Postmodern Monsters | with Stephen Hicks

Dr. Stephen Hicks is a professor and lecturer who has been speaking about the origins and outcomes of Postmodernism for over 20 years. In this discussion, provided by the the new media platform thinkspot, we explore the Evergreen Protests in the light of intellectual trends dating from the Enlightenment.

Follow him on twitter @SRCHicks

And me @BenjaminABoyce

[KM-pokk]

I love Stephen Hicks. I’ve listened to many interviews and have read his book. Benjamin you’re on a roll with your interviews! Keep it up, you’re becoming one of my favorite YouTubers!!! BTW, I’m not even in your target demographic. I’m a mom with 2 sons, 10 & 13 who lives in a red state. But I’m attuned to this issue like a laser beam because I believe this is the battle of the future. (I’m not really religious or particularly conservative. I’m just a normal centrist American but pretty sure I’m part of a silent “huge” majority.)

[outofbluepills]

Stephen Hicks deserves to appear on any list of "intellectual dark web" heavy hitters. He does a great job describing where the different players in the social "justice" movement are coming from, both philosophically and psychologically. What a reasonable, intellectually honest, insightful thinker Hicks is. Excellent interview, Benjamin.

[cordful]

I worked at an Australian university a few years back as a support worker for students with disabilities. This had me sit in on various units from different faculties. I recall with some gladness now that nursing students voted with their feet by dropping out in droves very early on from a unit imposed on them by the arts/post-modernist mob. They saw it as a total waste of time. I now see how justified they were, and feel that the future may indeed be in good hands - those of the sane, mostly silent majority. Another observation was that students involved in 'cultural studies' and such units, were quite immature emotionally, very disagreeable, and frankly, not the brightest - nuance was lost on them.

[timothyfrantz]

The far left has drifted to post modernism, the far right has drifted to pre modernism.

[judithgervais]

When responding to Benjamin's question about the need for a religious foundation, or similar ethical scaffolding, Stephen Hicks nicely outlined secular humanism's credentials. The robust legacy of human insights and creativity. The primary question used to be was there any impenetrable mystery utterly beyond human understanding, not whether or not human understanding was valid.

[galacticusX]

The cats wanted to interject there at the end. I call shenanigans and oppression of marginalized voices by the host.

[paultweedlie]

I enjoyed listening to Dr Stephen Hicks's ideas. Sadly, I think that most university degrees have become irrelevant.

[ulysses]

No matter which of the three "versions" postmodernism one might prefer, each is based on an insurmountable contradiction. The only question is, how many of us will be damaged when the whole structure implodes. I think your sleepless concerns about an effective interview were well rewarded. Nice job, Benjamin.

[rebeccab.]

Watching this on April 26, 2020 and this interview has taken on even more relevance as we see the immense dangers and dehumanization of their tyrannical obsessions.

[TheBasicTruth]

Thank you Benjamin and please extend my thanks to Stephen Hicks. Your questions and Stephen's answers have confirmed my opinion of what happened and is happening at Evergreen and also the reasons why the people there (staff as well as students) behave the way they do. Postmodernism has been something that I've studied since the turn of the century, but I was aware of its symptoms decades before that. I had an epiphany in 2007 when I read Shelley Gare's, The Triumph of the Airheads and the Retreat from Commonsense, a book that touches on some aspects of the crazy, almost futile waste of time that is postmodernism.

[effectivehorsemanship]

I thought this was a superb dissection of the differing philosophies that humans have constructed in order to make sense of our unavoidable cohabitation.


I have always found Derrida annoying - there's a man who needs to learn that 'No' means 'No'.


Loving the dark blue T shirts, Ben.

[iamgoddard]

*From **1:06:11**, Benjamin proposes a brilliant thesis:* "I'm... wondering if the reason that postmodernism came back was because there was no religious structure undergirding or in conjunction with a reason structure, so it has to revert back into a number of people can't reason their way through things, they need to feel their way through things, and without that religious substrate there's no place for those people to find a home and connect with the reasonable people."

What strikes me as self-evident in there is that it seems there are people who "can't reason their way through things, they need to feel their way through things, " and that seems both like people who are highly religious and social-justice warriors. It’s the aspect of SJWs that earns them the NCP label, people who seem to have become hollow emitters of ideologically pre-scripted statements, ideological possession.

Could there be a critical mass of people who need to find meaning in life through narrative and feelings and another portion that finds meaning through reason? And could it be that because the reasoning fraction reasoned its way out of religious narratives that had guided societies since the dawn of time and because that atheistic fraction (of which I am a member) began to shape social belief, that the inevitable feeling fraction of society has been deprived of a core meaning-shaping emotive narrative that they have naturally coalesced around some narrative that defines sacred and profane, good (equity) and evil (oppression)? They would be people whom it makes little sense to try to reason with, because they arrive at a worldview not by reason but by feeling and crowd following.

I could expound at some length but suffice to say, Ben’s mind is always full of shiny nuggets of brilliance!

[hreedwork]

Benjamin, Wow... you're in the big league with this interview. 😎

[btrenninger]

Interesting conversation but, I end up the same place I always do. And, I'm sure this argument is nothing new. But, as an engineer, if I've learned anything over the years is that, despite philosopher's questioning that reality can be known, the moment an engineer stops trying to understand reality disaster is sure to happen. I always end up with Johnson's "I refute it thus."

[willosee]

Douglas Murray speaks to your question regarding a lack of religious sub structure. He is an atheist but argues that when you consider many moral positions that religion looks you in the eye.

[jamesmatamoros]

I don't agree with this speaker. What I find consistent with "ghettoized" people who deal only with their own class or race with little connection or interaction intensity with others, is that they have no clue about how the mass of Americans live and work very well with each other every day. There are tens of millions of us of every race and religion who work together well every day, who buy and sell from each other, who medically take care of each other, who rent and loan from each other with respect, fairness, often laughter with no animosity. This group will be the unlistened to tipping point

[ryPish]

53:20 What is never _scare-quoted?_

I was typing what I thing would be James Lindsay's answer to this, and Benjamin brought it up, so I'll just try to wrap it and put little bow on it.

Postmodernism is supposed to be about questioning, criticising and deconstructing everything, once you have done that to everything you can think of,
you might now start to look for something you can latch on. In a Cartesian move, academics barely intelligent enough to fool themselves decided "I am oppressed therefore I am", and just like Descartes, they were mostly wrong.

Marx, already trendy in academic circles at the time, provided a ready-made ideology of how to deal with oppression, and how power is at core of everything.
This is why everything is framed in terms of oppression, why you have to demonstrate that you are more oppressed to be heard before someone else etc.
Which is what you might call a Grand Narrative, something you could deconstruct with postmodern tools, but PoMo-Marxists won't.
It seems that they would rather embody the paradox of being both marxist and postmodern and just stay a rambling, walking contradiction, going nowhere.

We now have a small group of people walking in circles around the sacred concept of Oppression, chanting postmodern hymns.
And thus a new Durkheimian religion was born.
Happy-merry nondescript native festivities.
**gender-neutral jazz hands**

[markasp]

Excellent questions asked by Benjamin here to tease out the complexities of the consequences of 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th generation pomo.

[pinklutlepig]

And the groups scatter and have their language confused.
Like at the tower of Babel.

[guthrie]

That purposefully placed black lady painting tho