue to let this kind of programming or publications or videos or social media continues.

So if you if you believe in what we’re doing, if you like this interview, if you like the kind of content that that Stephen is so meticulously putting together and the Waterfall, then continue consider supporting it supporting our work. We did not take government bailouts. That is an example of what I consider living in consonance with your values. We did not need it, because we have people like you out there. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much, Professor Hicks, and see everybody next time.

Stephen Hicks: Thanks again.

[Video first published at YouTube.]