Napoleonic Codes

"The French constrain their Language all the time by Bureaucracy. "

Peterson: You touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. And one of things I really like about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment, of resentment. 

And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power that drives the postmodernist. . . Let’s call it - it’s not a revolution - transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything, that has any - well, what would you say - any merit of competence or aesthetic quality. 

And I don’t know if that’s. . . It seems to me that that’s partly rooted in The Academic’s disdain for The Business-world, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality. Because most people who are as intelligent as academics are, from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it. But there also seems to be this - there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction, of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work, its reduction to some kind of power game, and, surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates A Power Game. Which I can’t help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. Does that seem reasonable to you? 

Paglia : These professors who allege that Art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group - these people are Philistines. They’re Philistines. They’re middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow. They have no sense of beauty, they no sense of the aesthetic. 

Now Marxism does indeed assert this.

Marxism tries to reconfigure The Universe in terms of Materialism. It does not recognise any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I’m an atheist, but I see the great world religions, as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it. I find them enormously moving. They’re like enormous poems. And what I have called for - the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education - the world, okay - the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve an understanding, and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness. All of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized onto Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. My career has been in the art schools. My entire career, beginning at Bennington College. 

So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of Art. It is absolute nonsense, as post-structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by Language, by words. Everything we can know, including Gender. It is absolutely madness. Because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body and sensory activation. See what happened was, something was going on in the art world as well. I identify with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like “Wow!” Admiration. Wow. What happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also. This happened in the art world. It was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What postmodernism is is a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century. We’re talking about Courbet, the realists. We’re talking about Monet and the impressionists. People who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art. It was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack. Challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. Excuse me. From the moment Andy Warhol and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it that serious artists had had, that was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for fifty years. The postmodernism in academe is hand-in-hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere. This incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, with this idea once again that the art world has a superior view of reality. Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, in an openness and [inaudible] of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftists of academe, who are frauds. These people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton - how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They’re corporate types. They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. These people are company players. They could have done well in any field. They love to sit in endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation and so on. Not one ‘leftist’ in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people - not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolute fascists bureaucrats. They’re cancerous. There are so many of them. The faculty have completely lost any power in American academe. It’s a scandal what has happened. And they deserve the present servitude that they’re in right now, because they never protested. My first job at Bennington College, 1976. I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty, against the encroachment by the board of trustees and the president. It was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times. And we pushed that president out. And there’s not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. All these decades. Passive. Slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. Peterson: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time. They get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States - it’s not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn’t say. . . But the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students’ future earnings. And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control. Something like that. So it’s a real bargain with the devil. Paglia: And a total abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture that has come along with it. The transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology, and introduces you to the basics. Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily. Why? Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false. 

Peterson: That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can’t understand the causal relationship. Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that. But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master. And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything they believe in. They don’t believe in competence. They don’t believe in authority. They don’t seem to believe in an objective world, because everything is language-mediated. So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. You can attribute everything to power and dominance. Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . . 

Paglia: Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism. 

Peterson: Okay, it’s a radical relativism. Now, but the strange thing is, despite. . . Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives. That’s never touched. But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. And I don’t. . . Two things. I don’t understand the causal relationship there. The skeptical part of me things that postmodernism was an intellectual. . . It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can’t understand how the postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions. I don’t understand that. So what do you think about that? Paglia: Well I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive. They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics. It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. Peterson: And generally nothing but contempt for. Paglia: Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure: the janitors and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English departments and are products of a time, during the New Criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was. . . I loved the New Criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the New Criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maynard Mack’s series Twentieth Century Views, where you had these books. . . I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Brontë or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it, because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way ‘Freud’ and ‘Freudian’ were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. Actually, it seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psycho-biography about political figures. So I thought, ‘It’s happening.’ All of a sudden it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s. So I feel I am an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way. . . It’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all, to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The postmodernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Peterson: Maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the - what would you call it - the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books, and I thought that they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. 

The real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model. But nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. Partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it’s associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio- cultural condition. Everyone knows that. So when I read Madness and Civilization I thought, well that’s not radical, that’s just bloody self-evident. Paglia: Well, you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. Social psychology was well launched in the 1920s. The levels of ignorance that this people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve never read Erving Goffman. So in other words, to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. Again, I know these people. I, in some cases, knew them in graduate school - people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That’s all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that. Foucault is simply this mechanism. It’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. But the contortions of language, the deliberate labyrinth of elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist? This is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. 

Peterson: So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language. Because language can be used as camouflage, and so here’s the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras, and zebras of course have stripes. And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. But it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white, and they’re on the veldt along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So biologists go out to study zebras, and they’re making notes on a zebra. And they watch it, then they look down at their notes, and then they look up. But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know which zebra I was looking at.’ The camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. So the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can’t identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd, and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon as it became identifiable the predators could organise their hunt around that identifiable animal. That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. They take down the identifiable animals. So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them. As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. 

Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language. No one else can understand it. Only we can. 

But what’s absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of translations from the French. 

When Lacan is translated into English, there’s a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from [Jean] Racine. There was something that was going on - there was a sabotage of the French language that was going on - that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. 

Peterson : Oh yeah, The French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy. 

Paglia: That’s right. 

So the amateurism of American academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France - that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed WRONG to be doing in English. 

The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments, so we have African American studies and Women’s Studies and so on. The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That’s what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do: to blend all the literature studies together, 

Power vs. Justice

Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Power vs Justice (1971)

A few clips of Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault discussing justice, power, and the notion of human nature in their famous 1971 debate. This is a version of an upload from the previous channel. The translation is my own, although I referenced the published text (which by the way was edited by Foucault prior to publication, which is why there are various differences between the published transcript and the actual recording). The audio has also been improved. 

The debate was about human nature and took place in November 1971 at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Nederlands, as part of the “International Philosophers Project” initiated by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation and arranged by the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders, who was also the moderator.

Chomsky on the "limits" of knowledge:   

 • Chomsky on the "Limits" of Knowledge ...  

#Philosophy #Chomsky #Foucault

Meaning and Value

“Writers can have Faith in Television. There is a lot of Money at stake, after all; and Television owns the best demographers applied Social Science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans in the 1990s are, want, see — what We as Audience want to See Ourselves as. 

Television, from The Surface on down, is about Desire. And, fiction-wise, Desire is the sugar in Human Food. 

The second Great-seeming thing is that Television looks to be an absolute godsend for a Human-subspecies that loves to Watch People but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one-way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why Television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. 

Every lonely Human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The Lonely, like The Fictive, love one-way Watching. 

For Lonely People are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odour or obnoxiousness — in fact there exist today support - and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. 

Lonely People tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other Humans. They are allergic to People. People affect them too strongly.”

The New Critics, rather level-headedly at first, sought to dethrone The Author by attacking what They called “The Intentional Fallacy.” Writers are sometimes wrong about what their texts mean, or sometimes have no idea what they really mean. Sometimes The Text’s meaning even changes for The Writer. It doesn’t matter what The Writer means, basically, for the New Critics; it matters only what The Text says. This critical overthrow of creative intent set the stage for the poststructural show that opened a couple decades later. The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way : “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly following Husserl and Brentano and Heidegger the same way the New Critics had co-opted Hegel, see the debate over the ownership of Meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favour of presence over absence and Speech over Writing. We tend to trust Speech over Writing because of the immediacy of The Speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see Writing, not Speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. 

For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, Writing is a better animal than Speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence : The Reader’s absent when The Writer’s writing, and The Writer’s absent when The Reader’s reading. 

For the deconstructionist, then, A Writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of The “Context” of A Text, but Context imposes no real cinctures on The Text’s Meaning, because Meaning in Language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of Consciousness. This is so because these guys — Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarmé and Foucault God knows who — see literary language as not A Tool but An Environment. A Writer does not wield Language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; Writing writes; etc. 

Hix makes little mention of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought or Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, where all this stuff is set out most clearly, but he does quote enough Barthes — “To write is… to reach that point where only Language acts, performs,’ and not Me’” — so you get the idea that Author-as-owner is not just superfluous but contradictory, and enough Foucault—“The Writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’; [it is] an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier” — so you can see that even the New Critics’ Holy Text disappears as the unitary lodestone of Meaning and Value. 

For Hix’s teachers, trying to attribute Writing’s meaning to a static text or a human author is like trying to knit your own body, your own needles. Hix has an even better sartorial image: “Previously, The Text was a cloth to be unraveled by The Reader; if The Cloth were unwound all the way, The Reader would find The Author holding the other end. But Barthes makes The Text A Shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end.”

Perform Sex

 

The People screamed, 

The Fire went everywhere. 

So I was called into the office in the next couple of days. And who do I see when I sit down in the office, waiting like you're in the jail or you're in the principal's office? I see Timothy Treadwell. I was like, "Hey, How are you? I know I've seen you. I'm Jewel." He said, "I'm Tim." I said, "What are you in for?" He said, "I'm in for walking funny in the dining room." He said, "What did you do?" I said, "I lit the soup cart on fire." He said, "That was you?" 

And you know, it wasn't love at first sight, but it was certainly kindred spirits. 

Only Timmy is the boss of all foxes and all bears. You're their ruler. Look at that face. Hey, thanks for being my friend. This is so good. Does that feel good? We patrol the Grizzly Sanctuary together. How did we meet? Over a decade ago. He left his mother and father's side, promptly peed on my shoes, pooped on my clothes, that was it. He was my friend. Timmy, the fox. Yep. And we watch over things. And he's the boss. Takes care of everything. Yep, yep. He says, "I love the way you pet." I think one of the things that's really important is you can see the bond that has developed between this very wild animal and this very, fairly wild person. And you realize he has this gorgeous fur, and people are trying to kill him for it with steel door traps and cruel farming practices. And other people run him down on horses for sport. Fox hunting. We want this to end. Between Timmy, the fox, this beautiful fox, and me, we ask the public, please stop killing and hurting these foxes and torturing them. Don't you think? If they knew how beautiful he was, and how sweet he was, they would never hurt him. Thanks. 

Timothy used his camera as a tool 

to get his message across. 

Sometimes it was very playful. 

Do another take here. 

I fucked up the last one. 

Almost fell off the cliff. 

I'm a fucking asshole. 

Behind me is the Grizzly Sanctuary and also behind me, hidden down below in those trees somewhere, is my camp. 

I must stay incognito. 

I must hide from the authorities. 

I must hide from people 

who would harm me. 

I must now hide from people 

that seek me out because 

I've made some sort of, 

I don't want to say celebrity, 

but they come to Alaska and 

hear about Treadwell in the bush 

and they want to go find him. 

Well, they can't. 

I'm hidden down below. 

No one knows where I am. 

Even I don't know where I am. 

That's pretty shitty. Let's do 

a really short take here. 

But as a filmmaker, he was methodical.

Whatever.

Often repeating takes times. 
One more really short, excellent take. Let's just really sum it up. Here we go. This is gonna be the motherfucker. Behind me is the Grizzly Sanctuary, and also hidden below is my camp. For I must now remain hidden from the authorities, from people who would harm me, from people who would seek me out as a story. My future helping the animals depends on it. I must be a spirit in the wilderness. With himself as the central character, he began to craft his own movie, something way beyond the wildlife film. There is going to be a number of takes I'm gonna do. These are called "Wild Timmy Jungle Scenes." We're gonna do several takes of each where I'll do it with a bandanna on, maybe a bandanna off. Maybe two different colored bandannas. Some without a bandanna, some with the camera being held. I kind of stumbled. Let's do it again. So the basic deal is that this stuff could be cut into a show later on, but who knows what look I had, whether I had the black bandanna or no bandanna. Very rarely the camo one, but I like the camo look. Both cameras rolling. Both cameras rolling. Both cameras rolling! Sexy green bandanna, last take of the evening. I'm on my way to the creek. I need to get water. And there's a super-duper low tide. Full moon tonight, and action. 
In his action movie mode, Treadwell probably did not realize that seemingly empty moments had a strange, secret beauty. Sometimes images themselves developed their own life, 
their own mysterious stardom. 
Starsky and Hutch. Over. 
Beyond his posings, the camera was his only present companion. 
It was his instrument to explore the wilderness around him, 
but increasingly it became something more. 
He started to scrutinize his innermost being, his demons, his exhilarations. 
Facing the lens of a camera took on the quality of a confessional. 
Covering various years, the following samples illustrate the search for himself. 
If there... I have no idea if there's a God. But if there's a God, God would be very, very... pleased with me. If he could just watch me here, how much I love them, how much I adore them, how respectful I am to them. How I am one of them. And how the studies they give me, the photographs, the video... And take that around for no charge to people around the world. It's good work. I feel good about it. I feel good about myself doing it. And I want to continue, and I hope I can. I really hope I can. But if not, be warned. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. Thank you so much for letting me do this. Thank you so much for these animals, for giving me a life. I had no life. Now I have a life. Now, enough of that. Now let the expedition continue. It's off to Timmy, the fox. We've gotta find Banjo. He's missing! And that's my story here, for me, Timothy Treadwell, the kind warrior. Can I take it? I'm trying. Okay, yeah, I can do it. Yeah. Why not? Why not? I've crossed the halfway point. Government's given me all they have. So far. I've stood up to it. I've had danger in the boat, almost died. I've almost fallen off a cliff. Yeah. The danger factor's about to amp up in the Maze. The Maze is always the most dangerous. 
Lord, I do not want to be hurt by a bear. I do not. 

I always cannot understand why

 girls don't wanna be with me 

for a long time, because 

I have really a nice 

personality. I'm fun. 
I'm very, very good in the... 
You're not supposed to say 

that when you're a guy. 
But I know I am. 

They know I am. And... 
I don't fight with them, 

I'm so passive. Bit of a patsy! 
Is that a turnoff to girls, 

to be a patsy? I mean it's not... 
it's not that I'm a total great guy. 
I'm a lot of fun and 

have a good life going. 

I don't know what's going on. 

I always wished I was gay. Would've been a lot easier. You know? You can just "bing-bing-bing." Gay guys have no problem. I mean, they go to 

restrooms and truck stops, and 

they perform sex. It's like so 

easy for 'em and stuff. 

But you know what? 
Alas, Timothy Treadwell 

is not gay. Bummer!

I love girls! And girls... 

Girls need a lot more... 

need a lot more, you know, 

finesse and care, 
and I like that a bit. 

But when it goes bad 

and you're alone, it's like... 

Well, you know, 

you can't rebound 

like you can if you were gay. 

I'm sure gay people have problems too, but 

not as much as one 

goofy straight guy named 

Timothy Treadwell. 

Anyway, that's my story. 

That's my story. I love you. Look at you. You're the best little fox. 

But how did I come into this work, Iris? 

Did you ever get the story? 

I was troubled. I was troubled. I drank a lot. 

Did you know that? You wouldn't even know what that is. But 

I used to drink to the point

 of that I guess I was either 

gonna die from it 

or break free of it. 

But nothing, nothing, Iris, could 

get me from... to stop drinking. Nothing! I went to programs. 

I tried quitting myself. 

I did everything that I could to try not to drink, and then I did everything I could to drink. 

And... And it was killing me until I discovered this land of bears and realized that they were in such great danger that they needed A Caretaker, they needed someone to look after them. But not a drunk person. 

Not a person messed up. 

So I promised the bears that if I would look over them, would they please help me be a better person and they've become so inspirational, and living with the foxes too, that I did, I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle. 

It was an absolute miracle.

And the miracle was animals. 

The miracle was animals. 

I live here. It's very dangerous. It's really dangerous. I run wild with the bears. I run so wild, so free, so like a child with these animals. 

It's really cool. And 

it's very serious. 

I'm here alone, and when you're all alone you do get... you get lonely. 

Oh, duhl Right? You get pretty lonely. 

Oh, no. I'm gonna do 

all this stuff because 

I'm supposed to be alone. 

Amie :

Oh. Okay. 

Part of the mythical character Treadwell was transforming himself into 

required him to be seen as being 

completely alone. 

He was mostly alone, but 

he did spend time with women 

who will here remain anonymous. 

The Truth is that Amie Huguenard 

accompanied him for parts 

of his last two summers --

A fact which was out of step 

with his stylization as the lone 

guardian of the grizzlies. 

It's July and I've been dropped off all alone again here in the Grizzly Maze. 

And it's always such a surreal 

feeling as the plane takes off. 

And it doesn't quite sink into you 

just how alone you are. 

That for the next two months or more you will be alone in this wild wilderness, this jungle that the bears have carved tunnels through. And that's the Grizzly Maze. It's July. 

I hope to survive and to be able to record the secret world of the bears. And come September when people might come to harm these animals, I'll look after them, I'll make sure they're safe. It is so weird, though, when it sinks in, how alone you are. 

Grievance Studies

Interview with the grievance studies hoaxers

Transcript

All right, well I'm talking today with Dr. James Lindsay, 

Dr. Peter Boghossian, and Dr. Helen Pluckrose 

and they're all famous or infamous depending 

on your perspective as the authors of a series of hoax

Articles that were published in what purport to be academic journals in the last year

Following up work done by Sokal how long ago was that? 

Now it's got to be like 25 years now. Right, right

So we've all assumed or you've always said that the situation hasn't improved so the first thing I'm going to do we're going to have an extended discussion about

these articles and about the motivations for producing them and and then the necessity for that and the morality of that and the aftermath and all of that and the first thing I'm going to do is have

Each of you introduce yourself and then we'll launch right into a discussion about the, Let's call it the scandal

Dr. Lindsay, yeah, um good to be here So I have a background in mathematics and physics my PhDs in math

I left academia in 2010 and have been studying mostly

religious and moral philosophy and psychology since and Then got wrapped up in this idea. I kind of was the I guess epicenter of the project

I did all the submissions and managed all the emails and all of that and then Peter and Alan

Filled in all of my weaknesses And so we spend you know an 18 about 18 months working on this a year really ten months writing papers

then there is the getting ready to go public so That's kind of who I am and how I got into this I just a

lapsed mathematician who gives a lot of concern to how we produce knowledge and what what academic standards are and should be

So what did, why did you leave Academia? I wish I could say that it was like this prescient thing. I saw the writing on the wall that it was going mad

And I wanted out but really it was just a number of personal responsibilities and commitments that led me to now want to pursue

Employment where I didn't know where I would be placed from, you know one postdoc to the next it was family commitments primarily

But you were still interested enough to continue while with this project interested enough in the academic world. Yeah, I never really

wanted to stop Researching or reading and thinking and coming up with new ideas It's very difficult to do mathematics without some institutional

Backing a math is hard as some people have noticed so I didn't have the resources necessary really to pursue

Mathematical research independently, but I found that I could you know dig into philosophy and I could dig into

psychology kind of on my own not professionally, of course, but Enough to get an idea of what I was was looking at in a philosophical sense

to answer questions that I was it was really deeply interested in mostly the question that drove me probably from about

2011 forward was you know, what do people really mean? What are they talking about when they say the word God and so I really got involved in talking about their thinking about religion

that's what led me to religious and moral psychology trying to understand why people believe things that they do and why they why they manifest their beliefs in certain ways and

ultimately because I was you know That kind of a guy. I just wanted to find out what the I figure I live in the southeast US

It's a really religious area. People talk to me about their belief in God all the time. I hear it constantly at different levels from the you know, yeah

there's I kind of believe level all the way to the borderline insane level of conviction to very implausible

Propositions level and I wanted to understand I know the people talking about ideas like God

Means something when they save the term It's something very not just do they mean something They mean something very important to themselves and I wanted to figure out from a perspective that didn't rely upon

The religious the theology or the religious mythology or narrative What they were speaking to as articles within in the material world

And so I became very interested in that and spent a number of years reading and writing about it and by the way the kind of culture war, if you want to call it that,

progressed at seeing what was happening to people I was Interested in Sam Harris for example was certainly one of these people

you see these people get called racist or sexist for what seemed to be nothing and you try to dig into it again with the

interest in meaning of words kept seeing these references back to these, you know, power dynamics and

sociological definitions that they only see racism or sexism is structural entities that allow

basically people of People to be considered racist or sexist just because of their identity

By just by virtue of being say a white male you could be racist and sexist. You inevitably are that's exactly exactly so

That's what led me to get curious about the grievance Studies canon ultimately. I see. okay. Peter, okay, let's hear sir

lets hear from you and tell everybody who you are and what you're up to I'm currently teaching philosophy at Portland State University in the philosophy department and I

Am up to James Lindsay and I just finished a book how to have impossible conversations that will come out probably in

2019 from Da Capo press and I don't know what I'm up to now because I may be

Looking at a career change very soon. So We will get into that later but the University filed charges against me they found me guilty of not seeking IRB approval and the

Investigation is ongoing for the falsification.. Oh! So we better have quite a conversation as well about IRB approval;

that's another rabbit hole we can plunge down because that's another catastrophic catastrophe that the university has inflicted upon itself over the last two decades.

So that's something that's become increasingly Politicized so it's very difficult to understand how you could get IRB approval for a satire, or why you might need it.

Yeah, okay. Okay. Good Helen. 

Let's hear from you --

Helen Pluckrose :

Well, I'm the member of the group who isn't Doctor,

I'm a lonely MA but I have a background in

Literature and early late medieval early modern studies 

I'm interested in how women used the Christian narrative toget Authority in autonomy for themselves sort of 1300 to 1700 

So I'm looking at how this changed before 

and after The Reformation 

how The Narratives changed --

I I left at the end of my Master's. I was intending to go back and do my PhD in medieval manuscripts

But it's just got I keep going early on earlier because it is so difficult to get away from the ideology. I'm

Interested in medieval manuscripts, but not overwhelmingly I want to look at social history But it's so difficult to do that because there is a pressure now to do so anachronistically: to read it through

Gender ideology of today, so I have to accept that the reason I was going to do medieval manuscripts

is because I can translate and transcribe and this is something objective that I can do. I can produce an edition of

Texts, which aren't readily available and explain them and that's the only real way that I'm able to look at

religious writing by and about women in any objective way and it isn't really I want to do so I stepped away for a year

And in that year I started writing about about post-modernism about feminism about liberalism and ideology and

Then they just got to be so much to do with that But I I haven't gone back at all so involved in in writing about what's going on right now

and so that is where I'm now. I see. Well, it's interesting because you you talked about

your your belief that women in the

mid stages of development of the Christian Church we're using the idea is to actually liberate themselves and to

Yeah Example from Marjorie Kemp to Amelia Lanier and we're looking at very different ways in

Which you know it within the Catholic narrative, for example, women would say well God speaks directly to me he is the ultimate

patriarch so that gives me a certain authority to disagree with a patriarchial church.

if I think it's fair with my husband and then later after the Reformation there was a slightly different emphasis in which

Women, you know everyone, could interpret the Bible and that includes women so there was a different kind of authority

There too. So that that's generally have been what up what I've been interested in. There's slightly different ways that women have approached

biblical text biblical narratives and And yes, and used them to challenge that our mainstream

Interpretations and and makes them make some pretty good arguments. Well Amelia Lenya certainly did Marjorie Kemp mostly screams

Okay Why are you guys telling us what the genesis of this project was?

let's outline the project itself that the sequence of papers that you wrote and Let's talk about the genesis of that as well. So I want to take that one. Okay?

It's really kind of kind of interesting I don't know if your audience would know this Jordan or not, but all three of us

you know were writing a bit within what might have been considered the new atheist vein and working within that and

And I was working on a book trying to answer my big kind of early 2010's research question

What do people mean when they say god I was writing a book called that I eventually titled Everybody is wrong about God and I Peter called me one day while I was working on

Either the book itself or the research for it I don't recall the specifics at the time, but he called me one day and said, you know, dude, dude

I think I'm going crazy. I keep trying to tell people something that's as obvious as can be to me and

Somebody has to believe I'm not crazy everybody thinks. I'm nuts. Please tell me I'm not crazy and so I said, you know, what is it and he said

I Look at the way People in gender studies used their scholarly Canon, the way they they produce that the way that they refer to it,

the the fact that it seems disconnected in a literal sense from what's going on in reality and

It feels like it's their bible, it feels like it's a holy scripture for something like a religion

Am I going nuts and as it turned out the reason I started writing the book Everybody's wrong about God was partly to answer my big research question

But it was also because I noticed that the community built up around new atheist activism which called itself the atheism community

showed almost all of the symptoms of qualifying as a religion at least from like Durkheim's perspectives and

Maybe even from some others So I immediately latched on to what Pete said and I said no, you're not crazy. I think you're probably right

I think you are absolutely right that the scholarly Canon in gender studies and so on is

operating like a book of faith for Something but I don't know exactly what this is

And so we got curious about that scholarly canon kind of from that point

It wasn't long after that that the infamous feminist Glaciology paper came out

where the a few four or five researchers published a very well funded study showing they're claiming to show that the

Glaciology is inherently sexist all the way back to its roots

Back to you know, the intrepid explorers of mountains and polar regions and all this so is

justified by being a big tough guy in the 19th century or whatever and That apparently somehow this

masculinist bias hangs over it and so the answer to this is to put feminist art projects as part of glacier science and

(...) ology is as part of glacier science or else it's racist and sexist and I

Mean, I remember reading the paper Lightly at the time and thinking there's no way this is real and Peter and I had a phone call

We started looking at new peer review on the Twitter at the same time. Oh, you should never look at that. Oh my gosh, so so we've we've actually got two issues here

then. Let's say now all the sudden because yeah, there's a there's the there's the issue of what's going on in the

Social justice oriented academic disciplines and then there's a deeper issue of how

people view the world individually and collectively yes through the lens of a belief system and the probability that that

Belief system will take on something approximating the trappings of a religious movement. Mm-hmm

Yes, so so that's a deeper question. I mean one of the things that I discussed continually with Sam Harris when we had our series of debates was

the question of the Inescapability of something approximating the religious framework to orient people in relationship to action in the world

All right, like I happen to believe that a framework like that is inescapable. The question is not whether you're going to have one

it's which one you're going to have and what is it going to be rooted in and I mean one of the things I think that both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky warn people about in the late 19th century was that

What what this isn't a quote from either of them, but it's something approximating someone else. Whose name. I don't remember

He who believes in nothing will end up believing in anything? and And there's something there's something in that that's extraordinarily deep as far as I'm concerned

All right, so you were interested in religious phenomenology, and then you guys started to see that as

far as you were concerned a variety of different quasi academic or academic movements were taking on the trappings of our

Religious They were starting to look religious in their approach and in their application of their beliefs, right

On the social justice end of it, right community for example was definitely engaging in of course they had kind of their

their unique vocabulary that they speak to one another in and identify one another by

which is kind of like an ecclesiastical vocabulary, but if social justice and then they

were Definitely involved, what what they call political correctness is in practice virtually identical to what you see with people carrying blasphemy

So these parallels started to stick out at the same time The way that we started looking at the real peer review Twitter account in the way that they seem to be producing

Our knowledge that they could then refer to virtually Replicates special revelation the they came up with their ideas

they believed that they came from some morally backed source of

Goodness, and put them forth. And then where they were were morally vetted and

Given an epistemological status they didn't deserve as a result. Okay. What do you think the sources?

The source at the time I had no idea but now after having done the project I think the source is actually what I've come to call a postmodern mythology that

Our social reality is conditioned upon use of language and representation and it's all done in service to power

dynamics that underlie how society works those power dynamics are trapped up in identity and

Mediated primarily through language and media weather Okay, so I've identified the sources of that not only me obviously

but I've identified the sources of that belief with the French post modernist movement fundamentally other people trace some of it back farther to

What's essentially something approximating a Marxist doctrine which is the doctrine of which is a doctrine of power relations

I would say sure you have any Criticisms or further comments on that. Let's call it geneology geneology or Lynne

Helen Good yeah, I I largely agree

I with the idea that that we had a quite a profound epistemic

shift in the late 60s with the rise of the post modernists I disagree with people who

Cry and kind of relate this closely to Marxism I think it's clear that they they have a common ancestor and that they have certain ideas

in common, but if we complete Marxism and post-modernism

Too closely on more than those yet that that sort of oppressor and oppressed group that sort of them

false consciousness these sort of key ideas which really were floating around at the same time and they've come up in the same place if we complete those two closely and we

are not looking at the really profound differences in Epis theology in which

Marxism was really trying to continue a modernist project. It was totalitarian It was Objectivist mostly and it went sort of in a straight line and the if there is a word for the extremes

Marxism it is totalitarianism. If there's a word for the extremes of post-modernism its disintegration its fragmentation

So we're looking now at something very different something very intangible that is coming in and it's saying we cannot access an

Objective truth. Everything is created in discourses empowers us in systems of power

Ok, so why in the world is power and privilege them? I mean it still seems that the post modernists are willing to

Assume that the pursuit of power is first of all obvious that everyone's pursuing it

But it's also ok for those who don't have it to pursue it So it's not as if they've abandoned the idea as far as I can tell above a linear narrative

Towards some end the end seems to me to be power And so why is that justifiable from the postmodern perspective given that linear?

movement and Meta-narratives aren't justifiable because of this change that happened in the late 80s

so when circle for example he he did his hoax what he was looking at was this quite sort of pure post-modernism this

Very sort of intangible idea. That's an objective reality can't exist that we can't grasp anything that everything is a construct

But what happened in the 80s? Gradually, was that this just after?

prolific amounts of writing it just kind of fizzled because once you've Disintegrated and dismantled absolutely everything and it's all in a mess on the floor. You have got nowhere to go with this

So we started seeing then the rise in materialist feminism first of all And then within sort of critical race approaches

Intersectionality in queer theory in post colonialism particularly. We started seeing a change towards

Okay, so everything is a cultural construct But we can't address anything

If we don't accept that a certain group of people in a certain place at a certain time experience certain things

so what we're looking at now is an objective reality that oppression and systems of power exist, but but already

Mm-hmm. Everything else is socially constructed so the funding

That construct has power yes, it is objectively true That power is benefiting straight white men and disadvantaging women of color trans women etcetera

So this this was the the change that happened then so now it's politically actionable and this I mean kimberlé crenshaw

But this most explicitly when she said it's politics applied to postmodern theory, okay?

So we want to get this straight because it's very very important. So you just you distinguish the postmodern movement from the Marxist movement because the Marxism Marxists were still moving in a

Single direction and you considered that still part of the modernist project. You equated Marxism and post-modernism

Insofar as they both adopt, let's say an oppressor

Jarett Yes, although many other things do too and often that that's quite warranted. I mean the the American

Revolution for example was an oppressor oppressed revolution

Power and power differentials exist the issue is not there are other realities that might be considered

Exactly history is whether that we're seeing and truly it Yes, and whether it's reasonable to reduce everything to a single dimension of motivation

so the postmodern project collapses into its own nihilism and something emerges out of the ashes and that's the

assumption that a transcendent reality does in fact exist, but the only Defining feature of that transcendent reality is the existence of power in the existence of power differential

And identity and that's associated with identity Okay, but then the question becomes just there's a question that goes underneath that even which is well

Why is it why is it that that is accepted as the fundamental reality because there's no rationale for that in

post-modernism itself in fact Should criticize that they do they do very much and this the argument that goes on repeatedly with the old-style

postmodernist saying this isn't post-modernism and So a week we've tended to call it applied post-modernism

John nurse to build it the pomide cluster because it's just a set of ideas about identity about power about privilege about

language the importance of language and and

hierarchies and things which have come from Post-modernism which have got politicized and then within activism have got convinced into kind of user friendly chunks and further

Bastardized so we can't we can't take this away from post-modernism it didn't come from anywhere else, but neither is it the

That they're pure sort of deconstructive or post-structuralist or any of that of that whole sort of massive range of

Theory that it existed from the late 60s into the mid 80s. That's that died. It's it's gone

It's fragmented itself as it is always bound to do so Drive to your question about why or how they justified this change

I'll just say we we called this This set of disciplines or approaches grievance studies for a reason it's about grievances. It's the politics of grievance

So they feel aggrieved therefore they feel justified in trying to disrupt power

They see that exists and to claim power for themselves. It's social revenge. That's what they're that's what they're animus is. That's their

moral justification for For continuing to fragment and and to chase the very thing they say is

You know the great corruptor of man, which is power If this is true I do I have some sympathy with that claim it doesn't matter that there are philosophical

Incoherencies within the structure within the intellectual structure at all. What matters is that?

There's an animus and a motive and the motive is fundamentally something approximating revenge why why would you say look why would you say revenge and not justice like and this this goes to another issue just

obviously all three of you opposed this movement and we've already decided in this discussion that it's something like The Revenge of the

Marginalized but the marginalized could well object well, this isn't revenge you only see it that way because you're part of the privileged Power Group and it's actually a search for

It's a search for it's a search the genuine search for justice you're and also most of the marginalized on social justice

Orientated that that's what we have to remember this is speaking on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities

most members of every group Do not ascribe to it. They're they're politically diverse. So

That's one of the reasons that that the claim for the pursuit of justice is

Invalidated it's that there's no evidence whatsoever that the activist types who dominate these disciplines are valid representatives of the communities

That they purport to stand for it. And in fact if you surveyed the communities themselves

In any reasonable manner then the communities indicate their lack of agreement with with this way of looking at the world. Yeah

Yes, okay, okay and Of course There is also the the complicating element that nearly always appears that you do have kernels of truth on both sides of that

discussion there are legitimate questions of justice that are being tied up into this and then there are

legitimate reasons to see it as being motivated primarily by something approximating revenge or grievance or reparations or something like that and

They get intertwined and as you were mentioning with any time, you're working with postmodern epistemologies. There's no reason to expect consistency

They reject consistency as a bug in the system They're unrepentant that unrepentant about being inconsistent. So that's no small point

And I think for people watching that that point needs to be punched home. So Jim, could you speak to a little more about that?

Well, yeah, it's um the the idea that you would be consistent is

One of the ideas that would be caught up in the Western philosophical tradition as they would phrase it It's caught up in the exam tradition that was bred of white and male power

And so that needs to be disrupted because that power inherently from the perspective of this

World view that power inherently corrupts, but more importantly and inherently always acts to preserve and maintain and legitimize itself

okay, so the demand for consistency becomes itself an act of oppression against me back lane is that

all seems reasonable to me so so look so so here's a peculiar thing and

It's an observation of something approximating Let's say a Freudian notion of projection

um The people who are pushing this viewpoint aren't legitimate

representatives of their communities in any real sense of the matter and They push a particular viewpoint that has very little academic credibility as far as I'm concerned

and it is primarily concerned with political activism and with the obtaining or the justification of obtaining power

Now we could assume that this is being done on behalf of the people who are putting forward the doctrine and so to me, see

I've come to understand that part of the reason that people cling to their belief systems is because

they have Their the reason they have the moral authority To occupy the hierarchical position that society has granted them is because they're regarded as experts in an in a belief

structure and if the their claim to that expertise is questioned and their moral justification for occupying their position is

eradicate and it's the position that gives them purpose in life and that protects them from

Uncertainty and anxiety. It's not the belief structure itself You see it's very fabric that they're experts in the belief system and that justifies their position in the hierarchy

So they put forward this claim to continue Justifying the fact that they occupy, and very perversely, and this is the for any projection is very perversely the very positions of power

whose existence they criticize this would be the university professor claims in particular that seems

reasonable to you or or is there something wrong with that line of it that comports actually with what I

From reading John hight, for example who talks about psychosocial evaluation and

the way that human beings do that with one another how we identify where we stand in our social and moral hierarchies

and how we where we position ourselves and others and each other in relation to one another and that

One of those three dimensions he named divinity and so that would be the Part you're speaking to so we gain we gain status and the hierarchy through our closeness of kin

so if you and I are friends you rank me higher than I probably deserve because that's how humans do and

We gain status by reputation and that's why we care what Michael Jordan things about politics and we gain status by

Our moral standing which is what John hight called divinity and of course he explored it primarily in the happiness

hypothesis with regard to his trips I think to India and seeing a traditional religion and then comparing that directly against so-called weird societies in

Western democracies, and I think that what we're actually seeing in a lot of these cases as we're seeing

Partly at least people are acting out What what often gets completed with religion, in fact is that they're acting out the need to

Fulfill or participate in that third dimension of psychosocial evaluation

Although in secular societies we throw out the the explicit religious structure for it and we have to find it in other ways

So that's what you're actually talking about. They occupy a moral expertise that moral expertise gives them standing within the prevailing

Moral and social Malou and then that defines their place in the community As in both in terms of prestige and in terms of hierarchy

So they're basically acting out precisely what they're accusing all other disciplines of doing

Irony oh, yeah, and the difference is to see the thing is the difference as far as I'm concerned is that

If you look at a discipline like engineering Which I think is perhaps as close to the polar opposite of this. This might be managed

One of the things that engineers do is look at the world in a certain way, but another thing they do is build bridges

Exactly, right. That's right There's an objective real world

Direction there - there philosophizing and their beliefs that results in something of tangible and

Universally recognized benefit to the community at large and something that can fail And that's right. Right right. Also, that's very important. Okay now, okay next issue. So now

the first issue first of the next two issues say is Why is it that you three?

Found yourself in the position where you decided to take this on as a critical project and why is it that so few other?

academics are doing so I Don't have good answers for why so few

Academics are doing so because I don't want to just blatantly call people cowards that I don't know But you don't get treated well for fighting let's dig into that a bit

Okay, because I think I think cowardice is one or fear and let's let's not fear

Let's go with fear. And let's also note that the fear is well justified very just yeah, that's correct, right

Well Peter you're in a great position to speak to that because what's happening to you?

Yeah, so I don't know if you want to go down the path of what's happening to me it but I Think you're right our mutual friend Brett

Weinstein said to me that academia when we had a conversation about academia is self selecting for cowardice

And I think it's a process that people go through before they have tenure where they're Afraid to buck the system afraid to challenge ideas. They're afraid to

Question because they won't get tenure and then once they do get tenure then they won't make it a moat climb now

Dad a sort of the same thing happens in corporations at the middle manager level like it's not a disease that's endemic to

to academia Well, it's not but it's one variable and a suite of variables that we have to take a look at

The other one is the culture in which the cultural milieu that Jim spoke about in which people are terrified to be called sexist racist

Bigot, they don't challenge those. I'm even hesitant to say the things they don't challenge

but I'll say it like race and IQ or and Trans issues transform issues if you teach an ethics class people won't really dig into those

issues in a substantive way But I think that there are many factors but not just one but it's just you that people will come up to Jim and myself and I haven't spoken explicitly to Helen about

This and they'll thank me. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much. Oh great. Can you do that publicly? No, no

No, the same thing happened to me So so I think Peter we should talk about what's happening to you because look we talked about fear

We can talk about cowardice we can talk about Justifiable fear because there's no there's no pleasure in being isolated and mobs and undermined and fired

Right so that the the apprehension of that is not merely cowardice. It's it's realistic and

I'm not under estimating the potential role the additional role of cowardice, but and there's another issue too here

And I've been thinking about it's like to me many of these postmodern activists propositions are so fundamentally absurd and so

Academically weak that most serious social scientists and pretty much all serious stem

Types, the stem researchers have just ignored them You know

They thought they were beneath contempt

You know a brilliant postmodern activist idea like intersectionality or like patriarchy theory or like white privilege

all you have to do is spend an hour thinking through those things critically and you realize that there's

Absolutely, nothing whatsoever to them methodologically or conceptually

As Jim was saying, you know that can be a kernel of truth in things

But when they are theoretically built up I mean obviously they're there there are societies in which white people are

regarded more positively on average but this is something that can be measured empirically which can be looked at which can be talked about and we don't actually have that we

have imaginary knapsacks and talk of complicity and

and epidemiological Environments in which white people literally can't understand what's going on

So we get it and we get a big mess and it's it's the kernel of truth is in there And so that gives them the opportunity to kind of retreat

To this sensible space where they'll say but there is racism and that there is sexism Well, yes

of course there is but what you're doing here with these theoretical concepts is is not

Looking realistically and reasonably at that Problem of univariate reduction right? It's like, okay. Well racism is a problem in sexism is a problem. We'll say and well any form of

Discrimination that isn't associated with the hypothetical outcome of the project is a problem

But there are methods that everyone who is a decent social scientist knows to measure those and to estimate the proportion

of the variance in the Outcome problem that those issues are accounting for and the postmodern activist types - absolutely none of them. Yeah

We're the attention. Yeah. What do you said? I mean, why would they because they don't care about their agenda driven in there?

They're not a truth oriented. So There's gonna be no point to even think like that. Well, they also can't they don't have the method without the training knowledge exactly

So so that also provides additional impetus for being motivated to criticize those to do because it's a lot easier than facing the reality and the

consequences of your own ignorance and because gaming Let's talk about what's happening to you because I want to know about the cost that you're buried for this and then we'll go back

To why you guys decided to do what you did? so PSU, like many college campuses has become an

Ideological community and I've demonstrated that I don't fit that mold and I suspect that

They're gonna go to great lengths to get rid of me. So what's happened is I've been found guilty of not seeking IRB approval and

Okay, you should tell the viewers what that means and provide some background detail because it's okay

Okay. So RB approval is theirs It's called IRB institutional

Review board and whenever you do a an experiment on human subjects human beings or animals

by the way You need to go through the IRB and you need to get permission and you detail

Exactly what it is that you're going to do and they say to you Well, you have to change this you have to do this. Don't do this etc. And then they give you permission

Okay. Now these these systems just a little more background. These systems were originally said fundamentally to monitor

Relatively or potentially dangerous medical experimentation on human beings, but they've expanded their purview so that now it's impossible for anybody

Who's an academic in any institution to even interview people without?

Seeking permission from a very vast and rigid bureaucratic structure that's easily politicized

Yeah they came out of and they do exist for good reasons the Nuremberg trials mainly at cetera et cetera and people were

and that envelope as has The number of experiments or the number of things that are caught under that umbrella

continues to increase we can talk about the ethics of the IRB more generally, but in our case or particularly marketing

though the IRB has no Jim and James and Helen don't fall under the auspices of PSU SRV so they can't be sanctioned. I however

Allegedly can can be sanctioned. So I've been found guilty on that first charge

Which Howard why now? Look let's tell everybody he published a sequence of papers

How many papers in journals how many so we we wrote? 27 of them were accepted and four were published

On the cusp of publication for example, okay Let's get it straight these are satirical publications that were published in hypothetically serious academic journals

And now Peter you're being gone after for not seeking Institutional review board permission to publish studies that didn't exist. Yeah to two things

that's the first thing I've been found guilty of that and it's escalated to the provost and the president University and I believe that the Provost is a former Gender Studies scholar and on the names of those people just

I'll let that sit there. I do I do I can't pronounce the president's name to be blunt with you

And the provost is new Provost. I'm not avoiding the question. I just don't maybe that's fine We can always put that in the description of the video

So so what are you guilty of, exactly, because these studies didn't exist. You didn't undertake research on any human subjects

Now they've decided that the journals editors and reviewers are the human subjects that we were studying

so not the studies themselves, but go up one level of meta to the fact that we were studying the culture of

Journal journal review and publication so the editors who are not anonymous and then the anonymous peer reviewers are considered to be the human subjects of our

I see so that's supposed to be distinguishable from you thinking and writing about the things that you encounter in your own life

For example, which is also what now supposed to be subject to IRB approval yeah, so so

Okay, so there's a lot of moving parts of this. So we need to break it down I want to I want to continue with the

Excuse me guilty of not seeking IRB approval that can include term up determination from my current position and

I just want to speak to that before I talk about the data fabrication charges, so I don't agree with the decision

But I definitely understand the pressures that they have on them to do something

Who knows what's happening Russia's pressures from a who these activist types are very tiny proportion of the population

So and when we're talking about pressure, what exactly do we mean? well, there was an anonymous hit piece by 12 or 11 of my colleagues published in the student newspaper the Portland Vanguard and

They may be a small Representation, it's unclear to me... In academia I don't think they're a small proportion of the population.

they are a large and I think that they wield institutionalized power and have weaponized things like title nine against

people they don't like so there's that but I do want to say I don't really know what's happening behind the scenes like my guess. Is that these?

This group is extraordinarily Vocal but with their face with no as a decision for what kind of university they want to be

Is it one that uses power to support freedom of inquiry and pursue the truth? or do they want to protect social justice at all costs and

the fabrication of data thing is interesting because that's an ongoing a

currently ongoing Investigation and again, those are very very serious charges

Let's look here too. Like there's a very big difference Let's get this very clear between a self-admitted satire

Which had historical precedent and which has ethical justification, even if you don't agree with the justification, and data fabrication. Data fabrication occurs

When you put data forward and you claim that it's a truthful representation of a real-world situation.

And.. Obviously that's distinct from satire in comedy. Everyone understands that distinction.

Well, the idea is that those rules were put in there for very good reasons and that is people wouldn't use that to advance their careers, which

And they wanted to hide the results so they don't didn't want anybody to see what it was

So the problem with that is that it would as Sokol wrote that it would contaminate

the research lines in perpetuity, so what the success of our project depended upon it being revealed so that no longer applies and

the idea that we would somehow not only have I not benefited from this, but this has come at a tremendous cost to me so

Yes It's in my opinion. It is a grotesque abuse of

what it means to fabricate data and It may be interesting to see it'll be interesting to see what happens and be interesting to see when it goes to court

Okay, so so well, yeah tell me about the proceedings when it goes to court. What kind of court is it going to I?

Don't know. I mean first let me even take a step back from there so if you look at the timeline of events when this occurred and I have that off the top of my head, but

the when I was found guilty from the IRB, there's been a series of

not seeking IRB approval There is a series of a time when the university president could just end this

Just like that. You can say well we're gonna put a letter of reprimand in your

Wiener, we've decided you've already done this they can ominous kind of awkward

Who found you guilty That was the IRB in the day. That was December 14th

I see. So the IRB is policing its own its own policies here

Yeah, so that was it for the IRB charge the open the data falsification charge is open and still being investigated

And that actually started I think like two or three days after we went public He got an email and said you've been summoned to a meeting

but we were all in Portland together at the time and I was over the IRB which purports to be an ethics committee doesn't have any problem with the ethics of policing themselves

No Okay, so you might want to point that out very strongly if they're not in a position to be policing

Accordance with their own policies no conflict of interest clearly There's something appalling about that and it's not surprising because there's plenty of calling about the institutional review boards. Hmm

Guilty it's been escalated to the president. And again the president could just decide

Just like that You know we're just gonna put a letter in this file of reprimand and we're gonna move on and I think that the whole problem would be

Ended except my guess is that there are a lot of people Crying for vengeance right now against me, right?

So they want to hang you out to dry as an object lesson to people who would dare to do the things that you threw

you've done because I'm a heretic and I'm a blasphemer and I have Attacked their canons and there has to be some price that's paid for this

That's my guess on their thinking and then the fabrication of data charge again. That's a very serious charge

Okay data, and those rules are put in put in place for a reason

I don't think a court would find I Mean it would be if see when this goes to court or if it does even go to court

The idea that this was fabricated either for personal gain Or that would have to not be revealed at some time and that the future lines of literature would be contaminated and polluted

It's just it's just not true. And I think that Well, they also a clear it it's a career-ending charge. So that's partly why it's being brought against you right data fabrication

There is anything rich? Well, there isn't any same thing worse within the domain of science than you can do that you can do than that

And it it's really unfortunate and preposterous because the data fabrication occurred

intentionally in the sense that we wanted to find out if they could detect because we Suspected from the very beginning as we were kind of discussing earlier that these people who largely work in

Humanities are not equipped to do social science, but that's ultimately what they're basically doing and so we wanted to see if they could detect utterly ridiculous data or

Data that were clearly cherry-picked or data or conclusions. I should say that we're drawn from data that aren't warranted

And so we wrote papers that included in this case. For example a dog park paper just

Transparently ridiculous data, in fact the first draft of that paper even we we knew the data were so bad that they were probably going to ask to see it and

Road okay, so you go through the papers then so so we'll talk about the dog park paper

why don't you go through the papers that have been published just briefly and say yes, they are and and and tell us why they're

transparently ridiculous because that's also Attention, right? Yeah. Yeah the dog park paper

was the first one we had accepted in February and it

chronicles it's a feminist scholar putative Lee that's chronicling dog rape culture by examining dog humping in Portland dog parks and

Then draws conclusions from that Using black feminist criminology as a tool to conclude that it would be appropriate to train men as we train dogs

if only it were politically feasible, so we have to come up with metaphorical equivalents and that it concludes that oppression of dogs based on perceived gender is real and the reason that that was

Allegedly concluded was we claimed that? humans intervened and broke up

Gay dog rape much more frequently and vigorously than they broke up straight dog rape

And the peen it's already a bit weird These things the paper the paper

in included for instance the detail that the that the scholar our sat in the dog park for a thousand hours over the course of a year, but never in the heavy rain and

Observed and then examined personally closely examined the genitals of

just short of ten thousand dogs, which if you've been to a dog park You've probably realized the same people bring their dogs almost every day

It's there's not 10,000 dogs in any dog park in a year, but never mind

Develop a reputation for looking at dogs genitals. Yeah, I think so and then immediately turning to ask their owners

Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me your sexual orientation? That's what the paper says week and it's very native of 10,000 dogs

Genitals of 10,000 dogs and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual orientations It includes details that are irrelevant like whether dogs used the bathroom in the in the other dogs or in the the food bowl

The water ball it talked about, you know The way people would break up dog fights like doing jumping jacks and singing we thought this data was so absurd

That we put in the first draft which the journal saw a Line that said that we took the data and put it in a recycle bin

So that they couldn't possibly ask us to produce it because we thought oh man if they ask for this data Which is so stupid it's over. So we said that we recycled the data which is already its own research miss practice and

No problem, you know the journal was like just write it up. Okay. I can't believe we're having this conversation

Listen the more we talk about this the more ridiculous it gets

There was the paper where we argued that if straight white or straight man, I'm sorry It doesn't matter what their races if straight men were to anally penetrate them selves with sex toys. They'd become less transphobic and more feminist

Which apparently got that conversation either they may not want to have that conversation But this data was this conclusion

Which was called a truly marvelous paper in an important contribution to knowledge by one of its reviewers

This paper was published this paper was based on interviews with 13 men only eight of whom were straight and

of course, it was all interview data, and it was just just people saying the most ridiculous things about their experience of sticking things in their own butts and then their feelings about feminism and

Concern for rape culture and in their attitudes about trans people and so on including one so-called social conservative

Who was quoted saying he didn't want to take part in some stupid liberal study about sticking things up his butt. I mean

It's almost impossible to have looked at this and not thought, you know, something's going on here but instead they thought truly marvelous paper in

Its that that's a second paper a third paper Was an ethnography allegedly of a 70 some-odd year-old man who went to Hooters with his Brazilian jiu-jitsu class

after workouts and sat there and basically just womanized for

Hours upon hours. It recorded something like 10,000 hours or sorry 10,000 minutes of

Conversation at the table which could all be summarized This was an example of clear cherry-picking of data

the only features of the Conversation that were relevant were the way that the guys hit on the servers or talk about the servers

you know various body parts or most importantly how much they enjoyed the fact that Hooters provides them a place that they can go and

Tell young attractive women what to do in a situation in which they are Contractually obligated to fulfill those those orders like literally double

entendre on the word order like please I would like some beer that's an order so

That was an example of clear cherry-picking and of course deriving ridiculous conclusions

didn't you guys know while you were doing this that you are going to get yourself in like a boatload of trouble I mean and

Now I see when you're talking about it you laugh And so you still got a sense of humor, which is quite a remarkable thing

But leave you you did this for a long time and like yeah It's hard to believe actually that you did manage to do it. I had some some moments especially where

I mean we were always aware that there would be a backlash and then when I started actually signing the transfer of copyright

documents to have the papers actually published I started to feel a little like, you know, we might really get in some trouble for this

but at this point we're kind of in deep and Might as well carry on and try to finish the experiment. We had intended to try to write papers for 12 months and

Then spend six to eight months kind of, you know, following up. The academic publishing process is slow

They do the review you get it back a couple months later you have to do edits It takes maybe another month or two before they accept or whatever then publication maybe another couple months later. So all it's slow

So we want to do a lot, you know six to eight months after Twelve months of writing and that was the intended and duration that we should be wrapping up the project now if we didn't get busted

But about late summer, the the dog park paper got picked up

by some journalists and the real peer-review and got made fun of and we realized we were probably Not going to make it to the end of our intended year and a half dish

Time span, so we ended up writing for 10 total months which is a bit of time and Then what a lot of papers still under review which was really a shame because I'm fairly sure that I had to got in

But I do want to speak to that Jordan because somebody had to do this. Yeah

Because the ideology because the perfect these professors are looking at their classrooms as an ideology now and

They're attempting to indoctrinate people and do Things about reality that have nothing to do with reality. They've placed an agenda ahead of the truth, and it's corroding our

Institutions in it's eroding trust in those universities and institutions and

You identified the problem many people identified the problem but something had to be done about it beyond identification and calling these people out we needed to show that needs to

deal Ajith amides canon's because they're The way that they were coming to knowledge is just epistemological to say it's not rigorous. This child is is charitable

So there kind of few pieces to that right? So you everybody as we mentioned a little bit earlier we touched upon

Is now familiar with the idea that racism and sexism don't seem to mean the same thing They meant ten years ago

you Used to be able to say racist and sexist and amend Discrimination based on race or sex and it could go in any direction

But now it's got this this power dynamic privilege plus power stuff. Everybody's talking about privilege. So that's everywhere

but if that's one dimension that it's impossible to avoid that the sociological or

grievance studies definitions for concepts are Everywhere, but they're also two other pieces of evidence one that we saw before we started

that would be a paper that was done by charlotta Stern who documented how

Insular Gender Studies is how they literally took the year since Steven Pinker published the blank slate 2003

Until 2015 or 16. She looked at a bunch of papers got a sample of those papers and determined whether or not they

incorporated or ignored the information that Pinker had shared as a as a as a test and found that there was an

Overwhelming amount of just putting the blinkers on and pretending that biology still doesn't exist. And that human nature is totally

a pretense here I mean the reason it's not a pretense is because as far as I can tell the people who are in these disciplines know

Absolutely. Nothing whatsoever about biology. No, they don't want it

the less, you know about biology the more you don't want to know that you need a

Daunting task. Yeah, I want to speak to that for a moment if I may so

At my university there's a course offered on the philosophy of race and it would seem to me that a minimum

qualification one would need to teach that is that one would have to have some kind of degree in evolutionary biology, but

that does not seem to be the case and I think again we're seeing

consistently You know race is such an explosive explosive topic but when you start with the idea that you have the

And then you work backward and cherry-picked the literature and in this case is extraordinarily easy because you just go to these

The journals and the canons of literature and then you start teaching that so what happens then? is the kind of the self fulfillment of the

postmodern Condition is that they then manufacture Pieces and information that people take as knowledge. That's right

We see that happening in our institutions now and it's nobody's calling them out on it So it's again I say that because it's your point of why did we do this?

Because the public trust in these institutions is being eroded and we're teaching our kids things that are just not true

they're just they're totally untethered to reality even though some of these people may be very well-meaning and

There's always a citation we learned there's always a cite all the citations you want to find something that says

Anything ridiculous about sex toys and anal taken care of there's questions power dynamics using that already

that Really is that is the important thing to sort of realize it about what we did

I mean all of that ridiculous stuff that Jim was saying earlier He we were able to say that because there was already something out there which led to it or said it

itself, and so if you're actually looking at what our project is something that's very important to look at is our references because to

Make its its satellite. I mean some of it like the dog park really yet. It's there's this humorous

There's a very humorous element in it But on a deeper level what it is is just gathering so much of this nonsense together

Sighting it putting it in there and then kind of making it do whatever it whatever we wanted it to do that

That was was the project and it's so your point is that you have embedded

Literature

They really, I mean a lot of the some of the academics have said well We haven't been fooled because we still stand by the papers what you wrote was

Reasonable because they are indistinguishable and that really was The point we wanted to have we've ended up with a really good resource for anyone who wants to know what is out there

they can look at our references they can look at the arguments if they enabled us to make they can look at how the reviewers

What they rejected us for what they accepted us for what they pushed us to do There's a very clear pattern but because it is so complicated and so few people

have taken the time it would take to read all of our papers to read all of the comments to follow up our, um, our

references it's not always clear that what we're doing is putting it right in the Canon that is

The other issue, and that has To do with the motivation of other academics not to be bothered with this, let's say, is that

The statistic that I'm most familiar with is that about 80% Of humanities papers get cited 0 times and the problem

Is that even to go after very bad ideas in an academically rigorous way is actually an extraordinarily

daunting task and it might be daunting in direct proportion to the to the

Appallingness of the ideas. So for example, if you're grading out a very bad undergraduate essay

It's way more difficult to grade a D paper than it is to grade a B paper

Because a D paper has so many errors in it. You don't even know where to start write the words are wrong

The sentences are wrong. The sentences aren't organized in the paragraph the paragraphs are chaotic and disjointed and the whole thing makes no sense and you actually have to ...

There isn't a level of criticism that can't be applied to a very bad paper And so it's absolutely exhausting intellectually apart from the danger that it poses

Personally, and so, you know before we assume that it's mere

Lack of character on the part of our fellow academics that is stopping them from taking a stand against such things

although I do by the sort of entrenched cowardice idea that emerges as

perhaps an inevitable consequence of participating in a structured hierarchy

It's that there are there are many more reasons why this has flourished including the inappropriate,

what would you call it, subsidization of these viewpoints for the last 50 years?

Yeah, I think that's right, it's really really Painstaking to pour through these papers and as a person, you know with a commitment to science and a background in science

It wasn't just even painstaking. I actually went into some pretty dark places I have dark psychological places

I remember reading the so I mentioned reading the Glaciology paper earlier the feminist glaciology

But I didn't read it in depth when we first found it, but when we started to do this project I wanted to emulate it and write one about feminist astronomy. You do it. Yeah

And I read the thing in tremendous depth and with great care Taking notes all the way through and and you know preparing so I could could write a facsimile and I shut down

I mean, I just almost locked myself in a room by myself for three days in a dark depression

I had to talk him down because he just got so despairing and he was just

Quoting bits to me. Look at this. How can this be?

Look, the same thing happened to me when I was writing 12 rules for life. I wrote a chapter called don't bother children when they're skateboarding and it's about the discouragement. Let's say of

Primarily of young men as a direct consequence of this the kind of rhetoric that we're discussing like that made me

Unbearable to my family for about three months because the more I studied it the more, well, It has a really

Fragmenting and chaotic effect going on you psychologically and I've also seen this manifested in my students

who, you know, who undergo this kind of activist indoctrination. It's such a it's such a

corrosive and cynical view of the world that all were we're all in it in our groups and that all the groups are fighting one another for

Power and that that's a fundamental transcendent reality It's just yeah

Now imagine imagine the sort of person who looks at that as an epistemological and moral virtue, and who teaches that to their students; who attempts to

indoctrinate their students into these, they don't even rise to the level of being false, in terms of these morally dangerous ideas,

and then they think that there are better people as a result; And then they think that if somebody calls them out on it, they're evil. Okay, so let's

look at this too. When Haidt and Lukianoff wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" (wonderful book) they pointed out as the American Psychological

Association and the American Psychiatric Association should have that all of the safe space and

Doctrines and trigger warning doctrines and and and that sort of thing And the speech codes, for example that are increasingly forbidding even sarcasm are

Exactly the opposite of the approach that you would take if you were a trained psychologist Trying to produce people who are more resilient

You actually make them weaker and more anxiety prone more anxiety prone more depressed and more hopeless and I think the evidence for that's

Absolutely clear and I think it's appalling that it wasn't clinical psychologists or psychiatrists who pointed it out and so it is that the

These doctors are being put forth for the benefit of those who formulate the doctrines and that the students are sacrificial victims in that in

that process. Yeah, there's one here's one more piece that I think is important it goes back to what Jim said about

not not seeing that a contradiction is problematic because the whole idea of contradiction is white science or Western science and that's

That's problematic is that we found that these folks don't really value discourse and dialogue and so

They don't really value having ideas challenged and questioned That's not their their reason for teaching these ideas in the first place. And if I may give you a quick example

Here's me well in state university wants to include ER has included at this point a

course on Native American philosophy which which I think is a great idea and

Somebody in the audience Asked a question And and the question was I went to a presentation and the question this individual asked was well

What do we do as settlers as colonialists when we want to question or challenge these?

ideas in the Native American philosophy and the presenter said You know, I've struggled with this it's very difficult for me. But the bottom line was it shouldn't it should be exempt from

Tools that we have used for other disciplines, you know the dialectic, you know

Challenging and so that first of all that places me in an almost impossible position

What am I supposed to do say, you know? Why is it exempt what it should play by the rules every other philosophy because then I become the God who hates

Western eight Indigenous people who age into this phosphate and then on the tool of the patriarchy which gets back to what you were

Question or asking before is why do we have this? Silenced in academia and what's the problem of it? So I think part of the problem is that these folks don't value discourse

They don't value dialogue. They don't value open expression They don't vote they view that and again There's a paper for this they view that as a type of violence

words or type of minds this type of form of violence And so then their students develop brittle

Epistemologies because they've never heard the other side of the story Right and they develop them just when they should be developing resil resilience. Exactly, correct? And

Yeah, it is a litmus test I always I always ask folks why who are gender studies in my class or study in the ingredient Studies fields

why isn't Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler taught and (I don't) hear a single single student that says yes, I've learned about that in my classes

well they don't they don't teach that because they have a prevailing moral orthodoxy and they want to indoctrinate students with it and

they've kind of hijacked the administration and as I said before they've weaponized offices of diversity inclusion etcetera to punish people who are heretics and who question or challenge this

Okay, so we're gonna run out of time we run down to about ten minutes here so I want to here's a question that I want to bring to all three of you I think one is

Why in the world should anybody outside of academia care about this? that's the first thing (great question) and most a very careful answer that and the second is

For each of you what's been the personal consequence of this and would you have repeated it if you knew what the

Consequences were going to be so let's start with the first one Why in the world should they why in the world should anyone care that some half-witted academic journal?

published an insane paper by three renegade academics about what about dog rape of all the absurd

of the observe absurd topics It's so surreal that it seems

Virtually incomprehensible. Sensible people should avoid it. So what's the answer to that?

Well, go ahead Ellen

The university is It is our source of knowledge production

If we look back through history When our cultures were Christian the new knowledge about this was coming from the universities when we had the Scientific Revolution

when we went into the Enlightenment This was coming from the universities these things don't stay in the universities

We have seen it is coming out in Its what is essentially happened with the kind of identity studies that we're looking at is that it has been made directly

actionable by activists It has been tagged on to the end of the civil rights movements and liberal feminism and gay pride

When those movements have started to see diminishing returns and people wanted to continue

Then it's it's tagged on to the end of that to a society, which is just seeing the end of empire

The end of Jim Crow and is geared towards Towards social justice and it is kind it is it is seeded here

So its also a warning to the corporations because it is permeating the HR department. It's like think something this insidious is going to stay in the

Universities and don't be thinking that you can import 2% of it without importing the other 98%.

Yeah, people leave University and they join these industries. Also, there's pressure on corporations

to comply with the the reigning moral orthodoxy I mean I don't think that the average business owner or the average person in the street knows anything about

Foucault or Crenshaw or even thinks much about this but it is in the air now and it is it is in the air now, and it is

effecting it is effecting everything and we do need to take it seriously without sort of having a moral panic

We need to look at it calmly and empirically and address it as it actually is.

Yeah, and what should we do about it? That's the next issue because that's a podcast.

Yeah, okay fine. That's another podcast. And the final question for all three of you is and maybe one at a time

Would you do it again I Would yeah, I would definitely do it again

Okay, so we know that you're an unrepentant troublemaker. I am definitely an unrepentant troublemaker. I've also found like my one great talent in the world and I feel like it I've made my own life obsolete now

Okay, I can be a wonderful bullshit artist if anybody is looking for one

Okay. Yeah, I would definitely do it again. It's worth the risk. I think it needed to be done Helen let's ask you next and then we'll get let Peter have the last word because he's the one that's got the most on the

Line at the moment. Yes. Yes, I would do it again I mean I've I was imagining all sorts of things from being arrested under sort of hate

Speech Act to being physically attacked because I have an uncommon name. I've had an awful lot of online abuse

I've got some persistent stalkers But that has essentially ... I probably won't get into a PhD program in my own country though

somebody in Germany has offered, bless her, but it's been It's been it's been quite necessary for survival, it was worth doing and I would do it again. Okay Peter

It had done. It had to be done. There's a crisis in the universities. There's a crisis with knowledge production as a crisis of confidence

this may come at a heavy price to me and I have had to weigh out my family obligations helping put my son through school, you know being a

Part of a, I'm married so being in a relationship in which I economically contribute to the to the house

but this had to be done someone had to do it and if I am a Consequence of this then. So be it it had to be done. Yeah

Well Peter weren't there's a bunch of us who are not particularly inclined to let you be a sole sacrificial victim;

So if your university wants to get too stupid with you then, um, Let's let's assume that they're going to be consequences. I sincerely appreciate your support the bottom of my heart. Thank you

Yeah, well enough is enough. So well look guys. It was really good talking to you. Although I think that you're quite the

Surreal bunch of troublemakers and perhaps exactly what this crazy situation requires and

Well, and I and I hope that I hope Peter that that things work out for you properly over the next few years

It's gonna be a tough haul for a while. There's no doubt about that. So well, are you getting any student support at your university?

Yeah, I'm getting a lot of student support the University, but you know I have to be blunt with you

I've people are threatened to attack me a few weeks ago someone spit at me My colleagues literally well walk down the corridor they'll turn their heads

It's it's a but that you know, the uncomfortable things they own it's not that much different from the typical University Department

yeah, it's it has seemed to be I Am I mean I I want to be blunt with you

It is a concern for my safety in Portland when I leave the house now

yeah, and I now been threatened on more than one occasion by people and I'm concerned. Do you,

You do you find the threats credible? I mean, I know every every threat is upsetting But like are you actually in the situation where you have some apprehension about leaving your house? Or are you able to put that aside?

I don't have any apprehension about leaving my house look, You know,

I wake up in the morning and I in emails and tweets people telling me how stupid I am and what a

Bad person I am a homophobe and a racist. All right, that doesn't do anything to me

But when I walk out in the street.. I was out at a bar a few weeks ago Or maybe a few months ago. I don't need no lifetime lines, but you know someone

Someone came up to me and he started harassing me. I fortunately with my jujitsu coach John Biggins

and he's a black belt in jujitsu, and he immediately pulled up the chair beside us and I kept saying let's talk

Let's have a conversation. No, he followed me in the bathroom. I came out of the bathroom Finally I look I don't know what's happening

I don't know why you're so upset But I'm happy to talk to you and he said I don't want to talk to you Peter. I want to hurt you

That's that's pretty that's pretty serious Yeah, and then it happened again on the street when I was surrounded about a week and a half ago, by people

I assume they're antifa or people or something clearly wanted to

hurt me, so You know, I am I am concerned. I am concerned look, I mean those four people who have a been through

It's very hard for people how to be true that sort of thing to understand just exactly how distressing that kind of occurrence is not

Only good things happens, but because it could happen again and it could become more serious. So I'm really sorry to hear that

I didn't realize it didn't come to that. That's that's no laughing matter I appreciate that and

Threats on your door left on your door and on any poster that's got anything to do with you and there's there's this swastikas

There's insults, there's leaflets and notices

Oddly, that kind of stuff doesn't bother me it's when it's in the physical world where I feel

Someone I mean if someone tells you they're gonna hurt you. You should take their word. Yes Definitely when it's that direct and when it's that in-your-face, so those threats are credible. That's that's a real. That's a real danger

So that's that's well. Look. I'm really sorry to hear that. And I'm I'm also sorry to hear that. You're paying a substan

I'm sorry to hear a general that you're paying a substantive price for that I'm going to do what I can for what that's worth to

try to make sure that people hear about this and that you're not in it alone because I think you guys are like

comedians, you know you're Canaries in the coal mine and whatever happens to you is going to happen to a lot of other people if if it's allowed to happen to you so it can't

Be allowed to happen to you. That's what it looks like to me. So thank you for supporting yeah. Alright guys

Well, thanks a lot for talking to me all it was, it was

stupidly interesting talking with you. I know that's a hell of a thing to say.

You know, it's so ridiculous you you can't you couldn't invent this in a bad piece of fiction

And it's it's so sad that that this is the sort of thing that we have to occupy ourself with

when there is serious work to be done, so Maybe. All right. Well happy new year.

I suppose hopefully this will be a watershed year and things will get more intelligent from here on in

Yeah, I'm sure hoping that'll be the case. Me, too. Thank you All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and I'll let you know when this is all coming online. Okay?