Transcript
00:00:00 I hate affirmative action.
00:00:02 I don’t just disagree with it.
00:00:03 I don’t just think it’s against the 14th Amendment.
00:00:06 I hate it.
00:00:07 The hatred comes from an understanding
00:00:09 that it is a bandaid, that it is a substitute
00:00:12 for the actual development of the capacities
00:00:14 of our people to compete.
00:00:16 They wanna tell African Americans to pat us on the head.
00:00:20 We’re gonna have a separate program for you.
00:00:22 We’re gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
00:00:25 That doesn’t make us any smarter.
00:00:27 It doesn’t make us any more creative
00:00:30 and it doesn’t make us any more fit
00:00:34 for the actual competition that’s unfolding before us.
00:00:39 The following is a conversation with Glenn Loury,
00:00:42 professor of economics and social sciences
00:00:44 at Brown University.
00:00:45 He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time,
00:00:49 writing and speaking about race and inequality.
00:00:53 I highly encourage you to listen to his show
00:00:56 on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.
00:01:01 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
00:01:02 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:04 in the description.
00:01:06 And now, dear friends, here’s Glenn Loury.
00:01:10 Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech
00:01:12 I think is the greatest speech in American history.
00:01:15 If I may, I’d like to read a few words of it.
00:01:17 Sure.
00:01:18 And ask you a question about this dream.
00:01:21 I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
00:01:26 and live out the true meaning of its creed.
00:01:28 We hold these truths to be self evident,
00:01:31 that all men are created equal.
00:01:34 I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,
00:01:38 the sons of former slaves and the sons of former
00:01:41 slave owners will be able to sit down together
00:01:44 at the table of brotherhood.
00:01:47 I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
00:01:50 a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
00:01:54 sweltering with the heat of oppression,
00:01:56 will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
00:02:00 I have a dream that my four little children
00:02:04 will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
00:02:08 by the color of their skin,
00:02:09 but by the content of their character.
00:02:12 I have a dream today.
00:02:14 First of all, damn.
00:02:16 I mentioned to you offline I immigrated to America
00:02:19 and this is why I love this country.
00:02:20 This is one of the great speeches that represents
00:02:23 what this country is about.
00:02:25 So what is this ideal of equality
00:02:29 that we should strive for as a nation,
00:02:31 that all men are created equal?
00:02:33 What does that mean to you, this equality?
00:02:37 Well, if we put this in historical context,
00:02:43 King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.
00:02:47 It’s exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs
00:02:53 the Emancipation Proclamation
00:02:55 declaring the enslaved people to be free.
00:03:02 They’re not yet citizens in 1863,
00:03:07 but the end of slavery has become the position
00:03:10 of the federal government when Lincoln issues
00:03:13 that Emancipation Proclamation.
00:03:17 So putting it in context, enslaved people,
00:03:22 four million or so African descended enslaved people,
00:03:28 how do they become citizens?
00:03:31 How do they become in this status of subjugation
00:03:38 and domination and stigma and exclusion?
00:03:42 How do they become citizens?
00:03:44 It seems to me that that’s the heart of it.
00:03:48 The equality that King is talking about
00:03:53 is an equality of status as members of the nation
00:03:59 as free and equal citizens within the republic.
00:04:04 Now, I think it’s really important to understand
00:04:07 that slavery was not merely a legal order,
00:04:13 but it was also a social system
00:04:18 that had the symbolism attached to it.
00:04:22 They had a big journey to make
00:04:25 from their subjugated status as serfs, as landless people,
00:04:30 as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really
00:04:33 in the minds of many.
00:04:35 So I think that’s what in 1963, 100 years later,
00:04:42 that King is appealing to this idea
00:04:45 that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence
00:04:50 writes these words, all men are created equal
00:04:54 and endowed by their creator
00:04:56 with certain inalienable rights,
00:04:59 Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, didn’t have in mind
00:05:05 when he wrote those words, the people who were slaves.
00:05:10 But by the time you get to 1963,
00:05:13 King is invoking this idea, all men,
00:05:19 and of course he means all persons.
00:05:20 He doesn’t only mean men.
00:05:23 He means men and women are created equal.
00:05:25 He wants this idea to be embraced by the country
00:05:30 in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.
00:05:35 That’s his dream.
00:05:35 That’s his idea.
00:05:37 The legacy of slavery would be erased,
00:05:41 that the position of African Americans would be equalized
00:05:46 within the political community,
00:05:48 which is the United States of America.
00:05:51 That’s my sense of it in any case.
00:05:53 So on a very basic level, the worth of a human being
00:05:58 is equal.
00:05:59 It’s just literally the worth of a human being.
00:06:02 So I mentioned to you offline
00:06:03 that I came from the Soviet Union.
00:06:06 My grandfather fought in World War II,
00:06:10 and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person
00:06:17 as they were captured, there’s different numbers,
00:06:21 but it’s in the hundreds to one German
00:06:24 in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.
00:06:30 So he wanted Germany to expand
00:06:32 and conquer a large part of the world.
00:06:34 And within that future world, that Third Reich,
00:06:37 the worth of a Russian or a Slavic person
00:06:41 is one hundredth or one thousandth of a German person,
00:06:45 of a pure German person.
00:06:47 So that has to do with not some kind of public policy
00:06:51 or politics or all that kind of stuff.
00:06:53 It has to do with the basic worth of a human being.
00:06:56 And that’s what Dr. King is speaking to,
00:06:58 that all people on some kind of deep level
00:07:03 are worth the same.
00:07:07 If you’re somehow weighing the value of a person,
00:07:10 we’re equal in that basic fundamental worth.
00:07:14 Yeah, I think that’s correct.
00:07:16 I think that’s very well said.
00:07:18 I don’t know that he had in mind
00:07:20 the position of Slavic people in Central Europe
00:07:23 in the middle of the 20th century,
00:07:25 or the first part of the 20th century, King.
00:07:27 I don’t know that he had that in mind.
00:07:29 He might well have done.
00:07:31 But certainly that’s the idea.
00:07:34 So you don’t think he was really thinking
00:07:35 about this particular civil rights struggle
00:07:40 and the particular struggle
00:07:42 against the backdrop of the history of slavery in America
00:07:47 and thinking about African Americans.
00:07:49 He wasn’t thinking about the basic,
00:07:52 he wasn’t speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.
00:07:55 No, I don’t mean to say that.
00:07:56 The speech in Washington.
00:08:00 The dream.
00:08:01 In 1963 at that march was within the context
00:08:07 of the United States.
00:08:08 And it was within the context of the civil rights movement.
00:08:12 There was a movement that was going on.
00:08:15 He was an actor in a political drama that was American
00:08:21 that had to do with the fight over equal rights
00:08:26 for voting, for housing, for employment,
00:08:30 for citizenship of blacks in America.
00:08:34 But King was informed, I think,
00:08:37 by a much broader Christian ethic of the equality
00:08:43 of all persons.
00:08:44 I mean, he gets killed in 1968.
00:08:48 The five years after that speech in Washington,
00:08:51 he spends developing his worldview
00:08:57 and the things that he had to say, for example,
00:09:01 about the war in Southeast Asia that was going on
00:09:03 at that time made appeals to universal principles
00:09:10 of equality.
00:09:11 He was a pacifist to some degree.
00:09:13 He was against war.
00:09:15 He was a socialist to some degree.
00:09:18 He might not have worn that label publicly,
00:09:22 but he believed in a decent society
00:09:25 where the poor would not go untended,
00:09:27 where healthcare would be available to people who needed it
00:09:30 and this kind of thing.
00:09:32 A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life
00:09:37 was not dependent upon the color of the skin,
00:09:40 upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken,
00:09:44 upon whether male or female.
00:09:48 All persons are created equal.
00:09:50 This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King,
00:09:55 on my understanding.
00:09:56 Broadly speaking, what do you learn about human nature
00:10:01 by looking at the history of slavery in America?
00:10:07 Oh my.
00:10:08 So what does that tell you about people?
00:10:10 Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head.
00:10:15 One is about the capacity of people
00:10:22 for looking the other way in the face of
00:10:27 unethical and morally profoundly problematic practice.
00:10:38 So, I mean, slavery was controversial.
00:10:40 It was controversial going all the way back
00:10:42 to the founding of the United States of America.
00:10:44 The country was founded on a compromise
00:10:47 where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent
00:10:52 and would not have had it countenanced in the Constitution.
00:10:59 The other half of the country were steeped
00:11:02 in the dependence on the labor of these African captives
00:11:07 and their descendants.
00:11:08 The economy depended upon it.
00:11:10 They owned them as property.
00:11:11 That was their wealth.
00:11:12 Their wealth was invested to some degree
00:11:14 in the value of these human beings.
00:11:17 And in order for the United States to come together
00:11:20 as a confederation of the several colonies,
00:11:24 there had to be a compromise made.
00:11:25 And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist
00:11:31 and the people who were against it
00:11:35 or who thought it morally problematic
00:11:38 were able to countenance the practice
00:11:42 in the Southern states where slavery flourished.
00:11:45 And that went on for 75 years
00:11:47 after the founding of the country
00:11:49 until the crisis of the late 1850s
00:11:53 that led to the Civil War
00:11:55 and ultimately to the emancipation.
00:11:56 So one thing I think about human nature
00:12:00 from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people
00:12:05 to live with terrible, morally questionable practices
00:12:11 and have that as a part of their institutions.
00:12:14 It took a movement, a massive movement of abolitionists
00:12:20 struggling against slavery for the better part of a century
00:12:24 before that practice could be eradicated.
00:12:29 But the other thing about human nature that I see
00:12:34 is the ability of people to sustain their humanity
00:12:39 under the most awful, oppressive conditions.
00:12:44 The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children,
00:12:49 I mean, they were chattel,
00:12:51 they were bought and sold like horses or cattle.
00:12:56 And yet their humanity was not destroyed by that.
00:13:01 And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree
00:13:06 in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive,
00:13:11 the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved
00:13:16 and who were set free were able to over the following decades
00:13:25 build a foundation for the development of African Americans
00:13:30 within the context of American society
00:13:34 that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement
00:13:39 of the middle of the 20th century
00:13:41 and has led us into the present day.
00:13:45 So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil
00:13:53 but human nature can also survive
00:13:55 in the face of terrible evil.
00:13:58 That’s what I take from slavery.
00:14:00 That survival, that flame can burn even when the world
00:14:05 around it tries to put it out.
00:14:07 There’s still a little flame of human consciousness,
00:14:11 of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is
00:14:16 that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful
00:14:19 that lives on.
00:14:21 That’s very well said.
00:14:22 Yeah, I think you put it very well.
00:14:23 There’s gotta be some poetic way of expressing that.
00:14:28 Oh.
00:14:29 Leave it to the poets.
00:14:31 What about the people that look the other way?
00:14:34 How many people do you think, just regular people,
00:14:37 knew that something is, this is wrong?
00:14:40 Or do people through generations convince themselves,
00:14:44 most people, most regular people,
00:14:46 convince themselves that there’s nothing wrong?
00:14:52 Yeah.
00:14:53 I ask this question because I wonder
00:14:55 what we’re looking the other way on today also.
00:14:59 Because you have to ask yourself these difficult questions
00:15:05 of assuming we’re the same people we were back then
00:15:10 then we can be flawed in that same kind of way.
00:15:14 We can look the other way just as others have in history.
00:15:20 Yeah, you spoke of the European context
00:15:24 and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people
00:15:28 had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes
00:15:33 that were committed by that regime were being undertaken.
00:15:36 I mean, railroad cars full of human beings
00:15:39 being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death
00:15:43 in labor camps or to be gassed, et cetera.
00:15:48 A lot of people had to know about what was going on
00:15:50 and look the other way or enthusiastically supported
00:15:55 the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on.
00:16:01 And I don’t know, I wasn’t around in 1840.
00:16:05 My sense of the matter is that like many practices
00:16:09 that are unjust, most people thought
00:16:12 that’s just the way it is.
00:16:14 I mean, that’s the world that they inherited.
00:16:16 They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries.
00:16:20 They just wanted to go along.
00:16:22 Some people might’ve been troubled by it
00:16:24 but thought there’s nothing that can be done.
00:16:26 Some people might’ve thought, well,
00:16:28 they’re these black Africans, they’re not really like us
00:16:32 and they are lucky to be here.
00:16:35 If they were in Africa, they’d be worse off still.
00:16:38 Some people might’ve thought that.
00:16:40 Some people might’ve been disturbed
00:16:42 but not been able to see what it is
00:16:44 that they could do about it.
00:16:46 They might’ve thought, oh, this is disgusting.
00:16:51 This is not something I would wanna have anything to do with
00:16:56 but not knowing whether there’s any practical way
00:17:01 of opposing it, that’s why you need a movement.
00:17:05 You need for the people who are troubled by the practice
00:17:10 to know that there are others like themselves
00:17:12 equally troubled and as they gather together,
00:17:16 collectively, they can exert their influence.
00:17:20 I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery,
00:17:24 as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.
00:17:28 There were abolitionists and there were people
00:17:30 who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents
00:17:36 and institutions that created the United States of America,
00:17:40 opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.
00:17:47 But it took a while before that could come to a head
00:17:52 and produce the crisis which ultimately led
00:17:56 to the eradication of slavery.
00:17:59 I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States.
00:18:05 It’s not unique to the Western Hemisphere.
00:18:08 The enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel
00:18:14 is something that one sees on a global basis,
00:18:18 one sees it going all the way back to antiquity.
00:18:22 So we might ask, how is it that people finally came
00:18:26 to turn their backs and eradicate the practice?
00:18:30 That might be the thing worth really trying to understand
00:18:33 because the practice itself is,
00:18:36 there’s a wonderful book by the sociologist
00:18:40 Orlando Patterson called Slavery and Social Death
00:18:46 that was published in 1982, which is a comprehensive history
00:18:51 and social analysis of the institution of slavery
00:18:55 over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek
00:19:00 and Roman civilizations, finding slavery in Africa
00:19:06 amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East,
00:19:09 finding slavery in the Far East,
00:19:11 finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people,
00:19:16 the practice of taking someone as a captive in war
00:19:19 and then instead of killing them, which you could do,
00:19:22 making them into your property was very, very widespread
00:19:27 in human culture.
00:19:30 So I mean, I’d like to make this point sometimes
00:19:33 when people are talking about how wrong slavery was
00:19:36 and I agree without any question
00:19:40 that the practice was profoundly morally problematic,
00:19:46 but I’d like to make the point that given how wrong it was,
00:19:50 think about how impressive was the accomplishment
00:19:55 of the eradication of slavery.
00:19:58 Now, that was something, I mean, there were 600,000 dead
00:20:01 in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865
00:20:06 in a country of 30 million people.
00:20:08 That’s a lot of dead people who gave their lives
00:20:13 not to eradicate slavery in every instance,
00:20:16 probably most of them were just fighting for,
00:20:21 they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces
00:20:25 and they fought and they died,
00:20:27 but the net effect of their having fought and died
00:20:30 was to push along a process
00:20:32 that led to the eradication of slavery.
00:20:34 That’s an amazing achievement.
00:20:37 The slaves themselves were largely uneducated
00:20:43 and backward in their,
00:20:47 of course, what else could they have been?
00:20:48 They were kept in captivity,
00:20:50 they were prevented from developing their human potential
00:20:55 and yet after the end of slavery,
00:20:58 that population, that 4 million plus African descended people
00:21:04 became the foundation for what a century later
00:21:08 leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall
00:21:12 and giving that great speech
00:21:14 and now here we are 150 years down the road
00:21:18 and Barack Obama is president of the United States.
00:21:21 Now, he did not descend from slaves,
00:21:23 I think we must not lose track of that,
00:21:25 but he identified as an African American
00:21:29 and was a part of the population
00:21:32 that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves
00:21:36 and we are, we African Americans are
00:21:40 for all practical purposes,
00:21:42 fully equal citizens of this great republic.
00:21:46 That has happened within a century and a half
00:21:49 and I don’t know that you can find any parallel
00:21:52 to that kind of transformation in the status of people
00:21:56 from human chattel to full citizens of the republic.
00:22:01 Anywhere in human history,
00:22:02 it’s certainly worth celebrating the achievement
00:22:07 of the eradication of slavery, I would say.
00:22:10 And it probably started with a few people
00:22:14 that inside their mind dared to rebel.
00:22:18 You know, it’s interesting to think about how it all started,
00:22:23 how in the state of injustice,
00:22:26 the revolution percolates, like where it starts.
00:22:32 You said people that see something is wrong find each other.
00:22:39 It’s in the ideas of charismatic individuals
00:22:43 that not only know that something is wrong,
00:22:44 but are able to tell others about it and be convincing
00:22:51 and then together gather and rise up.
00:22:54 It’s interesting to make this kind of incredible progress
00:22:58 from slavery to where we are today
00:23:00 to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal.
00:23:06 Yeah.
00:23:06 The power of individual,
00:23:07 because I don’t know what you think about it,
00:23:10 but I tend to think that a few small individuals
00:23:14 probably originated this.
00:23:16 Like it’s the power of the individual,
00:23:18 because sometimes we think there’s injustice in the world,
00:23:20 what can I possibly do?
00:23:22 But I tend to think one person can be the seed
00:23:26 of starting to fix the injustice.
00:23:29 Sure.
00:23:31 One person here, one person there.
00:23:34 Yeah.
00:23:36 One thinks of course of Frederick Douglass,
00:23:38 this massively significant figure who was born in slavery,
00:23:46 who stole his freedom because he was property
00:23:52 and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore
00:23:54 and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally
00:23:59 and who became an educated, a powerfully articulate,
00:24:04 massively influential person in the United States
00:24:09 and in England going around presenting himself
00:24:14 as an embodiment of human dignity
00:24:18 and commitment to ideals of equality.
00:24:24 And I mean, he’s just one person,
00:24:27 but there were others like him.
00:24:30 Just one person.
00:24:31 All it takes is just one person.
00:24:33 So here we are on this topic of equality
00:24:39 in the 21st century.
00:24:43 So what does equality mean today?
00:24:45 If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome
00:24:53 or the injustice of inequality,
00:24:56 at which point does equality of outcome is just,
00:25:01 at which point is it unjust?
00:25:03 Sort of looking at our world today
00:25:05 and looking at inequality,
00:25:08 how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice
00:25:14 and some is the way of life?
00:25:16 So what does equality mean when we look at the world today,
00:25:19 different from Dr. King’s speech of the basic humanity?
00:25:23 I don’t think King’s speech, I have a dream
00:25:27 that one day my four little children will be judged
00:25:29 not by the color of their skin,
00:25:31 but by the content of their character
00:25:34 requires equality of outcome.
00:25:40 He says his children will be judged
00:25:42 by the content of their character.
00:25:44 That’s a conditional statement.
00:25:46 That is the judgment will depend upon the content
00:25:49 of their character, not the color of their skin,
00:25:54 but it doesn’t follow from that,
00:25:56 that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth
00:26:01 and economic power,
00:26:05 position within the society,
00:26:06 representation in the various professions,
00:26:10 the various measures of social achievement
00:26:13 doesn’t follow from judging by the content of character
00:26:17 and not color of skin,
00:26:19 that when we look at the end of the day
00:26:21 at the social outcomes that they will be equal
00:26:24 across the different groups.
00:26:27 In fact, I think there’s a contradiction in the idea
00:26:29 that groups will be equal
00:26:31 in all of the various social outcomes,
00:26:34 that they will be equally successful in business,
00:26:36 that they will be proportionately represented
00:26:40 in the various professions,
00:26:42 that they will have the same educational achievement,
00:26:45 that the occupational profiles will look the same.
00:26:49 If they are, in fact, distinct groups
00:26:53 with their own cultural traditions and practices,
00:26:58 with their own ideals and norms,
00:27:01 various immigrant populations,
00:27:04 people coming to the United States of America
00:27:06 from all corners of the world,
00:27:09 the descendants of the African slaves,
00:27:13 the black Americans here today,
00:27:15 who are ourselves various with different backgrounds,
00:27:19 different origins and so on,
00:27:21 the different religious practices and commitments
00:27:25 that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever,
00:27:32 however we parcel up the total population
00:27:37 into the various groups,
00:27:38 these groups are themselves different from one another.
00:27:42 They have different norms
00:27:45 within their own cultural practice.
00:27:48 How would we expect,
00:27:49 if in fact we recognize
00:27:51 that the groups are different from one another,
00:27:54 that in a world that is fair,
00:27:56 they would all come out equally represented
00:28:00 in every undertaking.
00:28:00 They’re not equally represented,
00:28:03 and that fact, I’m arguing,
00:28:06 is in and of itself insufficient
00:28:09 to justify the conclusion
00:28:11 that they’re not somehow being fairly treated.
00:28:15 Fair treatment doesn’t imply equal outcomes
00:28:18 in a world in which the populations in question
00:28:21 are themselves different
00:28:23 with respect to their culture, their practices,
00:28:25 their norms, their traditions,
00:28:27 their beliefs, their ideals, and so on.
00:28:31 The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs,
00:28:35 cultural orientations, and ideals
00:28:37 will have consequences
00:28:40 in terms of their different social outcomes.
00:28:44 So I just think it’s a mistake
00:28:46 that people are making
00:28:47 when they think
00:28:49 fairness of treatment
00:28:53 implies equality of outcomes.
00:28:56 It does not.
00:28:57 Is the process by which we’re speaking now
00:29:02 in the midst of the National Basketball Association’s
00:29:06 playoffs,
00:29:07 I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan.
00:29:10 I mean, I’m just,
00:29:12 it’s a very good team, and I’m excited about my Celtics.
00:29:16 We defeated
00:29:18 the Brooklyn
00:29:21 Nets.
00:29:22 I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant
00:29:25 and Kyrie Irving and company, okay,
00:29:28 in a playoff series.
00:29:31 We whipped them,
00:29:32 and we’re on our way to
00:29:35 the Eastern Conference Finals,
00:29:37 and we’re on our way to the NBA Finals,
00:29:39 and I’m, you know, if I were a betting man,
00:29:42 I’d put down a few bucks
00:29:44 that the Boston Celtics, underrated as we are,
00:29:47 have a very good chance of winning the NBA Finals.
00:29:50 Okay, so that’s the NBA.
00:29:51 That’s the National Basketball Association.
00:29:53 I’m a sports fan.
00:29:54 I like basketball.
00:29:55 Slightly biased prediction, but yes.
00:29:57 Yeah, it is somewhat biased.
00:29:59 All I’m saying is,
00:30:01 if you take a look at who the star players are
00:30:04 in the National Basketball Association,
00:30:06 you’re gonna find that there’s some Eastern Europeans.
00:30:09 You know, there’s some really good basketball players
00:30:11 coming out of Eastern Europe,
00:30:15 and more power to them,
00:30:17 and there are a lot of African Americans.
00:30:19 We’re overrepresented.
00:30:22 There are not that many Jews, as far as I know.
00:30:24 No offense intended there, Lex,
00:30:26 but I mean,
00:30:28 the NBA is not
00:30:32 equally representative
00:30:34 of all of the different populations in the United States.
00:30:37 Now, we could go into the reasons why,
00:30:39 but I’m just saying the process
00:30:41 by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.
00:30:44 If you can play, you can get on the court.
00:30:48 All they’re looking for is people who can play.
00:30:51 I think something like that is true
00:30:54 in many different venues.
00:30:56 I expect, if you’re a really good technical engineer,
00:31:01 companies are gonna employ you,
00:31:04 and if you can make money, they’re gonna advance you,
00:31:07 and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.
00:31:12 I expect that the people who are engaged
00:31:15 in financial transactions,
00:31:17 who are actually making bets on the market,
00:31:20 by and large, are the people who are good at that activity,
00:31:24 and if you’re good at that activity in this world,
00:31:26 in this modern world,
00:31:27 you’re gonna rise to the top.
00:31:31 I’m not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.
00:31:37 Of course, there are of many different sorts,
00:31:40 but I’m saying that to expect that there would be,
00:31:43 okay, I mean, let’s look at who’s actually writing code.
00:31:46 Let’s look at who’s actually trading bonds.
00:31:48 Let’s look at who’s actually starting businesses and so on.
00:31:53 To say that in a fair world,
00:31:57 I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population,
00:31:59 they’d be 10% of every one of those things,
00:32:02 is to ignore the reality that the differences
00:32:06 in the culture and practices and norms
00:32:09 of the various population groups
00:32:11 will lead to differences in their representation
00:32:14 amongst people who are outstanding performers
00:32:17 in one or another activity.
00:32:20 How do you know if the difference in culture
00:32:24 accounts for the difference in outcomes,
00:32:26 or it’s the existence of barriers,
00:32:30 especially barriers early on in life,
00:32:32 of discrimination that are racially based?
00:32:35 So if you think about affirmative action,
00:32:41 in which ways is affirmative action empowering,
00:32:44 in which way is it limiting
00:32:47 for these early development of different groups,
00:32:50 but let’s just speak to African Americans.
00:32:53 We should say that you went to some no name
00:32:56 Northwestern University at first,
00:32:57 but then you ended up with the great university of MIT.
00:33:01 So that’s your, not early, but middle development.
00:33:06 So speaking of the development,
00:33:09 the opportunities, the equality of opportunity,
00:33:13 how do we know we got that equality right?
00:33:17 Yeah, I’m glad you put it like that.
00:33:19 We were talking about results,
00:33:20 now we’re talking about opportunity.
00:33:22 I was taking the position that
00:33:23 when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world
00:33:29 where his children will not be barred
00:33:32 from the good things in life
00:33:34 because of the color of their skin,
00:33:37 we’re talking about opportunity, not about results.
00:33:42 But opportunity is not just something
00:33:45 that depends upon what the law is
00:33:48 and what public policies are.
00:33:50 Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions
00:33:54 in which people are raised,
00:33:56 the social and economic conditions.
00:33:58 So the child of a poor family that has no resources,
00:34:04 it doesn’t have the same opportunity
00:34:06 as a child of a wealthy family
00:34:08 to realize their full human potential.
00:34:11 You asked me, how can we tell whether or not
00:34:14 a difference in outcomes is a reflection
00:34:19 of unequal opportunity,
00:34:21 or it’s a reflection of differences in culture
00:34:23 and interest and practice?
00:34:26 And I don’t know that there’s a single answer
00:34:29 to that question,
00:34:30 but I think one wants to look at the data,
00:34:33 one wants to try to measure.
00:34:37 As a social scientist, I would say what you wanna do
00:34:40 is you wanna estimate the significance of various factors
00:34:47 for determining the outcome.
00:34:48 If the outcome is how much money does a person make
00:34:51 when they work in the labor market?
00:34:53 So you look at their wages and you think,
00:34:56 well, that depends upon a number of things.
00:34:58 It depends upon how educated they are,
00:35:00 what kind of skills they have,
00:35:02 what kind of work experience they have, and so on.
00:35:06 And those things are all legitimate factors
00:35:11 that might determine how much they end up making
00:35:13 in the labor market.
00:35:15 But you also wanna perhaps, controlling for those things,
00:35:19 see whether or not the fact that they are black
00:35:23 or they are Latino or whatever,
00:35:25 fact that they are male or that they are female,
00:35:29 the fact that they do or do not speak English
00:35:31 as their native language, this kind of thing,
00:35:34 whether those factors also are implicated
00:35:38 in determining how successful they are in the labor market.
00:35:42 And if you find that after you have controlled
00:35:46 for the things that are legitimately determining success
00:35:51 and failure in the labor market,
00:35:52 like skills and education and experience,
00:35:56 having controlled for those things,
00:35:58 the fact that a person is black or is a woman
00:36:01 or is an immigrant or is of Latino background
00:36:09 also affects their earnings,
00:36:11 then you might conclude that to that extent,
00:36:14 they’re not getting equal opportunity in the labor market,
00:36:16 that kind of idea.
00:36:18 But I wanna focus a little bit more here
00:36:22 on what we mean by opportunity
00:36:23 because it’s not just whether employers treat the worker
00:36:29 on a fair and even basis,
00:36:33 irregardless of the worker’s racial or ethnic background.
00:36:36 That’s one opportunity issue,
00:36:39 but that’s at the end of the development process.
00:36:43 They are now presenting themselves to the market,
00:36:46 trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage.
00:36:50 That’s the end of the line.
00:36:52 What about the developmental opportunity,
00:36:54 the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place?
00:36:58 That goes all the way back,
00:37:00 that goes all the way back to birth.
00:37:01 It even goes back to before birth.
00:37:03 Or the mother carrying the infant in the womb,
00:37:10 she has certain nutritional practices
00:37:15 as she might be smoking or drinking alcohol
00:37:18 or something like that.
00:37:19 I’m not saying she is, I’m not saying she isn’t,
00:37:20 I’m just saying whether she is or she isn’t
00:37:23 that will affect the development of the fetus.
00:37:27 The newborn, now there’s a question of environment.
00:37:32 There’s a question of the development
00:37:33 of their neurological potential.
00:37:37 Do they learn how to read?
00:37:40 Are they stimulated verbally?
00:37:42 How many words have they heard spoken?
00:37:45 Are they being nurtured in a home environment
00:37:49 so as to maximize the possibility
00:37:52 of them achieving their human potential?
00:37:55 What about the peer group influences?
00:37:57 What about the values and norms of the surrounding
00:38:03 human communities in which they’re embedded?
00:38:05 Do they encourage the young person
00:38:08 to apply themselves in a systematic way
00:38:13 to their studies and to their focus
00:38:15 on their acquisition of language command
00:38:18 and of their educational potential?
00:38:22 So development is not only something
00:38:25 that is controlled by the society’s practices,
00:38:29 it’s also something that is influenced
00:38:32 by the cultural background of the individual.
00:38:37 And those things are not equal.
00:38:40 Those things vary across groups in a very significant way.
00:38:46 And that too will be a factor
00:38:50 determining disparities of outcome.
00:38:53 So when I see outcomes that are different,
00:38:56 I see wealth holding that’s different.
00:38:58 I see educational achievement that’s different.
00:39:01 I see representation in the professional schools
00:39:03 and law school and medical school
00:39:05 that’s different between groups.
00:39:06 One question is are the institutions treating people fairly?
00:39:11 But another question is do the background
00:39:15 in social and cultural influences
00:39:17 equip people in the same way?
00:39:20 And we know that the answer to that,
00:39:22 not in every instance do they equip people in the same way.
00:39:25 And so it makes the judgment, the moral judgment
00:39:28 that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated.
00:39:34 Inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree,
00:39:39 but it is also a cultural factor to some degree,
00:39:43 I wanna say, and that’s controversial, I know.
00:39:47 A lot of people, they think of themselves
00:39:50 as being progressive.
00:39:51 They wanna point a finger at society
00:39:55 whenever they see a disparity.
00:39:58 But I think that that’s a mistake.
00:40:00 I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem.
00:40:05 You think that if you get the right law,
00:40:08 if you have the right public policy,
00:40:11 if the right politicians are elected to office,
00:40:13 suddenly those disparities will go away.
00:40:16 And I’m here to tell you that that’s a false hope.
00:40:22 And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.
00:40:27 But I mean, we could go into that.
00:40:28 You were talking about affirmative action,
00:40:30 which is something else altogether.
00:40:33 And you were talking about me and my education,
00:40:35 which is also something that’s a little bit different.
00:40:39 And I’m happy to talk about those things.
00:40:41 Northwestern University, by the way, was a great university.
00:40:44 I’m just joking, it’s one of the great universities
00:40:47 of the world, yes.
00:40:48 And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University,
00:40:51 which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place.
00:40:54 And I got a very good technical training in mathematics
00:40:58 when I was at Northwestern, so.
00:41:00 You love both mathematics and human nature.
00:41:03 And so, which is why you ended up going into economics
00:41:08 at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT
00:41:11 and getting your PhD there.
00:41:13 So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist,
00:41:16 which allows you to think systematically and rigorously
00:41:19 about the way the world and the way humans work at scale.
00:41:24 Trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans,
00:41:28 like a psychology perspective, economics allows you to do.
00:41:33 Well, economics is one of the social sciences.
00:41:35 I think there’s value in psychology and in sociology.
00:41:39 There’s a lot to know that doesn’t come up
00:41:42 within the study of economics.
00:41:44 We study markets and the dynamics of economic development
00:41:49 and trade and so on.
00:41:54 But yeah, speaking personally, as I was coming along,
00:41:59 I was fascinated by mathematics.
00:42:01 I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern
00:42:04 and took a lot of courses there in functional analysis
00:42:09 and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems
00:42:14 and stuff that I ended up employing
00:42:18 in my graduate studies in economics.
00:42:20 But you’re right, I was not satisfied simply
00:42:25 to be proving theorems.
00:42:27 I wanted to be addressing issues of social significance
00:42:32 and economics.
00:42:33 I discovered to my delight was a field of study
00:42:37 that allowed me both to develop
00:42:41 rigorous analytical frameworks,
00:42:45 modeling and precision of logical deduction
00:42:52 and inference on the one hand,
00:42:56 satisfying my mathematical interests,
00:43:00 but on the other hand,
00:43:01 could address questions of social significance
00:43:03 like why does racial inequality persist?
00:43:07 Why are some countries prospering and growing
00:43:10 and others less so?
00:43:12 Why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate
00:43:16 in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth?
00:43:19 And I ended up falling in love with the application
00:43:24 of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues.
00:43:29 What do you use beautiful about mathematics,
00:43:32 about mathematical puzzles, about logic,
00:43:35 all those kinds of things?
00:43:36 Because it’s still there.
00:43:39 The love for math is still there for you.
00:43:41 So is there something you could speak to?
00:43:43 What is the kernel, the flame of that love?
00:43:48 It’s like magic.
00:43:50 I mean, you know, being able to prove something
00:43:52 and I mean, you know, I think of offhand,
00:43:56 you know, there’s no largest prime number, okay?
00:43:58 So how would somebody know that?
00:44:02 Okay, what’s a prime number?
00:44:03 So a prime number is a number that has a whole number
00:44:05 that has no divisor other than one.
00:44:08 There are no divisors of the number
00:44:11 that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37,
00:44:16 whatever, okay.
00:44:17 So they’re prime numbers.
00:44:19 There’s no largest prime number.
00:44:20 There are infinite number of prime numbers.
00:44:22 There’s no largest prime number, okay?
00:44:23 That’s an idea.
00:44:24 You can get your mind around it in an instant.
00:44:26 It doesn’t take a whole lot of depth to see the question.
00:44:31 There’s no largest prime number.
00:44:33 I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics.
00:44:35 I mean that.
00:44:36 Oh, they don’t show up in economics except cryptography.
00:44:39 I understand that’s important.
00:44:40 Yes, yes.
00:44:41 For code, you know, in coding stuff.
00:44:44 And that shows up in economics.
00:44:45 But in terms of models, probably not.
00:44:49 That’s, so prime numbers are little,
00:44:55 you know, in abstract algebra,
00:44:58 it’s like they show up in all these places
00:45:00 that are just like beautiful mathematical puzzles
00:45:04 that don’t immediately have an application,
00:45:05 but somehow maybe challenge you,
00:45:09 and as a result, push mathematics forward.
00:45:11 Like Fermat’s last theorem, you know,
00:45:14 as far as I know, no obvious real world application,
00:45:18 but it has challenged mathematicians
00:45:19 throughout the centuries.
00:45:21 Indeed.
00:45:22 And somehow indirectly progressed the field, but.
00:45:28 That the rational numbers are countable.
00:45:31 They can be put in one to one relationship
00:45:34 with the integers and, you know,
00:45:37 but that the real numbers are not countable
00:45:38 and there’s a lot more real, quote unquote,
00:45:41 more real numbers.
00:45:41 These are orders of infinity.
00:45:43 This is Cantor, Georg Cantor, and all that kind of stuff.
00:45:48 Or Gödel’s theorem, I studied this as an undergraduate,
00:45:52 you know, the incompleteness theorem
00:45:54 that there are propositions within any logical system
00:45:58 that’s rich enough to accommodate arithmetic.
00:46:02 There are going to be propositions
00:46:04 that you can formulate that are true,
00:46:06 but that you cannot prove to be true.
00:46:10 So the idea that you could systematically develop
00:46:14 a logical framework for mathematical inquiry
00:46:19 that could demonstrate the truth or falsity
00:46:21 of any proposition is not a feasible goal.
00:46:26 A feasible goal.
00:46:27 This was Hilbert’s project as I understand it
00:46:30 and Gödel showed that there was no hope ever
00:46:35 of being able to demonstrate the closure
00:46:39 of logical systems that were rich enough
00:46:41 to accommodate the real numbers.
00:46:43 They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians
00:46:47 and scientists alike and humans
00:46:50 because maybe you can’t prove everything.
00:46:52 I remember, you know, when I was a junior college,
00:46:56 a community college student
00:46:58 before I transferred to Northwestern
00:47:00 and I took a calculus course and it was a lot of fun
00:47:04 and it was differentiating algebraic expressions
00:47:09 and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions
00:47:12 and it was a lot of simple problem solving.
00:47:16 I get to Northwestern,
00:47:17 I take a course in differential equations.
00:47:19 And again, it was a lot of formulaic applying
00:47:23 if you get a differential equation of this structure
00:47:25 like if it’s linear, you got exponentials, et cetera,
00:47:28 you can solve it.
00:47:29 And then I took a course that showed me, you know,
00:47:32 where the question was not how to solve
00:47:35 any particular functional expression,
00:47:38 but it was proving the existence of a solution
00:47:41 to a differential equation where it was like X dot equals
00:47:45 F of X and T and F is just some arbitrary function.
00:47:49 What do I have to assume about the function F
00:47:52 in order to know that there exists a solution
00:47:54 to the differential equation,
00:47:56 dx dt equals F of X and T.
00:48:00 And it’s basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition.
00:48:03 It’s a condition about the bounding of the slope
00:48:08 of the function F as a function of X that it doesn’t,
00:48:13 that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope
00:48:16 on that function and then you can use a iterative process
00:48:20 to show that the sequence of, you know, partial solutions
00:48:24 to the thing converges to something that’s a solution
00:48:26 to the real thing.
00:48:27 Anyway, again, I’m not gonna bore you
00:48:29 or pretend that I’m a mathematician, I’m not.
00:48:32 But what I’m saying is the difference
00:48:34 between a specific algebraic formula
00:48:38 that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand
00:48:42 and the abstract question of whether there exists
00:48:45 a solution in the general case is like a huge,
00:48:49 was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics
00:48:53 and the techniques that you have to employ
00:48:56 to address these larger questions and so on.
00:48:59 So I, you know, when I was an undergraduate,
00:49:03 I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis
00:49:08 at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician
00:49:11 named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory
00:49:16 and learned about some early functional analysis ideas
00:49:25 and when I saw that those ideas were being applied
00:49:28 by advanced study in economics, I was delighted.
00:49:32 I found an intellectual home.
00:49:34 So one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics
00:49:38 is to think how can you, which echoes
00:49:43 the challenge of economics, what are the properties
00:49:47 of an equation that allow you to say something profound
00:49:52 and say it simply?
00:49:53 And so the question of economics is how do you
00:49:56 construct a model where you can generalize nicely
00:50:00 and say something profound and say it simply?
00:50:03 So one of the questions, one of the challenges
00:50:06 of economics is macro versus microeconomics is,
00:50:13 you know, the world is made up of individuals.
00:50:16 So there’s a connection to this, our discussion
00:50:18 of race and discrimination and outcomes
00:50:21 and all those kinds of things.
00:50:24 The world is made up of individuals,
00:50:26 but in order to say something general,
00:50:29 we have to construct groups in order to analyze the data.
00:50:34 We have to aggregate that data somehow.
00:50:37 We have to make an average over some set of people.
00:50:41 So what are the pros and cons of looking at things
00:50:46 like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
00:50:50 based on groups versus based on individuals
00:50:53 and what are the groups, if there’s any pros
00:50:58 to looking at groups that we should be looking at?
00:51:01 Okay, well, those are big questions.
00:51:04 I mean, in economics, you’re right.
00:51:06 I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals
00:51:10 make decisions about spending their money
00:51:13 on this consumption side and about how enterprises
00:51:16 make decisions about what to produce, how much of it,
00:51:20 what inputs to use, what techniques of production
00:51:23 and so on, individual firms, individual consumers,
00:51:27 and then you want to aggregate.
00:51:29 So there’s a so called theory of general equilibrium
00:51:32 where you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets,
00:51:38 you think prices that move to equilibrate,
00:51:40 but you recognize that the price in one market
00:51:43 affects people’s behavior in another,
00:51:44 the markets are interacting with each other.
00:51:47 You realize that the behavior of one individual
00:51:49 affects the supplies and available resources
00:51:53 and for other individuals, so they’re knitted together
00:51:56 in some kind of systematic way.
00:52:00 And you want to try to demonstrate the fact
00:52:04 that notwithstanding all these interdependencies,
00:52:07 there exists a solution to the system of equations
00:52:12 that equates demand and supply
00:52:14 across all the different markets.
00:52:15 This is the existence of general equilibrium.
00:52:19 Then you want to try to say something about the properties
00:52:22 of an equilibrium, if it exists, is it efficient?
00:52:25 What do you mean by efficiency?
00:52:27 Well, the idea of so called Pareto efficient outcomes,
00:52:32 these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon,
00:52:35 everybody can’t be made better off
00:52:36 by an alternative outcome.
00:52:39 You want to demonstrate the efficiency
00:52:41 of competitive equilibrium.
00:52:43 What do you mean by competition?
00:52:45 You mean that people take their actions
00:52:46 to do the best for themselves that they can.
00:52:51 Profits of firms, well being of consumers,
00:52:54 they try to do the best for themselves that they can,
00:52:59 but they do so in reference to a set of prices
00:53:02 that they believe they cannot control.
00:53:03 That’s the criterion of competitive market circumstance.
00:53:08 So does a competitive equilibrium exist?
00:53:11 Do there exist a set of prices
00:53:12 which if everybody recognizes them as given
00:53:15 and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest,
00:53:20 the outcome will be supply equaling demand
00:53:24 in all the markets where people are interacting
00:53:26 with one another, and that requires the use
00:53:30 of some concepts and topology, fixed point theorems
00:53:33 and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics,
00:53:36 not very deep mathematical results,
00:53:38 but important to economics.
00:53:40 That’s all about general equilibrium and whatnot.
00:53:43 But you ask about groups.
00:53:45 By the way, amazing whirlwind summary of all of economics,
00:53:49 but yes, go ahead, that was great.
00:53:53 Markets of competition of operator efficiency anyway,
00:53:58 but yes, groups.
00:53:59 And prices. And prices.
00:54:01 And by the way, there are some very beautiful
00:54:07 formalizations of everything that I’m saying here.
00:54:10 You end up in vector spaces,
00:54:11 you end up with sets of bundles of consumption
00:54:15 and production, you end up with convexity,
00:54:17 you end up with hyperplanes,
00:54:19 which are in this finite dimensional vector space,
00:54:23 which are all of the bundles that have the same value
00:54:29 at a certain price.
00:54:30 You end up with inner products.
00:54:35 It’s very pretty.
00:54:36 Yeah, but you almost forget that it’s just a bunch
00:54:38 of humans transacting with each other.
00:54:43 That markets are made up of individuals.
00:54:47 Markets are made up of individuals.
00:54:49 And in order to carry out this formalization,
00:54:51 you have to make assumptions about the individuals.
00:54:54 And the end result is true in a formal sense,
00:54:58 but may not be true as a representation of the reality,
00:55:03 because it depends upon assumptions
00:55:04 that themselves may not hold.
00:55:07 But at least you know what it is that has to be true
00:55:10 in order for your formal framework to be relevant,
00:55:15 which is already a step in the right direction, I think.
00:55:18 I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition.
00:55:22 There aren’t your intuition where we sit back
00:55:24 and we don’t really know exactly what we’re talking about
00:55:28 because we haven’t pinned it down in a precise way.
00:55:33 I’m in favor of the formalization.
00:55:34 People, they think, what is mathematics
00:55:37 and the social sciences?
00:55:39 After all, we’re dealing with people.
00:55:40 People are not automata.
00:55:42 I agree with that.
00:55:43 But the analysis of the interaction of people,
00:55:48 I think, to be rigorous, requires us to be specific
00:55:53 about what we’re talking about, about markets,
00:55:55 about consumers, about firms, about profits,
00:55:57 about technology, about preferences.
00:56:00 And that’s the language of economics.
00:56:06 But people’s behavior depends upon what they seek in life,
00:56:11 depends upon their goals and their objectives.
00:56:14 Those things are at play.
00:56:17 They can be pushed this way or that.
00:56:20 So, I mean, nationalism,
00:56:23 fighting and dying for your country,
00:56:27 religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal
00:56:31 of the good or of what is the human situation
00:56:35 and what is the meaning of life.
00:56:37 Economists have to assume that these things
00:56:40 are some particular thing
00:56:41 before they can turn the crank on their machine
00:56:44 to analyze the outcomes of human interaction.
00:56:48 And yet these things, belief in my identity,
00:56:53 but the things that I’m willing to sacrifice and die
00:56:56 for purposes of life that I affirm
00:56:59 and pass on to my children are important preconditions
00:57:03 for actually carrying out any economic analysis.
00:57:06 And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time.
00:57:11 And that’s not something that economics
00:57:13 has a whole lot to say about.
00:57:15 Well, is there some general things
00:57:17 that are really powerful in terms of,
00:57:19 you said nation, religion, those are groups.
00:57:24 Can you group people nicely
00:57:26 in helping you understand human nature?
00:57:29 So group them into nations based on their citizenry.
00:57:33 That’s geography, right?
00:57:35 The geographic location of your birth
00:57:39 or your long term residence, or maybe religious belief,
00:57:44 what religion you believe over time.
00:57:48 Is there groups like that?
00:57:49 And then race, is that useful?
00:57:56 What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes
00:57:59 based on these kinds of groups, race in particular?
00:58:07 I think they’re pros and I think they’re cons.
00:58:09 I mean, I am myself, Glenn Loury sits before you right now,
00:58:14 a black American, an African American.
00:58:16 I quote unquote, I identify as,
00:58:19 that’s the way they talk about it nowadays.
00:58:21 I identify as a black American.
00:58:22 My skin is brown, my hair is coarse, my nose is broad,
00:58:27 relative to the way other people’s noses look.
00:58:31 My lips are thicker.
00:58:32 That’s a consequence of my ancestral descent
00:58:37 from the human population resident in the African continent
00:58:43 in millennia past, my race.
00:58:49 Here in the United States,
00:58:50 we have various quote unquote races defined crudely
00:58:55 in the way that I just tried to define myself.
00:58:59 You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument
00:59:03 that these are superficial differences.
00:59:07 I mean, really?
00:59:09 Why should it matter that your eye color
00:59:11 or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face
00:59:17 or the color, the tone of your skin,
00:59:19 the amount of melanin,
00:59:20 how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation
00:59:23 in terms of your skin, what is that the basis of anything?
00:59:30 I mean, that’s arbitrary, that’s not meaningful.
00:59:33 Could there really be meaning
00:59:34 in these superficial differences among human beings?
00:59:38 Isn’t that a archaic or barbaric way
00:59:40 of thinking about ourselves,
00:59:42 to look at each other’s skin color or hair texture
00:59:46 and then to decide, oh, that’s a black or that’s a white
00:59:49 or that’s a Latin or that’s an Asian or that’s a whatever.
00:59:53 That’s something that we should outgrow, a person might say.
00:59:59 That’s a relic of a kind of tribal society
01:00:03 of a kind of pre modern society
01:00:06 where we built real structure
01:00:11 on the basis of such superficial difference.
01:00:14 A person could say that.
01:00:17 On the other hand, I am a black American.
01:00:20 I mean, that’s part of my identity,
01:00:22 that’s part of my heritage,
01:00:25 it’s part of the stories that I tell myself
01:00:29 about who my people are.
01:00:33 Why do I need a people?
01:00:34 Why do I need a narrative of descent
01:00:37 in which I affiliate with a racially defined people?
01:00:44 Do I really need that?
01:00:45 I mean, I think that’s an important question.
01:00:48 In fact, this is a confession, think of myself as black.
01:00:52 I could think of myself as simply human.
01:00:55 I could not identify specifically as black.
01:00:59 I could say, my eyes are brown too, so what?
01:01:03 I’m a brown eye?
01:01:04 I mean, I’m gonna invent a group based on my eye color.
01:01:08 I weigh 290 pounds.
01:01:10 I’m gonna have a body size group.
01:01:12 I’m a plus 200 and that’s quote, who I am, close quote.
01:01:17 I don’t do that.
01:01:18 I came from Chicago.
01:01:20 Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown.
01:01:23 I’m a Chicago born person,
01:01:26 but frankly, I haven’t lived in Chicago since 1979.
01:01:30 That’s a long time.
01:01:33 I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly.
01:01:37 I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland
01:01:40 or St. Louis and fight to the death
01:01:43 with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person
01:01:46 based upon the fact that we come from different cities.
01:01:49 And you have even abandoned in your heart
01:01:52 the Chicago Bulls.
01:01:53 There’s some Chicago that’s still in me, I suppose,
01:01:56 but it’s not very deep.
01:01:57 It’s not quote, who I am anymore.
01:02:00 And I’m wondering, here I’m trying to pose the question,
01:02:02 why is it that being a descendant of African slaves
01:02:06 should be who I am?
01:02:06 So there’s some answers.
01:02:09 One answer is people will look at me
01:02:12 and deal with me differently based upon what they see.
01:02:17 I don’t have control over that.
01:02:19 I’m going to be perceived as a member of a group,
01:02:22 whether or not I elect to affiliate myself
01:02:24 with that group or not.
01:02:27 Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact
01:02:31 that regardless of what my internal orientation is,
01:02:37 the world will perceive me in a particular way
01:02:40 and will perceive me differently
01:02:42 based upon the color of my skin.
01:02:44 So a police officer who stops me at two o clock
01:02:46 in the morning because my tail light is out
01:02:50 and ask me for my automobile registration
01:02:54 and I reach quickly to the glove compartment
01:02:57 to get my registration.
01:02:59 And the police officer says, show me your hands.
01:03:01 And I don’t quite hear what he says
01:03:03 or I ignore what he says as I’m getting my document
01:03:07 out of my glove compartment.
01:03:08 But the police officer thinks because I have not responded
01:03:11 to his demand to show my hands
01:03:13 that I might be reaching for a weapon.
01:03:15 And the police officer sees that I’m black
01:03:18 and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon
01:03:22 is higher because in that town at that time,
01:03:25 a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car
01:03:28 happen to be black and male and so on.
01:03:32 And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it
01:03:34 and I’m bleeding out there and I’m dead now.
01:03:37 And all of that is a possibility that’s very real
01:03:40 and it’s based upon the color of my skin.
01:03:42 And therefore, when he stops me,
01:03:44 I keep my hands on the steering wheel
01:03:46 and I don’t go to the glove compartment.
01:03:49 And I’m fearful of the fact that he might mistake me
01:03:52 for a criminal, et cetera.
01:03:54 Or I walk into a high end store, clothing store.
01:03:58 I see you’re nicely dressed there, Lex.
01:04:00 I’m not, but that’s okay.
01:04:02 I do have some good clothes at home.
01:04:04 I just didn’t wear them here today.
01:04:07 But you know what I mean.
01:04:07 And the salesman in the clothing store
01:04:11 either treats me like an old friend
01:04:15 and is warm and welcoming.
01:04:17 And what can I do for you, sir?
01:04:19 And let me show you this and that.
01:04:20 And what are you looking for?
01:04:22 Because he thinks I’m gonna spend $1,000 there that day
01:04:24 and he’s gonna get a 5% commission or whatever it is.
01:04:27 And he either does that or he ignores me
01:04:31 and looks at me with suspicion
01:04:32 and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something
01:04:34 or thinks I’m only gonna spend $50 and not $500
01:04:38 and therefore I’m not worth his time.
01:04:40 And I’m aware of the fact
01:04:42 that when I go into the clothing store,
01:04:44 especially the high end places where I can buy a good suit
01:04:47 or buy some really good dress shirts or slacks
01:04:51 that fit me well and so on,
01:04:54 I’m aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously
01:04:57 by the salesman based upon the fact
01:05:00 that he’s looking at me and he sees a black person.
01:05:03 And therefore I dress up
01:05:06 before I go out to buy clothes to get,
01:05:09 cause I wanna present myself
01:05:10 as not someone who just walked in off the street,
01:05:13 but as one of those black people
01:05:14 who is really prepared to spend some money in the store
01:05:17 so that I can be treated with respect.
01:05:18 And I have to carry the burden such as it is
01:05:23 of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously
01:05:28 being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions
01:05:33 that people may have about me
01:05:34 based upon the color of my skin, something like that.
01:05:39 Or I ask myself, what am I gonna teach my children
01:05:43 about who they are and where they come from?
01:05:46 What stories am I gonna tell them about their ancestors?
01:05:50 Who are their ancestors?
01:05:52 Every African American has European ancestors.
01:05:55 Every black person in the United States of America,
01:05:59 I think that I can say that almost without exception.
01:06:02 We could go to 23andMe and look at the DNA.
01:06:05 They have European ancestors, they’re not purely African.
01:06:10 That’s a fact and that’s a consequence
01:06:12 of the experience of African descended people
01:06:16 because it’s a mixed population.
01:06:18 My name is Lowry, spelled L O U R Y
01:06:21 but pronounced as if it were L O W E R Y.
01:06:25 And I gather if you trace the history of that name
01:06:29 that it’s Scottish.
01:06:32 So somewhere back then.
01:06:33 So you could identify as a Scot.
01:06:35 Well, or I could claim some Scottish descent, but I don’t.
01:06:40 I don’t know who those ancestors are.
01:06:42 And frankly, I don’t know who my enslaved ancestors are.
01:06:47 I can’t trace my family history back very far
01:06:51 into the 19th century.
01:06:53 So what stories do I tell my children about who we are,
01:06:57 about who their ancestors are?
01:06:59 I mean, I wanna tell my children some story
01:07:01 and that story is gonna be colored, quote unquote,
01:07:05 by my race.
01:07:08 So even though it is superficial
01:07:11 and in an ideal world, you might think,
01:07:14 why would human beings, I mean, I read science fiction.
01:07:17 So there’s this Chinese writer, Chixin Liu is his name.
01:07:21 I might not pronounce it exactly right, C I X I N L I U.
01:07:26 Chixin Liu, he has a trilogy of The Three Body Problem,
01:07:31 The Dark Forest, and Death’s End.
01:07:35 Those are the three books of Chixin Liu’s trilogy
01:07:38 about how Trisolaris, which is another star system
01:07:42 within a few light years of the solar system,
01:07:46 and Earth get into a conflict.
01:07:49 And when the Trisolaris come down to dominate Earth,
01:07:55 suddenly all of these differences between the Chinese
01:07:59 and the North Americans and the Europeans
01:08:02 and the Africans and the South Asians
01:08:05 become kind of insignificant because after all,
01:08:08 the Trisolaris with their advanced civilization
01:08:11 whose star system is dying,
01:08:14 have their eyes on the solar system,
01:08:15 which has a planet, the third rock from the sun
01:08:18 that is pretty habitable and the difference between us
01:08:21 become pretty insignificant.
01:08:24 So we shouldn’t need for an invasion
01:08:29 by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen
01:08:34 before we would recognize the common humanity
01:08:38 that we all share that is profound and is deep.
01:08:43 We all descend in effect from the same ancestral population
01:08:47 of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago
01:08:52 and have survived amongst all of the different possible
01:08:56 variations of species and whatnot,
01:08:58 of humanoid population, the Homo sapiens have flourished,
01:09:02 the others have died out and here we are
01:09:05 and we can just look at the genetic endowments
01:09:09 that characterize our biological essence
01:09:12 and we can see that we are quote unquote
01:09:15 the same beneath the skin
01:09:16 and yet we end up freighting so much weight
01:09:21 onto these superficial differences.
01:09:23 So I can see both sides of the issue is what I’m saying.
01:09:27 I can see the argument race is an irrelevancy
01:09:31 because at the end of the day, deep down it is.
01:09:35 But I can also see the argument
01:09:37 that I hold on to racial identity because A,
01:09:41 my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me
01:09:46 but B, because everybody needs a story.
01:09:51 Everybody needs an account.
01:09:52 You tell me you’re Jewish.
01:09:53 I mean, I don’t know how deep that is.
01:09:55 I don’t know how genetically profound that is.
01:09:57 I do know that it’s a culturally profound identity
01:10:03 for a lot of people based upon maybe some of the same
01:10:08 kind of forces that I’m talking about.
01:10:09 A, they won’t let you not be Jewish.
01:10:12 You could say you’re not Jewish
01:10:14 but when Hitler is rounding people up,
01:10:16 what you say doesn’t have a whole lot to do
01:10:18 with what the Gestapo was about.
01:10:22 And B, you need to tell your children a story.
01:10:25 That’s the fascinating thing about this tribalism
01:10:28 that you spoke about that we form tribes as humans
01:10:35 throughout human history, form tribes
01:10:37 and have directed hate toward other tribes
01:10:41 and sometimes violence and destruction.
01:10:43 And yet tribalism allows you to tell a story
01:10:47 to your children, allows you to grow a culture.
01:10:51 There’s something about defining yourself
01:10:53 within a particular tribe that allows you
01:10:55 to have a tradition.
01:10:59 You have an article that you wrote
01:11:02 called The Case for Black Patriotism.
01:11:05 Oh yeah.
01:11:08 So I should also say it’s so interesting
01:11:10 because for me personally, I feel, identify as,
01:11:18 believe I am an American.
01:11:21 And yet within the American umbrella,
01:11:24 it feels that there’s a longing for other tribes.
01:11:27 You mentioned Jewish but what I honestly feel is,
01:11:31 I mean a lot of it is humor and culture and so on
01:11:34 is Russian and Ukrainian because that’s where I come from.
01:11:38 That’s where my family is from.
01:11:40 You know, there’s like stereotypical things
01:11:43 that are funny, humorous type of thing about Russians
01:11:48 that’s showing no emotion, good at chess and math,
01:11:53 into wrestling, drinking vodka.
01:11:57 I mean, there’s literally every single stereotype.
01:11:59 I’m in the embodiment of that.
01:12:01 So there’s a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways.
01:12:04 There’s a tradition there within the American umbrella
01:12:07 and some of it is humor, some of it is little quirks
01:12:12 of culture but now with the war in Russia and Ukraine,
01:12:15 interestingly enough, even that little thing,
01:12:18 it becomes also a source of negative tribalism.
01:12:22 But anyway, that context aside, what is black patriotism
01:12:29 and why do you feel?
01:12:31 I mean, I’m speaking in an article called
01:12:35 The Case for Black Patriotism in a Particular Context
01:12:40 and what I’m saying basically is very simple.
01:12:45 I’m saying we are African Americans
01:12:49 and the emphasis should be on the American.
01:12:54 I actually don’t even much care
01:12:56 for the framing African American
01:13:00 but I’m not gonna fight with people about it.
01:13:02 It’s, I don’t think it’s worth fighting about.
01:13:05 That’s not how, I would just say we’re Americans
01:13:08 or if you want, we’re black Americans.
01:13:11 We’re certainly not African.
01:13:13 That is the African American population
01:13:16 is a population of people who come into existence
01:13:20 here in North America through the cauldron of slavery.
01:13:26 There are also immigrants, immigrants from East Africa,
01:13:28 immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa,
01:13:33 immigrants from the Caribbean who descend
01:13:35 from an ancestral population which is African.
01:13:40 The history of the world since 1500 is a history
01:13:43 in which people of African descent are scattered
01:13:48 because of slavery throughout the Western hemisphere.
01:13:53 And so here we are.
01:13:55 But the institution of slavery ended in 1863
01:14:02 in the United States.
01:14:06 The struggle that we started out talking about
01:14:10 which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech
01:14:14 that you say is the greatest speech in American history
01:14:16 and I’m not gonna argue with you about that,
01:14:19 happened right here in the United States.
01:14:21 We are, what is the United States?
01:14:24 The United States is a nation of immigrants.
01:14:27 The population of the North American continent
01:14:30 was sparsely populated by an indigenous population
01:14:32 which was destroyed in conquest by a European population
01:14:40 that settled here in North America and appropriated the land
01:14:45 and have built a civilization here
01:14:47 which has been peopled by a large influx of immigrants
01:14:51 of individuals from Europe, Irish and Italian
01:14:56 and Greek and Slavic and Jewish, Russian Jews
01:15:02 coming in large numbers and so on
01:15:04 and wave after wave after wave of immigration,
01:15:07 Asian, Latin American population of people
01:15:11 who have come to reside here in the United States
01:15:13 and we black Americans who descend from slaves.
01:15:17 We African Americans who descend from slaves.
01:15:20 So here we are.
01:15:21 This is a great nation.
01:15:23 I mean, this is a monumentally significant political force
01:15:30 which is the United States of America founded in 1776, 1787
01:15:37 fought a war of independence from the British,
01:15:41 established a republic which is a confederation
01:15:46 of these independent colonies
01:15:48 which has grown into now the 50 states
01:15:50 of the United States of America, continental nation.
01:15:54 The richest and most powerful nation on the planet
01:15:59 with massive influence throughout the world
01:16:02 for good and for ill.
01:16:04 That’s who we are, I wanna say to black people.
01:16:08 There is no other home for us.
01:16:11 This fantasy of we being a people apart
01:16:15 back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s,
01:16:20 there was something called
01:16:20 the Republic of New Africa Movement
01:16:23 and they wanted some states in the South
01:16:26 given over to black people
01:16:27 and we were gonna have our own country.
01:16:31 And that’s a joke, it’s a fantasy.
01:16:33 It’s a mythic, unbalanced,
01:16:37 the unrealistic fanciful politics.
01:16:46 It’s not a serious politics.
01:16:48 We’re Americans, we’re not going anywhere here.
01:16:51 The idea that, and I wanna say this
01:16:54 in a number of different registers,
01:16:56 I wanna say first of all,
01:16:58 we need to make peace with the fact
01:17:00 that that’s who we are and that’s where we are.
01:17:03 So nobody is coming, the world court
01:17:07 is not gonna litigate our disputes.
01:17:10 The United Nations is not gonna set up a desk
01:17:13 for people of African descent who reside in North America.
01:17:17 We have to work out whatever our concerns are
01:17:20 with our fellow Americans right here
01:17:22 within the context of American politics.
01:17:25 That means compromise.
01:17:27 That means looking for a framework for political expression
01:17:32 which is broader than our racial identity, et cetera.
01:17:36 So I wanna say that.
01:17:38 But I also wanna say there’s no reason
01:17:39 to apologize for this.
01:17:40 There’s something positive to affirm.
01:17:42 I take on this question about slavery in brief,
01:17:47 because in fact, slavery was awful and it was wrong
01:17:50 and it was on the backs of the enslaved Africans
01:17:53 and it had consequences that have endured
01:17:58 long after the termination of the thing.
01:18:00 But I also wanna say, look at what has happened
01:18:03 in the last 150 years for African Americans.
01:18:07 And I wanna say, look at the vitality
01:18:10 of the institutions here in the United States of America,
01:18:13 of the Democratic Republic of the United States of America.
01:18:18 Again, not perfect, which are malleable enough,
01:18:22 these institutions to allow for the transformation
01:18:26 of the status of African Americans
01:18:28 such as has occurred since the end of slavery.
01:18:33 And I wanna say there’s a lot to celebrate in that.
01:18:35 So this is our country.
01:18:39 We are full members of the polity.
01:18:44 We have burdens and responsibilities
01:18:48 as well as privileges that are associated
01:18:50 with our membership in this Republic.
01:18:52 That does not mean that we should not fight
01:18:55 for what we believe to be right,
01:18:57 although we are not one voice here, we black Americans.
01:19:01 It does not mean that we should not protest things
01:19:04 that we think are deserving of protest.
01:19:07 But I wanna say, it does mean that we should not reject
01:19:11 the framework that we’re operating in
01:19:14 because we basically don’t have any alternative.
01:19:17 And because when viewed in full context,
01:19:20 a noble and profoundly significant achievement,
01:19:25 the United States of America and a beacon
01:19:28 to the rest of the world, I don’t wanna go off
01:19:30 in some starry eyed kind of jingoistic celebration
01:19:34 of America as the greatest civilization, et cetera, et cetera.
01:19:38 But this great nation is our nation.
01:19:44 And I think we do best by beginning,
01:19:47 we black Americans do best by beginning,
01:19:49 this is my argument in the piece,
01:19:51 by beginning from a framework which accepts that fact
01:19:56 and then builds on it.
01:20:00 So black patriotism is, if not exactly the same,
01:20:07 rhymes, echoes American patriotism.
01:20:12 So a black American is first and foremost an American.
01:20:16 Yeah, a black American is first and foremost an American
01:20:20 and it’s a good thing too.
01:20:24 Let me return to the question of Dr. King
01:20:30 and another powerful, impactful individual, Malcolm X,
01:20:35 to ask you the question.
01:20:37 Well, first, people often perhaps inaccurately portray them
01:20:43 as representing two different ideals, approaches
01:20:48 to the fight for civil rights.
01:20:52 So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach,
01:20:56 the peacemaker, and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary.
01:21:03 What do you think about this distinction?
01:21:05 And broadly speaking, in black patriotism,
01:21:08 in the future of black Americans in the 21st century,
01:21:12 what is the role of anger?
01:21:15 What is the role of protest?
01:21:18 Even violence encompasses a lot of things,
01:21:22 but just aggression and the fuck the man,
01:21:26 we’re going to have to make change, force change.
01:21:31 Okay, I think you put your finger on something
01:21:33 really important in the context of,
01:21:35 we were just discussing my black patriotism essay.
01:21:41 It’s not the only story.
01:21:44 There is another story and Malcolm X is someone
01:21:47 you identify and his memory lives on
01:21:52 and is powerfully influential.
01:21:55 And I think you see it in Black Lives Matter,
01:21:58 and I think you see it in the protest and rioting
01:22:01 and so forth that has broken out periodically
01:22:04 going all the way back to the 1960s and before,
01:22:07 but especially since the 1960s.
01:22:11 You saw it in Los Angeles in 1992,
01:22:14 the Rodney King civil disturbances
01:22:16 that broke out there and the balled up fist,
01:22:21 the radical afrocentric rejection
01:22:27 of the American story that Martin Luther King,
01:22:31 he believed in.
01:22:32 He believed in a magnificent promissory note.
01:22:35 And a lot of people are rolling their eyes
01:22:37 and saying, as you say,
01:22:39 fuck the man, magnificent promissory note.
01:22:43 I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
01:22:46 That’s what you can do for me.
01:22:47 Don’t ask me to believe in your BS
01:22:49 about some magnificent promissory note,
01:22:51 some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway.
01:22:54 I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
01:22:57 Now, I can relate to that.
01:23:00 As I mentioned, I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s
01:23:05 and the 1960s.
01:23:06 I remember Malcolm X, I mean, literally in real time.
01:23:10 I remember when he was murdered in 1965
01:23:14 in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem,
01:23:18 in Manhattan, in New York City.
01:23:23 I remember my uncle, I was raised in a house
01:23:26 where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house.
01:23:29 And my mother and my sister and I lived
01:23:31 in a small apartment upstairs in the back
01:23:35 of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned.
01:23:40 And my uncle was a small businessman,
01:23:42 a barber and a tradesman.
01:23:46 He was a hustler.
01:23:47 I mean, legally, he did what he had to do to make money.
01:23:50 He was a very enterprising, not especially well educated,
01:23:53 but a very intelligent and disciplined
01:23:58 and resourceful provider for his family,
01:24:01 which included myself, my sister,
01:24:04 and my mother in their household.
01:24:07 And we called him Uncle Mooney
01:24:08 because he had moon shaped eyes
01:24:10 that protruded and were round.
01:24:12 Uncle Mooney, James Ellis was his name.
01:24:16 Uncle Mooney, James Ellis Lee was my Uncle Mooney.
01:24:21 But I’m saying all that to say this.
01:24:24 He admired the nation of Islam.
01:24:27 I mean, King and Malcolm X,
01:24:29 Martin King and Malcolm X differed
01:24:31 along a number of different dimensions.
01:24:33 Malcolm X was a Muslim.
01:24:35 And Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister.
01:24:39 My Uncle Mooney didn’t have any time
01:24:41 for these Christian ministers.
01:24:44 He thought that was the white man’s religion.
01:24:47 And back in that day, you’d go into a black church
01:24:50 and you’d see a portrait of Jesus
01:24:53 and he’d be blonde hair, blue eyed.
01:24:57 He didn’t even look like a Mediterranean.
01:25:00 I mean, he didn’t look like somebody who came from Palestine.
01:25:03 I mean, he looked like somebody who came
01:25:05 from Northern Europe or something like that,
01:25:07 the picture of Jesus.
01:25:08 And my Uncle Mooney rejected that whole thing.
01:25:11 He would be damned if he was gonna bend his knee
01:25:13 to some white Jesus.
01:25:17 But he was not a Muslim either.
01:25:19 But he respected the Muslims.
01:25:22 He brought home their newspaper.
01:25:24 It was called Muhammad Speaks.
01:25:25 This is the nation of Islam,
01:25:28 which is the black Muslim movement
01:25:30 founded in American cities in Detroit and then Chicago,
01:25:36 going back to the early middle 20th century
01:25:40 and growing into a very significant movement
01:25:43 that had a lot of influence,
01:25:44 Louis Farrakhan and controversial figure
01:25:48 descends from this movement.
01:25:50 It has fractured now
01:25:53 and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims
01:25:59 has assimilated itself into Islam proper.
01:26:04 Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina
01:26:08 and came back with a very different vision
01:26:11 about what it meant to be a Muslim
01:26:12 and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition
01:26:16 and religious culture of Islam that has a global reach.
01:26:20 And he had a different vision when he came back from that.
01:26:23 Some people say that’s why he was killed and so on.
01:26:27 I don’t know.
01:26:28 I certainly find that to be plausible
01:26:30 that he became the constituted threat to the sect,
01:26:34 which was the black Muslims
01:26:36 and had to be dealt with.
01:26:40 I don’t know if we’ll ever know the full story on that.
01:26:43 But anyway, what I’m trying to say is
01:26:45 the black Muslims were there, Malcolm X was there.
01:26:47 And in my experience,
01:26:51 they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king,
01:26:55 which depended on a kind of respect
01:26:59 for the best of the tradition of American democracy,
01:27:04 appealing to the better nature of our oppressors,
01:27:09 live up to the full meaning of our creed.
01:27:12 I mean, these are words that he would use.
01:27:14 A magnificent promissory note is what he would think of
01:27:18 as the declaration of independence
01:27:20 and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln,
01:27:23 a unfulfilled ideal.
01:27:25 And the black Muslims were like, fuck that.
01:27:30 We’re gonna take care of our own.
01:27:32 We’re gonna build our own schools.
01:27:35 We’re gonna build our own businesses.
01:27:37 We’re not waiting for the white man to do anything.
01:27:41 Get your knee off my neck and get out of my way
01:27:43 and let me take care of my own.
01:27:44 And my uncle respected that.
01:27:46 He respected the straight back,
01:27:48 the stand up straight with your shoulders back.
01:27:51 That’s a Jordan Peterson.
01:27:52 But I mean, that was way before Jordan Peterson,
01:27:54 but that was his philosophy.
01:27:56 Stand up straight, but just raise your children.
01:27:58 Don’t be depending upon welfare.
01:28:01 You’re taking welfare from the white man.
01:28:03 You need to get busy.
01:28:04 You need to educate yourself.
01:28:06 You need to clean up your act.
01:28:07 Put down the fried chicken because it’s gonna kill you.
01:28:11 My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad,
01:28:16 they called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad,
01:28:19 who was the founder and the leader of the nation of Islam.
01:28:22 He had a book and all the book said was,
01:28:25 be smart, eat green vegetables, don’t eat fried food.
01:28:29 Don’t eat pork.
01:28:32 They’re Muslims.
01:28:33 Don’t eat pork and take responsibility for your diet
01:28:38 and be healthy.
01:28:39 And don’t be putting a whole lot of pills into your body.
01:28:43 You don’t need to do that
01:28:44 if you just get control of your diet
01:28:45 and you eat properly.
01:28:47 My uncle loves this idea of responsibility for self
01:28:53 and a determination to build.
01:28:56 He respected that in the Muslims,
01:29:00 even if he didn’t buy the religious part of it.
01:29:03 And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983,
01:29:13 he left me a bequest.
01:29:16 It wasn’t money, unfortunately.
01:29:18 It was his complete collection
01:29:21 of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
01:29:26 And I have these albums.
01:29:28 These are 33 and a third LPs.
01:29:30 There’s six of them.
01:29:32 And I have a complete collection,
01:29:34 as best as my uncle could assemble,
01:29:36 of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
01:29:37 Now, why did he do that?
01:29:39 He did that because he did not want me to forget.
01:29:42 Don’t be dependent upon the white man.
01:29:43 Build your own.
01:29:45 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
01:29:48 Proud black man, take care of your business.
01:29:51 Take care of your children.
01:29:53 Pick up the trash in front of your house.
01:29:56 Get busy.
01:29:58 This was this philosophy.
01:30:02 So violence now, that’s another story.
01:30:05 I mean, Malcolm X would say,
01:30:08 we’re gonna defend ourselves.
01:30:09 You’re gonna mess with us,
01:30:11 you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever.
01:30:14 We’re gonna arm ourselves and we’re gonna fight you back.
01:30:17 You racist police who are oppressing
01:30:22 and persecuting and abusing our people,
01:30:24 well, you better be ready
01:30:27 because we’re gonna fight you back.
01:30:29 And that too was the spirit that my uncle,
01:30:33 that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture.
01:30:36 My uncle was not a radical.
01:30:37 He was a businessman, but he respected this idea.
01:30:41 You take your life in your own hands when you mess with us
01:30:45 because we’re prepared to defend ourselves.
01:30:48 So that blood runs in you too.
01:30:50 That thread is, when you write about black patriotism,
01:30:53 that thread is there too.
01:30:55 It’s like you embody both the ideal that we’re all American,
01:31:00 but also that there is this oppressive history.
01:31:05 There is the powerful that are manipulating you,
01:31:10 that are oppressing you, and you can’t just wait around
01:31:16 for things to fix themselves.
01:31:18 You have to take action.
01:31:20 You have to take things into your own hands.
01:31:22 And sometimes that means being angry.
01:31:24 Sometimes that means being violent.
01:31:26 That’s there too.
01:31:28 Yeah, it’s there, but here, and the but is,
01:31:34 I don’t, me today, Glenn Loury in 2022,
01:31:37 think that that is the answer.
01:31:40 I don’t think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere
01:31:45 at the end of the day.
01:31:46 I think we’re past that.
01:31:49 There aren’t Knight Rider, Ku Klux Klan,
01:31:52 people breaking down your door and dragging you away.
01:31:55 There are not nooses thrown over a tree limb
01:32:01 where you hang somebody from the tree
01:32:03 because they whistled at a white woman
01:32:05 or they got too much property in your community
01:32:07 and you became, they were uppity Negroes
01:32:10 and whatnot like that.
01:32:11 That is a thing of the past in America
01:32:14 that the situation is no longer the one
01:32:19 that requires that kind of violent reaction
01:32:23 and that there is, if we look at the net effect
01:32:27 of the so called rebellions in American cities,
01:32:33 they’re negative.
01:32:34 The George Floyd protests, which became violent
01:32:40 and arsonists in the aftermath of civil disturbance
01:32:44 and whatnot in the summer of 2020,
01:32:47 I think set back the program for African Americans.
01:32:50 I don’t think it advanced it.
01:32:53 I think there are things to be concerned about,
01:32:56 schools that are not working,
01:32:59 police that are not respecting citizens and so forth.
01:33:02 But I think that those are things
01:33:04 that affect white Americans as well
01:33:07 and that the way to ultimately correct those things
01:33:13 is to make alliance and associate oneself
01:33:19 with Americans who are concerned to change these things.
01:33:23 And I don’t think it’s properly framed
01:33:25 as a racial problem.
01:33:29 I certainly don’t think that violent rebellion
01:33:36 gets us anywhere.
01:33:39 I get the historical salience of that posture
01:33:45 and it made a lot of sense
01:33:47 in the early and the mid 20th century.
01:33:49 I don’t think it makes very much sense at all
01:33:51 in the early 21st century.
01:33:55 Well, thank you for allowing me for a brief moment
01:33:57 to try to channel your Uncle Mooney
01:33:59 and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation
01:34:02 as we look forward to the 21st century.
01:34:05 You mentioned that in part,
01:34:09 you’re troubled by the term African American.
01:34:13 So words are funny things until they’re not.
01:34:18 So let me ask you about what I think
01:34:20 is one of the most powerful and controversial words
01:34:22 in the English language, the N word.
01:34:25 So this is a word that I can’t say
01:34:31 that only certain people have the right to say.
01:34:34 I have a friend, Joe Rogan, who has,
01:34:40 what would you say, there was mass pushback
01:34:43 or highlighting of the fact that he didn’t just say N word
01:34:48 but said the full word many times
01:34:51 throughout his conversations
01:34:53 when referring to, in a meta way,
01:34:58 about the power of words,
01:35:00 especially when related to certain comedians
01:35:03 using those words.
01:35:06 Yeah.
01:35:07 What do you think about this word?
01:35:10 Is it empowering?
01:35:12 Is it destructive?
01:35:16 What is it?
01:35:17 What does it mean for race in America?
01:35:20 What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan
01:35:24 were essentially, there’s an attack to cancel him
01:35:29 for using the word?
01:35:31 Just as a scholar of human nature,
01:35:33 what do you think about this whole thing?
01:35:36 This is a phenomenon that interests me.
01:35:39 Okay.
01:35:40 The N word, nigger, I can say it because I’m black.
01:35:44 But I mean, I can also say it because I like hip hop.
01:35:48 And when I listen to hip hop, I hear the word all the time.
01:35:50 These niggas ain’t, you know,
01:35:52 you better watch out for these, et cetera.
01:35:55 I heard the word constantly as I was growing up
01:35:59 as a boy and a young man in Chicago.
01:36:01 Niggas ain’t shit.
01:36:03 That was said.
01:36:04 That was, you know,
01:36:06 and that could be a reflection of some kind of pathology
01:36:10 within the African American community of self hatred
01:36:13 and so forth.
01:36:14 It could be, or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way.
01:36:18 I mean, I assume other groups also have their various,
01:36:23 I don’t know how the Irish talk about their Irish brothers
01:36:26 and, you know, whatever.
01:36:27 And I don’t know how the Jews talk about
01:36:30 the Jewish brothers and whatever.
01:36:33 But black people, when talking about other black people
01:36:35 use the N word all the time.
01:36:40 My nigger, N I G G A, you know, my nigger.
01:36:45 That is a term of endearment.
01:36:49 My friend, Randall Kennedy,
01:36:52 the law professor at Harvard University
01:36:55 has a book called Nigger.
01:36:57 And he uses the word in the title of the book,
01:37:00 the history of a strange history of a provocative word.
01:37:04 At some point there’s a subtitle,
01:37:06 but the title of the book is N I G G E R colon.
01:37:11 And then he has a subtitle.
01:37:15 I think, of course, the use of the word as a slur
01:37:20 and an insult, which is a part of the history
01:37:26 of black people in the United States,
01:37:27 the use of the word by the Southern racist segregationist,
01:37:31 we don’t want no niggers up in here.
01:37:33 Yall, you know, niggers have no place in my restaurant,
01:37:36 in my store, et cetera.
01:37:37 That’s meant to be an insult.
01:37:40 It’s an insult to people.
01:37:41 It’s a fighting word.
01:37:42 It’s a way that you say that to somebody.
01:37:44 It’s a invitation for conflict.
01:37:49 That said, what is it that about this particular word
01:37:52 and also the asymmetry of it,
01:37:55 that do you think it’s empowering
01:37:57 to the black community to own a word?
01:38:04 My honest answer to you is I don’t know.
01:38:06 I don’t fully understand it.
01:38:08 It has become symbolic in a way.
01:38:10 And the policing of the use of the word,
01:38:13 I can say it, but white people can’t say it.
01:38:15 I can say it.
01:38:16 I’m not a racist.
01:38:17 I’m not a self hating black.
01:38:19 I’m just speaking the language of colloquial English
01:38:24 that has emerged amongst African Americans
01:38:26 in which that word plays a big role.
01:38:29 But the prohibition on its use by others.
01:38:32 And of course, in the Joe Rogan case,
01:38:34 it wasn’t as if he was calling anybody an N word.
01:38:38 He was simply pointing out that people had said stuff
01:38:42 in which the N word was a part of what they said.
01:38:44 Now, he did make the statement about,
01:38:47 how did he put it?
01:38:48 The planet of the apes,
01:38:49 that one of the offensive things that he said,
01:38:52 he walked into a room,
01:38:53 there’s a bunch of black guys standing around.
01:38:55 He says, like planet of the apes.
01:38:57 He said it’s like Africa, planet of the apes.
01:38:59 Yeah, he should have been a little bit more careful.
01:39:03 That was an insult.
01:39:05 That was something that if you say that
01:39:11 and people are offended,
01:39:12 they have a right to be offended.
01:39:13 And if you didn’t mean to offend them,
01:39:14 you can apologize.
01:39:15 And he did apologize.
01:39:16 I accept his apology.
01:39:17 Joe’s okay with me as far as that goes.
01:39:21 In fact, John McWhorter and I at the podcast that I do,
01:39:25 The Glenn Show, had a conversation,
01:39:26 part of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
01:39:29 And we concluded he didn’t really do anything wrong.
01:39:31 I mean, you can like or you can hate him or whatever,
01:39:34 but the idea that he’s a racist is kind of ridiculous.
01:39:37 So frankly, I mean, if that’s your test
01:39:43 of what constitutes a racist, the utterance of the word,
01:39:47 then it’s kind of silly as far as I’m concerned.
01:39:53 What do you think about the rigorous testing of people
01:39:58 to the degree they’re racist or not?
01:40:00 The accusation of racism being a way to attack,
01:40:06 to bully, to divide.
01:40:10 So what are the pros and cons of that once again?
01:40:13 Because it does reveal the assholes and the racists,
01:40:16 but it can hurt people who are not.
01:40:20 Well, I think we have a history here in the United States
01:40:26 of blatant racism that goes back a long way.
01:40:30 And that has present day echoes.
01:40:33 So there are racists.
01:40:35 I mean, there are people who will look and see,
01:40:38 oh, those are black people.
01:40:39 They’re patronizing this business.
01:40:40 I don’t wanna patronize this business anymore.
01:40:42 Who if their daughter or their son is dating somebody
01:40:45 that is black, they will say,
01:40:47 I really wish you wouldn’t do that.
01:40:48 I mean, why are you hanging out with those people?
01:40:50 Don’t you know who they are?
01:40:52 There are people, there are racists, okay?
01:40:54 There are black racists.
01:40:56 That is black people who see somebody who’s white
01:40:59 and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever,
01:41:03 or have a visceral dislike based upon nothing
01:41:09 other than the color of the person’s skin.
01:41:11 Such people exist.
01:41:12 Racism is a real thing, et cetera.
01:41:15 On the other hand, I think this,
01:41:18 throwing around the accusation of racism,
01:41:22 a college professor is teaching a course.
01:41:25 He says in the context of teaching the course
01:41:29 that the underrepresentation of blacks
01:41:33 in physics program at this university
01:41:38 is because they score lower on the test than other groups
01:41:41 and they’re not qualified.
01:41:44 So say the professor gives a lecture and he says,
01:41:48 we don’t have more blacks in the physics department
01:41:50 at this university because there are not enough
01:41:52 qualified blacks.
01:41:54 Somebody in the classroom who hears that,
01:41:57 a black student, objects.
01:41:59 He’s a racist, okay?
01:42:03 That’s a power move.
01:42:05 It’s a move to try to control the conversation.
01:42:10 It’s not an argument, it’s an epithet.
01:42:13 You’ve said that a person who has a particular idea
01:42:16 that you don’t like, maybe that idea is,
01:42:18 I’m against affirmative action, I think it’s unfair.
01:42:21 I was just with Dorian Abbott.
01:42:24 Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of Chicago
01:42:30 who published a piece in Newsweek magazine
01:42:33 in which he said that he thought affirmative action
01:42:36 and racial balancing was unethical.
01:42:42 He was invited to give a lecture at MIT,
01:42:44 a very distinguished lecture in his field
01:42:46 based on planetary science.
01:42:49 I don’t know exactly what it is.
01:42:51 I’m not a scientist.
01:42:53 But in any case, because he had said
01:42:58 that he didn’t like affirmative action
01:42:59 and he thought affirmative action was racist,
01:43:01 that’s basically what he said.
01:43:02 Why are we looking at people based upon their race
01:43:05 and decide we should just do it on the merit?
01:43:07 That was his position.
01:43:08 Now, people protesting at the university
01:43:12 where he was invited, MIT, saying that he’s a racist
01:43:15 because he had that opinion.
01:43:17 He gets disinvited.
01:43:19 Charles Murray is a popular social science writer
01:43:24 who is famous for his book about IQ, The Bell Curve,
01:43:29 one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences
01:43:34 between black and white in performance
01:43:37 on mental ability tests and speculates about the extent
01:43:41 to which such differences may be connected
01:43:43 with the genetic inheritance of these racially diverse people.
01:43:48 Now, he could be wrong about everything that he’s saying.
01:43:52 The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist
01:43:57 because he observes that there are racial differences
01:44:02 in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans
01:44:07 of different racial descent.
01:44:10 He could be wrong.
01:44:12 Let me stipulate that he is wrong.
01:44:13 I mean, I don’t wanna argue about whether he’s right
01:44:15 or wrong.
01:44:16 I don’t wanna argue about whether he’s right
01:44:18 or about whether he’s wrong.
01:44:20 He’s addressing himself to a factual issue.
01:44:24 And now the issue becomes instead of grappling
01:44:27 with the factual questions at hand
01:44:29 and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness
01:44:32 about those questions, the issue becomes his character.
01:44:35 He’s a racist.
01:44:39 That’s, in my mind, a lot like calling him a witch.
01:44:43 And the use of that word now, I think,
01:44:48 has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft
01:44:53 because they have views about substantive questions
01:44:56 that bear on racial inequality or racial difference
01:45:01 that a person finds unacceptable
01:45:04 or that a person disagrees with.
01:45:05 And you think you can shut somebody up.
01:45:07 Crime in the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore,
01:45:14 Philadelphia, Washington, DC is out of control,
01:45:18 some person might say.
01:45:20 Murder rate is high.
01:45:21 Who’s committing those crimes?
01:45:22 They’re mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings
01:45:27 and who are doing the shootings.
01:45:28 They’re killing each other.
01:45:29 They’re making our city unlivable.
01:45:32 Now, that’s a hypothetical statement that I offer.
01:45:35 It might be correct, it might be incorrect.
01:45:39 It might be appropriate, it might be inappropriate.
01:45:42 It may be true, but something that we would be better off
01:45:45 if people didn’t focus on, I don’t know.
01:45:49 Responding to someone making that statement,
01:45:52 have you seen what has happened to my city?
01:45:55 It used to be that you could go to North Michigan Avenue
01:45:57 and you could find one after another
01:45:59 after another high end shop.
01:46:01 This is in Chicago, my hometown.
01:46:03 And tourists would come and they’d go to the theater
01:46:07 and there were restaurants and they’d go out.
01:46:08 They don’t do it anymore.
01:46:10 You know what?
01:46:11 Half of those stores are boarded up now.
01:46:12 You know why?
01:46:13 Because when George Floyd was killed,
01:46:15 black people mobbed in the city and they burnt
01:46:19 and they rioted and they looted
01:46:21 and it hasn’t been the same ever since.
01:46:22 And I’m moving to the suburbs.
01:46:24 I’ll be damned if I’m gonna send my children
01:46:26 to those schools.
01:46:27 A person could say that.
01:46:29 They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
01:46:31 They might be right, they might be wrong to say it.
01:46:33 Calling them a racist is exactly not
01:46:37 a rebuttal of what they said.
01:46:38 It’s a move.
01:46:39 It’s a move to try to take control of the conversation
01:46:43 by accusing someone of having bad character
01:46:45 because they said something that made you uncomfortable,
01:46:48 which you can’t deal with.
01:46:49 So you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist.
01:46:52 You might as well be calling them a witch.
01:46:55 You might as well be calling for their head on a platter
01:46:57 because they believe that Satan is Lord
01:47:00 because that’s the kind of quote argument, close quote,
01:47:04 which is precisely not an argument
01:47:07 that people who invoke that term are using.
01:47:09 And here’s what I have to say about that.
01:47:12 It’s a fool’s errand to try to refute somebody
01:47:17 by calling them a witch.
01:47:18 Likewise, it’s a fool’s errand to try to rebut
01:47:23 the contrary forces in American politics
01:47:26 that are a reaction often to real things
01:47:29 that are going on on the ground in black communities
01:47:31 in the cities across this country
01:47:33 by calling people a racist.
01:47:35 You may shut them up, but you won’t change their minds.
01:47:39 And you know what?
01:47:40 At the end of the day, they’re gonna go to the ballot box
01:47:41 and they’re gonna vote.
01:47:43 They’re gonna pick up their store
01:47:45 and they’re gonna move it to the other side of town
01:47:47 or to another town altogether.
01:47:49 They’re gonna keep their children away
01:47:51 from places where they think the influences
01:47:53 are harmful to those children.
01:47:55 They may not even talk about it in public.
01:47:58 You can believe that in private
01:48:00 that they’re talking about it with each other.
01:48:02 You had better find a more effective way
01:48:05 of dealing with the conflicts in this country
01:48:07 that fall along racial fault lines
01:48:09 than calling people witches,
01:48:11 which is what this, you know, anti racist,
01:48:15 you’re a racist because you think
01:48:17 that the out of wedlock birth rate amongst black Americans
01:48:20 is seven babies out of 10 are born
01:48:21 to a woman without a husband.
01:48:23 Their families are falling apart.
01:48:25 Now, no one says that in public
01:48:26 because they’d be called a racist
01:48:27 if they said it in public.
01:48:29 But as a matter of fact, the families are falling apart.
01:48:32 You didn’t change that in the least
01:48:33 by telling people to shut up about it.
01:48:35 Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist
01:48:38 in the 1960s, the late Senator,
01:48:40 the New York Senator who was a federal employee
01:48:43 and an intellectual writing reports
01:48:45 and he writes a report about the Negro family,
01:48:47 he called it in those years.
01:48:48 If I use the word Negro,
01:48:50 now they’re gonna call me a racist if I’m a white person.
01:48:52 I can’t even use the word Negro,
01:48:54 which is a historically legitimate reference
01:48:57 to the descendants of the enslaved people,
01:49:01 which we were as black Americans proud to use until yesterday.
01:49:06 So all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness.
01:49:12 It’s false black power.
01:49:15 People will seed you the ground.
01:49:17 Okay, you don’t want me to use that word?
01:49:18 I won’t use that word anymore.
01:49:19 Okay, you don’t want me to talk about that in public?
01:49:21 All right, I won’t talk about it in public anymore.
01:49:23 I don’t wanna be called a racist, okay?
01:49:25 So I won’t express my opinion.
01:49:26 You haven’t changed anybody’s mind.
01:49:31 And you’ve also mentioned that for that,
01:49:34 you haven’t changed anybody’s mind,
01:49:35 but also for things like in universities and institutions,
01:49:40 there’s a diversity inclusion
01:49:42 and equity kind of meetings and education and so on.
01:49:46 And I believe I read somewhere,
01:49:48 I’ve been, like I mentioned to you offline,
01:49:50 big fan of your Glenn show, people should listen to it.
01:49:55 It’s amazing.
01:49:56 There’s also just interviews of you that I’ve listened to.
01:49:59 I believe you mentioned somewhere
01:50:00 that even those kinds of meetings,
01:50:02 people might sit through and nod along,
01:50:05 but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s making progress,
01:50:09 that they may actually be bottling up a frustration.
01:50:15 The fear is that that’s going to result
01:50:17 in a pendulum sort of push back towards this idea
01:50:22 of forced appreciations, like forced anti racism kind of thing.
01:50:31 I talk about this often in my podcast,
01:50:32 that’s the Glenn show, you can find the Glenn show
01:50:36 on my YouTube channel and also at Substack.
01:50:39 Yeah, you have a great Substack.
01:50:41 You and your friend do Q and As
01:50:43 and all that kind of stuff on Patreon.
01:50:45 Yeah.
01:50:46 So yeah, so people should definitely follow you.
01:50:48 It’s a brilliant conversation.
01:50:49 Check us out.
01:50:50 But yeah, I mean, one concern is that the policing,
01:50:56 the superficial policing,
01:50:58 this is a part of political correctness,
01:51:00 the insistence that you only use certain words,
01:51:02 that you only talk in a certain way,
01:51:03 is a phony kind of power
01:51:06 because it doesn’t actually persuade people
01:51:08 about the issues that are at hand.
01:51:10 Instead, it forces them underground
01:51:12 in their talk about these issues,
01:51:15 and that’s problematic.
01:51:18 Much better that we have overt and explicit
01:51:22 and honest disagreement
01:51:25 to the extent that there are disagreement
01:51:27 about things that are going on
01:51:29 than that we have a superficial kind of conversation
01:51:37 that is purged of any real biting,
01:51:44 discomforting confrontation with the realities
01:51:48 of the situation at hand.
01:51:49 And for black Americans,
01:51:50 I think one big part of the reality
01:51:52 of the situation at hand is violent crime, violent crime.
01:51:57 A police officer is afraid when he stops the car
01:52:00 because it’s an 18 year old driver in the vehicle.
01:52:03 He’s got dreadlocks.
01:52:05 He’s a black person.
01:52:06 The car doesn’t have the right license plate.
01:52:08 He’s afraid to deal with that person.
01:52:11 And one of the reasons he’s afraid to deal with them
01:52:13 is because a few who look like him are behaving violently.
01:52:17 Their violence is usually perpetrated
01:52:20 against others who look like themselves, but not always.
01:52:23 And that reality doesn’t get changed
01:52:27 by telling a newspaper writer who writes about it
01:52:32 that they are racist or enforcing within a newsroom.
01:52:36 You can’t cover that story in that way
01:52:38 because to do so would be racist.
01:52:41 I think it’s a monumental mistake
01:52:45 to enforce a closure on public discussion
01:52:52 based upon a calculation that if we allow people,
01:52:55 if Twitter allows this kind of post,
01:52:58 if the Washington Post runs this kind of story, et cetera,
01:53:03 you end up with a superficial politeness,
01:53:08 a superficial politeness,
01:53:12 but a subterranean seething resentment
01:53:17 that only makes matters worse.
01:53:21 If I can get your comment, maybe you have ideas
01:53:24 because it does seem that this kind of attack works
01:53:28 of being called a racist, being called, maybe not sexist,
01:53:38 but somebody, like we’re going through a Johnny Depp trial
01:53:42 now, right?
01:53:44 It’s a defamation trial, and the reason it’s a defamation
01:53:47 trial is because all it took is a single accusation
01:53:50 of Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually
01:53:54 and physically abused Amber Heard.
01:53:56 And all it took is just a single article.
01:53:59 No proof was given except the accusation itself,
01:54:04 and the world believed it.
01:54:06 So it’s effective.
01:54:09 So how do you fight back if it’s so damn effective
01:54:13 that you can just call anybody racist?
01:54:15 And it works.
01:54:16 It’s hard to wash off.
01:54:18 It’s, you’re not proven in the court of law
01:54:27 or anything like that, but we get those articles,
01:54:32 we get that label, and then the world moves on
01:54:35 and just assumes that person is racist.
01:54:37 So how do you, do you have any ideas how to fight back?
01:54:41 No, I don’t, frankly.
01:54:43 Just highlighting the fact.
01:54:44 Listen, Roseanne Barr, who made this statement
01:54:46 about Valerie Jarrett, she made some kind of ape
01:54:49 like reference to the whatever, and her show
01:54:51 got canceled, and she’s a racist.
01:54:54 So first of all, pointing it out, I suppose,
01:54:56 is one of the most powerful things that this,
01:54:59 the hypocrisy of it, the.
01:55:04 You say it works, I guess you’re right.
01:55:06 It used to be that calling someone a communist worked.
01:55:09 I mean, going back to the late 40s, early 50s,
01:55:13 Red Scare, McCarthyism, and whatnot,
01:55:18 and the person might’ve belonged to a club
01:55:21 that was pro Soviet Union in the 1930s
01:55:24 when they were in college.
01:55:25 They might’ve voted for the socialist candidate,
01:55:28 Henry Wallace, in the presidential election of 1948.
01:55:31 They might belong to the Communist Party.
01:55:33 They might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot
01:55:37 of stuff about capitalism and whatnot,
01:55:39 and they got called a communist or a Marxist,
01:55:42 and it could’ve ruined their career,
01:55:43 could’ve ruined their lives.
01:55:47 And a lot of people shut up about it,
01:55:49 and it took, and it went on for a long time.
01:55:53 And in a way, it kind of still is going on.
01:55:56 I mean, you call somebody a Marxist,
01:55:58 if you can make that stick, they’re certainly not gonna
01:56:01 get elected president of the United States.
01:56:04 But I don’t know about this.
01:56:07 I think, you know, I once read this book
01:56:10 by a German political scientist
01:56:13 called Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
01:56:16 That was the writer’s name, Elisabeth Neula Neumann.
01:56:21 The book was called The Spiral of Silence.
01:56:25 And the argument was there can be some views,
01:56:30 some issues in society that get defined
01:56:34 in such a way that it’s inappropriate to hold those views.
01:56:37 And as a result, people who don’t want to be shamed,
01:56:39 who don’t want to be ostracized don’t express those views.
01:56:45 And when they don’t express them,
01:56:46 anybody holding the view because they don’t hear it
01:56:48 said by others think that they’re the only one
01:56:50 and one of the few who hold the view,
01:56:53 and so they don’t want to be the only one
01:56:55 out there saying something, so they keep it to themselves.
01:56:58 So now this view, this attitude in society
01:57:02 could be held by a large number of people,
01:57:05 but because of the fear that if they were to express it,
01:57:12 they’d be ostracized, no one says it.
01:57:15 And since no one is saying it,
01:57:16 the others who hold the view don’t know
01:57:18 that they’re not alone,
01:57:21 that they are not the only ones who hold the view.
01:57:24 And hence they keep silent.
01:57:25 That could be an equilibrium.
01:57:26 It could be a relatively stable situation
01:57:29 in which the emperor has no clothes.
01:57:32 Everybody can see that this dude is naked, okay?
01:57:36 But everybody thinks that, you know,
01:57:39 I don’t want to be the only one to say it.
01:57:41 And so we all kind of collaborate in this charade
01:57:45 of keeping the view to ourselves.
01:57:48 Then along comes an event that somebody decides
01:57:54 to defy the consensus and to speak out.
01:57:59 It could be a little kid who in the story
01:58:01 about the emperor has no clothes,
01:58:03 doesn’t realize that he’s not supposed to say
01:58:05 that the emperor is naked.
01:58:07 The thing about the kid in the story
01:58:09 who says that the emperor is naked,
01:58:11 it’s not that he’s saying it.
01:58:14 It’s not even that other people hear him saying it.
01:58:17 It’s that everybody knows
01:58:19 that everybody else heard him say it, okay?
01:58:22 The kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes
01:58:27 creates a circumstance in which it’s common knowledge
01:58:30 that the emperor has no clothes.
01:58:31 Now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge.
01:58:33 It does not even mean widespread knowledge.
01:58:36 It means comprehensive knowledge
01:58:38 of other person’s knowledge of the thing, okay?
01:58:42 So the spiral of silence is a equilibrium
01:58:45 that is susceptible to being undermined
01:58:49 by a process of a kind of cumulative process,
01:58:53 a snowballing process of revelation
01:58:56 that you’re not the only one who thinks this way, okay?
01:59:00 It’s fascinating to think that there’s an ocean
01:59:02 of common knowledge that we’re waiting for the little kid
01:59:05 to wake us up to, different little parts of it.
01:59:08 That’s correct.
01:59:09 And the little kid, by the way,
01:59:10 could be somebody like Donald Trump,
01:59:12 only more effective than Donald Trump,
01:59:15 somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump,
01:59:17 somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump,
01:59:20 somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick
01:59:25 takes a knee at a football game and says,
01:59:29 I’m not gonna stand for this president allegiance,
01:59:31 that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that.
01:59:38 Somebody who understands
01:59:39 that when a Black Lives Matter activist
01:59:43 stands up with his ball of fists and says,
01:59:44 burn this bitch down about a city
01:59:47 in the United States of America,
01:59:49 that a lot of people are upset about that, a lot of them.
01:59:52 A person, a shrewd politician,
01:59:54 a shrewd manager of a public image
01:59:59 could build on and create a circumstance
02:00:02 in which more and more people will feel safe
02:00:06 to express that view.
02:00:07 And the more who express it,
02:00:09 the safer those who have yet to express it but who hold it
02:00:12 will feel in expressing it.
02:00:13 And to the extent that the view is very widespread
02:00:17 but is kept under wraps, an explosion could happen.
02:00:21 And you can look up tomorrow and have a very different
02:00:23 country than you had today
02:00:25 because the conspiracy of silence, the spiral of silence
02:00:30 ends up getting unraveled by somebody who steps out
02:00:34 away from the consensus,
02:00:36 dares to take the slings and arrows
02:00:38 of exposing themselves as a naysayer
02:00:40 but taps into a sentiment that’s very widespread.
02:00:44 And I fear that with respect to many racial issues,
02:00:49 this is the situation that we actually confront,
02:00:53 that it could unravel in a very ugly way.
02:00:57 But it could also unravel in a beautiful way.
02:01:00 So it’s depending.
02:01:02 There is a spiral of silence, you’re saying,
02:01:04 and it could be, speaking of children,
02:01:07 charismatic children, there’s a guy named Elon Musk
02:01:11 who might be a candidate for such an unraveling, right?
02:01:16 You mentioned the person that speaks out
02:01:20 could be a Donald Trump.
02:01:21 But in this current situation that we live in,
02:01:23 like as this week, Elon has purchased Twitter.
02:01:28 That’s what I hear.
02:01:29 And is pushing for, in all kinds of ways,
02:01:34 the increase of free speech on Twitter.
02:01:37 And speaking about some of the issues
02:01:40 that we’ve been speaking about here with you,
02:01:44 but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact
02:01:47 that you have to, it’s okay to point out
02:01:50 that the emperor wears no clothes,
02:01:52 and to do so from all sides in a way
02:01:55 that everybody’s a little bit pissed off,
02:01:57 but not too much.
02:01:59 What do you think about this whole effort
02:02:01 of free speech in these public platforms?
02:02:06 Elon in particular, Twitter, your avid Twitter user.
02:02:11 But just public platforms for discourse,
02:02:14 for us as a civilization to figure stuff out.
02:02:18 Yeah, well, the people on the left
02:02:21 are very upset about the possibility
02:02:23 that Elon Musk and Twitter will be open to,
02:02:28 more open to provocative public speech
02:02:33 that has heretofore been banned or suppressed.
02:02:37 And I think they might be right to be concerned
02:02:41 that that could happen.
02:02:43 I don’t know enough about the technology
02:02:45 and about the market to really,
02:02:47 I mean, social media and whatnot,
02:02:50 it seems like it’s a complicated system
02:02:53 of interactions between people and who the users are
02:02:56 and so forth and so on.
02:02:58 I do know that that New York Post story
02:03:02 about Hunter Biden’s laptop was real news
02:03:06 and could have affected the outcome of the election,
02:03:08 and it was suppressed,
02:03:10 and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it.
02:03:14 I do know that the question of where the COVID 19 virus
02:03:18 originated and the role that a lab leak account
02:03:22 could have played in the public processing of that event
02:03:26 was real news, and that it was suppressed
02:03:29 by people who were trying to control misinformation,
02:03:32 disinformation, Russian disinformation campaigns
02:03:36 and whatnot.
02:03:36 So Twitter has users, I’m one of them,
02:03:40 and it has a lot of users.
02:03:42 It’s not as big as Facebook, I gather.
02:03:43 It’s not, but it’s important,
02:03:46 the ability to construct counter platforms,
02:03:51 people moving around and whatnot.
02:03:54 It’s a kind of network dynamic
02:03:56 that maybe I should understand it better than I do
02:03:58 being a social scientist, but.
02:04:00 I don’t think anyone understands it,
02:04:01 even people inside Twitter, which is fascinating.
02:04:05 It’s a monster because of just the bandwidth of messaging,
02:04:09 and you don’t know who is a bot and who is a human.
02:04:12 That’s a fascinating dynamic,
02:04:15 and the viral nature of negativity.
02:04:20 All of those dynamics, of course,
02:04:22 you are probably the right person to understand it
02:04:25 from a social scientist perspective,
02:04:28 from an economics perspective,
02:04:29 but nobody really understands,
02:04:31 and it’s fascinating within that domain,
02:04:34 how do you allow for free speech,
02:04:38 not allow for free speech, encourage free speech,
02:04:41 defend free speech, and at the same time,
02:04:45 manage millions of ongoing conversations
02:04:49 from just becoming insanely chaotic.
02:04:56 Sort of from Twitter perspective,
02:04:58 they want people to be happy, to grow,
02:05:02 to actually have difficult, critical conversations,
02:05:05 and the problem with humans is they think
02:05:08 they know what that is, and they think
02:05:12 they can label things as misinformation,
02:05:14 as counterproductive or healthy conversations, in quotes,
02:05:18 and the problem is, as we are learning,
02:05:22 humans are not able to do that effectively.
02:05:25 First of all, power corrupts.
02:05:27 There’s something delicious about having the power
02:05:30 to label something as misinformation.
02:05:33 You do that once for something
02:05:35 that might be obviously misinformation,
02:05:37 and then you start getting greedy.
02:05:39 You start getting excited.
02:05:40 It feels good.
02:05:41 It feels good to label something
02:05:43 as misinformation or disinformation
02:05:46 that you just don’t like, and over time,
02:05:49 especially if there’s a culture inside of a company
02:05:52 that leans a certain political direction
02:05:55 or leans, in all the groups that we talked about,
02:05:57 leans a certain way, they’ll start
02:05:59 to label as misinformation things they just don’t like,
02:06:03 and that power is delicious, and it corrupts.
02:06:07 You have to construct mechanisms,
02:06:08 like the Founding Fathers did,
02:06:10 for somehow preventing you from allowing
02:06:14 that power to get too delicious.
02:06:17 At least that’s my perspective on what’s going on.
02:06:19 Well, I’ll just tell you personally,
02:06:21 I’m excited about the prospect.
02:06:23 I’m glad to see Musk making the move that he’s making,
02:06:25 and we’ll see what happens at Twitter and so forth.
02:06:29 You’re looking forward for the, what did he say?
02:06:33 Let’s make Twitter more fun.
02:06:35 I’m looking forward to the fun.
02:06:39 You’ve talked about you are at a prestigious university.
02:06:43 Brown University.
02:06:44 Brown University, and you’ve mentioned
02:06:48 that universities might be in trouble.
02:06:50 I think it’s with Jordan, but everywhere else,
02:06:52 that barbarians are at the gate.
02:06:54 Who are the barbarians at the gate of the university?
02:06:59 So first of all, what is to you beautiful
02:07:03 about the ideal of the university in America, of academia?
02:07:09 And what is a threat?
02:07:12 Well, you know, a university is dedicated
02:07:15 to the pursuit of truth, and to the education
02:07:21 and nurturing of young people as they enter
02:07:24 into the pursuit of truth, to doing research and to teaching
02:07:29 in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse.
02:07:37 So free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence
02:07:40 and your imagination may lead you.
02:07:43 And civil discourse means that you exchange arguments
02:07:46 with people when you don’t agree with them
02:07:48 on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things.
02:07:50 I think the university is a magnificent institution.
02:07:55 It is a relatively modern institution.
02:07:59 I mean, last 500 years or so.
02:08:01 I mean, there are universities that are older than that,
02:08:03 but the great research universities of the world,
02:08:07 not only here in the United States,
02:08:09 are places where human ingenuity is nurtured,
02:08:14 where new lot knowledge is created,
02:08:16 and where young people are equipped to answer questions
02:08:21 that are open questions about our existence
02:08:25 in the world that we live in.
02:08:26 You can trace to the university much,
02:08:30 if not most, of the advances in technology
02:08:33 and resourcefulness and our understanding
02:08:35 of the origins of the species, of the nature of the universe,
02:08:38 cosmology, et cetera, science,
02:08:41 the pursuit of humanistic understanding,
02:08:44 the nurturing of traditions of inquiry,
02:08:47 so forth, so that’s the university.
02:08:49 Barbarians are at the gates.
02:08:52 The people who are trying to shut down open inquiry
02:08:55 at the university on behalf of their particular view
02:08:58 about things are a threat to what the university stands for,
02:09:03 and they should be resisted.
02:09:05 So if I’m inquiring about the nature of human intelligence,
02:09:10 and I wanna study differences between human populations
02:09:13 and their acquisition of,
02:09:15 or their expression of cognitive ability,
02:09:19 that’s fair game, it’s an open question.
02:09:22 If I wanna know something about the nature
02:09:24 of gender affiliation and identity
02:09:28 and gender dysphoria and whatnot,
02:09:32 that’s fair game to study in a university.
02:09:34 You can’t shut that down, you shouldn’t be able to,
02:09:37 by saying, I have a particular position here,
02:09:41 I’m a member of a particular identity group,
02:09:43 suppose I wanna study the history of colonialism,
02:09:47 and there’s a narrative on the progressive side,
02:09:51 which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating
02:09:54 and stealing or whatever, whatever,
02:09:55 and I happen to think, well, there’s another aspect
02:09:58 to the story about colonialism too,
02:09:59 which is that it’s a mechanism for the diffusion
02:10:02 of the best in human civilization to populations
02:10:05 that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that.
02:10:08 It brought literacy to the Southern hemispheric populations
02:10:12 that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing.
02:10:16 It’s complicated.
02:10:17 I’m not taking that position, by the way.
02:10:19 I’m just saying somebody at a university
02:10:22 should be able to take it up and pursue it
02:10:26 and engage in argument with people about it.
02:10:28 I’m talking about race and ethnicity,
02:10:29 but this extends to a wide range of things.
02:10:32 Suppose we’re talking about race,
02:10:33 a wide range of things, suppose we’re talking about climate,
02:10:36 and one person says the earth is endangered
02:10:38 because carbon in global warming, et cetera, et cetera,
02:10:42 and another person says, no, wait, no, wait,
02:10:45 look at where we stand in the 21st century.
02:10:48 We’re vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago.
02:10:51 We have much more knowledge about that
02:10:53 and so forth and so on.
02:10:54 250 years from now, human ingenuity will have devised
02:10:59 in ways that we can not even begin to anticipate.
02:11:02 All manner of technological means for managing the problem.
02:11:09 There’s no reason that we should shut down
02:11:11 industrial civilization today
02:11:14 because we fear the consequences of it
02:11:16 when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors
02:11:20 and those who come two centuries after us
02:11:22 will be vastly more effective
02:11:24 at dealing with problems than we are now.
02:11:27 Let’s, et cetera.
02:11:28 I’m not actually making that argument.
02:11:30 I’m just saying the tendency to try to say, oh, no,
02:11:35 that person is a climate denier.
02:11:36 They can’t pursue that area of inquiry
02:11:40 is against the spirit of the university.
02:11:44 I think the barbarians at the gates
02:11:47 has to do with the people who think they know
02:11:50 what the right side of history is
02:11:52 and try to make the university stand
02:11:54 on the right side of history.
02:11:56 My position is you don’t know
02:11:58 what the right side of history is.
02:12:01 And the purpose of a university is to equip you
02:12:03 to be able to think about what is the right side of history.
02:12:07 What is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us
02:12:11 as human beings living on this planet
02:12:14 with the billions that we are in the condition that we are.
02:12:18 So the identitarians,
02:12:22 the ones who wanna make the university kowtow
02:12:25 to their particular understandings about their own identity.
02:12:31 We now have at Brown University and various other places,
02:12:36 we don’t do Columbus Day anymore.
02:12:38 We do Indigenous Peoples Day.
02:12:40 When that day comes up in October,
02:12:42 we don’t talk about Columbus.
02:12:44 They’re taking down statues of Columbus
02:12:46 all across the country and so forth and so on.
02:12:48 I’m not arguing anything here other than
02:12:50 that the latter day position
02:12:59 BIPOCs, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color,
02:13:03 the latter day position that the university
02:13:05 has to reflect a particular sensibility
02:13:09 about these identity questions.
02:13:11 I think it’s a threat to the integrity of the enterprise.
02:13:14 I don’t think you’re overstating it.
02:13:16 I tend to be, just from my limited knowledge of MIT,
02:13:22 but perhaps it applies broadly,
02:13:25 I think the beauty of the university, broadly speaking,
02:13:29 is the faculty and the students.
02:13:33 And the problem arises from the overreach
02:13:40 of a overgrowing administration
02:13:43 that gives, again, thinks that it knows enough
02:13:51 to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs,
02:13:56 and then based on that, empowers a certain small selection
02:14:00 of students to be the sort of voices of activism,
02:14:04 of a particular idea.
02:14:07 And not, I think activism is beautiful,
02:14:10 but not just activism, but anybody that disagrees
02:14:12 is shut down, and that, I think,
02:14:17 the blame lies with the administration.
02:14:20 So I think the solution is in lessening,
02:14:23 just like the solution with too big of a government,
02:14:25 too big of a bureaucracy, is there needs to be
02:14:30 redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful,
02:14:34 which is the old students and the young students,
02:14:38 old students being professors.
02:14:42 So the scholars, the curious minds,
02:14:45 the people that are in this whole thing
02:14:48 to explore the world, to be curious about it,
02:14:51 on a salary that’s probably way too low
02:14:53 for the thing they’re doing.
02:14:54 That’s the whole point.
02:14:57 And then the administration just gets in the way,
02:15:01 and is the source of this kind of,
02:15:05 I would say that, in your beautiful phrasing,
02:15:08 I would say the administration
02:15:10 is the barbarians at the gate.
02:15:12 So the solution is smaller bureaucracy,
02:15:15 smaller administrations.
02:15:16 I have to, on this point, you had this conversation,
02:15:18 you put on your self stack with Jordan Peterson
02:15:23 about cognitive inequality.
02:15:25 I think it’s titled Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality.
02:15:29 This particular topic of just IQ differences
02:15:33 between groups, why is this,
02:15:37 why is it so dangerous to talk about?
02:15:39 Why this particular topic?
02:15:42 Well, it’s like you’re calling black people inferior.
02:15:45 It’s like you’re saying they’re genetically inferior.
02:15:46 That’s what people are saying.
02:15:48 It’s like you’re rationalizing the disparity of outcomes
02:15:51 by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people.
02:15:55 If you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes,
02:16:01 if you say cognitive ability exists,
02:16:03 people really are different
02:16:04 in terms of their intellectual functioning.
02:16:07 And if you say cognitive ability differences
02:16:09 are substantial between racially defined populations,
02:16:15 the sum of that, there is cognitive ability,
02:16:17 it matters, and the difference by race
02:16:19 is the conclusion that outcome differences by race
02:16:22 are in part due to natural differences
02:16:26 between the populations.
02:16:28 People find that to be completely offensive
02:16:30 and unacceptable.
02:16:32 So that’s what I think is going on.
02:16:34 Can you steel me on that case
02:16:37 that we should be careful doing that kind of research?
02:16:41 So this has to do with research.
02:16:46 It’s like the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda.
02:16:54 You can use, white supremacists could use conclusions,
02:16:58 cherry pick conclusions of studies to push their agenda.
02:17:04 Can you steel me on the case that we should be careful?
02:17:07 Yeah, I could do it at three levels.
02:17:08 One is what do we mean by cognitive ability?
02:17:11 So there’s many different kinds of intelligence
02:17:13 a person might say.
02:17:15 How good are IQ tests at measuring
02:17:18 other kinds of human capacities
02:17:20 that are pertinent to success in life,
02:17:24 like temperament, like emotional intelligence, and so on.
02:17:27 So intelligence is not a one dimensional thing
02:17:31 measured by G.
02:17:32 The cognitive psychologists talk about G,
02:17:36 the general intelligence factor,
02:17:38 which is a statistical construction.
02:17:41 It’s a factor analytic resolution
02:17:44 of the correlation across individuals
02:17:48 in their performance on a battery,
02:17:49 a different kind of test.
02:17:50 And they use that to define a general factor of intelligence
02:17:55 that a person could say that is a very narrow view
02:17:59 of what human mental capacities actually are.
02:18:04 And that it’s much better to think about
02:18:07 multi dimensional measures of human mental functioning
02:18:12 rather than a single cognitive ability measure,
02:18:15 so called IQ, which is a narrow construction
02:18:20 that doesn’t capture all of the subtle nuance
02:18:26 of human difference in functioning.
02:18:28 Functioning is not just the ability
02:18:30 to recite backwards a sequence of numbers.
02:18:34 I say eight, seven, nine, five, three, two.
02:18:37 You say two, three, five, seven, eight, nine.
02:18:40 It’s not just that.
02:18:40 Intelligence is a complex management
02:18:47 of many different dimensions of human performance,
02:18:49 including things like being able to stick with a task
02:18:54 and not give up, things like being able to discipline
02:18:58 and control your impulses so as to remain focused
02:19:02 and so forth.
02:19:03 That could be one dimension.
02:19:04 I could start by questioning the very foundation
02:19:07 of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability
02:19:13 by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed.
02:19:18 I could go to a higher level.
02:19:19 I could say what we’re really interested in
02:19:23 is social outcomes and the question of what factors
02:19:28 influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability
02:19:32 to many other things.
02:19:33 So here’s an example.
02:19:37 Visual acuity, how well do you see?
02:19:41 You’re not wearing glasses, I am.
02:19:43 Visual acuity varies between human beings.
02:19:48 Some people see better than other people do.
02:19:52 Visual acuity can be measured.
02:19:54 I can put you at the chart and you can,
02:19:57 can you identify and read that bottom line
02:19:58 in small print or not?
02:20:00 So we can measure visual acuity
02:20:02 and it varies between human beings.
02:20:04 Visual acuity is partly genetic.
02:20:07 I think that’s undoubtedly true.
02:20:09 We inherit genes that influence whether or not
02:20:12 we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever.
02:20:15 So visual acuity differs between people
02:20:19 and can be measured and is under genetic control.
02:20:23 On the other hand, corrective lenses allow for us
02:20:28 to level the playing field between people
02:20:29 who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity.
02:20:34 Likewise, social outcomes are what we’re really interested in
02:20:37 employment, earnings, whether or not they’re law abiding,
02:20:41 how do they conduct themselves and their families
02:20:43 and so forth amongst individuals.
02:20:45 Yes, social outcomes are influenced
02:20:47 by so called cognitive ability,
02:20:49 but they’re influenced by many other things as well.
02:20:52 If there are interventions that can be undertaken in society
02:20:56 that level the playing field between people
02:20:58 who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability,
02:21:02 the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability
02:21:05 becomes less significant.
02:21:07 Just like it’s less significant that people differ
02:21:10 with respect to how well they see
02:21:12 when corrective lenses allow
02:21:14 for the leveling of that playing field.
02:21:16 There are in fact interventions, educational interventions,
02:21:20 early childhood interventions that have been shown
02:21:23 to level the playing field
02:21:25 to create better life outcomes for people
02:21:27 even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence.
02:21:30 So a second level of arguing against this whole program
02:21:35 of research on human differences and intelligence
02:21:38 is to observe that yes, human beings
02:21:40 and perhaps racially defined groups
02:21:42 may differ on the average in intellectual endowment,
02:21:46 but there well may be social interventions
02:21:49 that level the playing field,
02:21:50 whether it’s in education
02:21:51 or in other kinds of programmatic interventions,
02:21:55 especially for the poor.
02:21:57 A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to,
02:21:59 which is that if you talk like this,
02:22:02 you’re gonna encourage a kind of politics
02:22:04 which is very ugly.
02:22:05 And it’s best to frame the discussion
02:22:09 in ways that don’t put emphasis
02:22:11 on racially defined natural differences between populations.
02:22:17 That’s an argument that I am myself personally
02:22:22 conflicted about.
02:22:24 On the one hand, I think, you know,
02:22:27 those people are just stupid.
02:22:29 It is racist, okay?
02:22:32 On the other hand, I think the calculation,
02:22:36 we shouldn’t do this kind of research.
02:22:38 Suppose I’m at the National Science Foundation,
02:22:40 a research team submits a proposal.
02:22:42 The proposal proposes to undertake a study.
02:22:44 The study would explore the extent to which people
02:22:48 and racial groups differ with respect
02:22:50 to their intellectual performance
02:22:52 and how that’s influenced by their genetic
02:22:55 and environmental interaction.
02:22:56 And I decide not to fund the study
02:22:59 based on a political calculation
02:23:01 that the subject is too sensitive.
02:23:04 And if you explore that subject,
02:23:06 you might get the wrong answer.
02:23:08 And if you get the wrong answer,
02:23:09 the white supremacist will be encouraged.
02:23:12 Well, that is presuming before the research is done
02:23:17 that I know the outcome of the research
02:23:19 and that I can calculate what the political consequence
02:23:23 of the research outcome is gonna be.
02:23:25 That’s assuming the thing before you even know
02:23:27 what the thing actually is.
02:23:28 It’s a kind of omniscience.
02:23:30 It presumes that you as the master of the universe
02:23:35 can tell people what it is
02:23:37 that people are being treated like children,
02:23:39 what it is that they’re capable of knowing
02:23:41 and what it is that they’re not capable of knowing.
02:23:44 It would be like someone saying to Einstein,
02:23:47 I don’t know about that special relativity theory.
02:23:49 You know, it could well lead
02:23:50 to the development of technologies
02:23:53 that would allow nuclear weapons.
02:23:54 Or someone saying to Oppenheimer,
02:23:55 who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project
02:23:58 where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity,
02:24:02 don’t carry out that project
02:24:04 because the results of acquiring that knowledge
02:24:08 may be more than we can deal with.
02:24:10 Or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research
02:24:13 who’s interested in exploring the nature of the human genome,
02:24:19 don’t carry out that experiment,
02:24:20 that cloning, undertaking, whatever,
02:24:22 because the consequences could be deleterious.
02:24:26 Well, the consequences could be deleterious.
02:24:27 The consequences could also be the cure of cancer.
02:24:30 The consequences could also be
02:24:32 being able to generate electric power
02:24:33 without producing carbon effluent.
02:24:36 So who are you to tell me,
02:24:38 you being the person in the political position
02:24:42 to control the research,
02:24:44 what the consequence of doing the research is?
02:24:46 I think I don’t want to cede that kind of power
02:24:50 to politicians over the course of human inquiry.
02:24:55 So yes, I would want there to be regulations
02:24:59 governing the use of biologically sensitive
02:25:03 and potentially dangerous pathogens
02:25:06 in a lab in Wuhan or any place else.
02:25:10 I would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire.
02:25:13 On the other hand, I think that the tendency
02:25:16 to try to shut down inquiry
02:25:19 on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences
02:25:24 is the road to ignorance and impoverishment
02:25:27 at the end of the day for humankind,
02:25:29 denying ourselves the potential benefits
02:25:31 of that kind of inquiry.
02:25:33 I think we need to take our chances with inquiry
02:25:35 rather than to try to control it.
02:25:37 And I feel that way about the exploration
02:25:39 of human intelligence as much as anything else.
02:25:42 So you’ve asked me to steel man the case
02:25:44 against research on IQ of the sort
02:25:47 that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing.
02:25:51 And I’ve said A, your measure of intelligence
02:25:54 is single dimensional and it ought to be multi dimensional.
02:25:58 I’ve said B, the consequences of people’s differing
02:26:02 in intelligence depends not only
02:26:03 on the natural endowments of the people
02:26:05 but also on the environment
02:26:08 and the potential for intervening in that environment
02:26:12 through one or another kind of instrument
02:26:14 as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses
02:26:18 to level the playing field between people
02:26:20 with different visual acuity indicates.
02:26:25 But finally, I’ve said, yes,
02:26:28 research on racial differences in IQ can foster
02:26:33 political beliefs that we would regard to be noxious.
02:26:38 On the other hand, to presume that what we don’t know yet
02:26:41 and might find out from the research is gonna be harmful
02:26:44 is to assume a kind of presumption
02:26:48 or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be
02:26:52 which we ought to be very slow to embrace
02:26:55 because if we had done so in the past,
02:26:57 we wouldn’t have nuclear power.
02:26:59 There’s a lot of things that we wouldn’t know.
02:27:01 I mean, what were people saying about Darwin
02:27:03 and exploration of the evolution
02:27:06 and origin of the species?
02:27:07 They were afraid that it was gonna, in effect,
02:27:10 disprove the religious based accounts
02:27:13 of what were they saying about Copernicus
02:27:16 and et cetera, et cetera.
02:27:17 So, you know.
02:27:19 That was a masterful layering of, quote,
02:27:24 wrestling with cognitive inequality.
02:27:26 You dragged in nuclear research,
02:27:29 Copernicus, Darwin, biomedical research with genetics,
02:27:32 even COVID and the lab leak.
02:27:37 I mean, that was just fun to listen to.
02:27:39 Okay. Okay.
02:27:42 Let me ask you about your politics.
02:27:44 So you’ve recently said that you’re a conservative leaning.
02:27:48 I mean, maybe that’s a day to day thing.
02:27:51 Maybe you can push back.
02:27:52 But so you have somebody like your friend, John McWhorter,
02:27:56 who we could say is on your left, to the left of you.
02:28:01 And then you have somebody like Thomas Sowell
02:28:05 who maybe is on to the right of you.
02:28:09 Yeah, probably.
02:28:10 And yet there’s a lot of overlap between the three of you.
02:28:14 So to what degree does politics affect your view on race
02:28:19 in America?
02:28:21 And maybe to what degree does your view on race
02:28:25 affect your politics?
02:28:28 Okay.
02:28:29 And that, for people who don’t know, has shifted over time.
02:28:33 You’ve been on quite a roller coaster,
02:28:36 as anybody who thinks about the world should be.
02:28:38 Well, let’s begin with the fact that I was trained
02:28:43 as an economist in a tradition of what many people
02:28:48 would call neoliberalism.
02:28:50 I was trained at MIT, which was not a right wing place
02:28:56 by any means, but it was a place where you learned
02:29:01 about markets and about the benefits of capitalism
02:29:06 as a way of organizing society,
02:29:10 the virtues of free enterprise,
02:29:13 the fact that the pursuit of profit
02:29:15 was not necessarily a bad thing,
02:29:17 but it well might be the road to prosperity
02:29:20 and to economic growth.
02:29:21 The idea that private property and individuals seeking
02:29:25 to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth
02:29:28 did create inequality, but it also created opportunity.
02:29:32 And it also expanded the ability to do things
02:29:36 and expanded our knowledge and our control
02:29:38 over the physical environment in which we’re embedded
02:29:41 and et cetera.
02:29:44 So we were not Marxists at MIT, although we did read Marx.
02:29:48 I mean, those of us who were intellectually curious,
02:29:50 you read Marx.
02:29:51 Marx was an important figure in the history of the West.
02:29:54 And I think Marx should be read in capital three volumes,
02:29:57 et cetera, alienation of labor and whatnot.
02:30:02 The implications of modernization,
02:30:04 the advent of industrial capitalism, et cetera.
02:30:08 That kind of dynamic deserves to be studied
02:30:12 and to come at it in a critical way,
02:30:16 informed by the intellectual inheritance of Marx and Marxism.
02:30:21 I think that’s a part of a full education
02:30:23 in social philosophy and economic analysis
02:30:28 that an open minded person ought to acquaint themselves with.
02:30:32 But at the end of the day,
02:30:33 I think that the free marketeers have the better of it.
02:30:41 I think the story of the 20th century
02:30:43 as far as economic development is concerned reflects that.
02:30:47 I think that the experiments where centralized control
02:30:52 over economic decisions was the order of the day failed.
02:30:57 I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China
02:31:01 as a force has a lot to do with the spread of,
02:31:05 in effect, capitalist oriented modes
02:31:08 of entering economic exchange,
02:31:11 freeing up prices, markets, property, and so forth.
02:31:15 Although obviously it’s a complicated
02:31:18 political economic system, we’re talking about China.
02:31:21 But I think that the story of the 20th century
02:31:26 and the hope for the 21st century
02:31:28 is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange
02:31:34 of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property
02:31:40 by people in a more or less capitalist oriented system.
02:31:46 That’s the view that I hold.
02:31:49 I guess that makes me a conservative, I don’t know.
02:31:52 I wanna say that’s not to the exclusion
02:31:56 of a social safety net.
02:31:58 I’m not saying that old people in an ideal social system
02:32:02 would be left to their own devices
02:32:04 regardless of whether or not
02:32:05 they had saved for their retirement.
02:32:07 I’m not saying that the ideal of extending decent access
02:32:13 to healthcare to all people regardless
02:32:15 of whether or not they can afford it,
02:32:18 decent access to education to people
02:32:20 regardless of whether or not they can afford it
02:32:22 is standing in the way of prosperity.
02:32:25 I don’t believe that.
02:32:26 I think the mixed economies that we see in Northern Europe
02:32:29 and in North America are a balancing
02:32:35 of the virtues of free enterprise property
02:32:37 and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand
02:32:40 against the needs to have a decent society
02:32:44 in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless
02:32:47 are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity
02:32:51 that is accommodated by our common membership
02:32:54 within a single nation state,
02:32:56 which is why I think nationalism is important.
02:32:59 And it’s why I think borders are important
02:33:02 because without a coherent polity
02:33:06 who can see themselves as in a common situation
02:33:12 and agree through their politics
02:33:15 to support each other to some extent,
02:33:17 you can’t sustain a safety net.
02:33:18 You cannot have a social safety net for a global population.
02:33:23 You can only have a social safety net
02:33:24 for a bounded population who have a sense
02:33:28 of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise
02:33:33 which they pay their dues through their taxes
02:33:35 in order to sustain it.
02:33:36 There’s a balancing that has to go on.
02:33:38 So that’s the first thing that I would say about my politics.
02:33:42 I’m a neoliberal economist.
02:33:44 I believe in markets.
02:33:45 I believe in prices.
02:33:46 I believe in profit.
02:33:47 Corporations are not an incarnation of evil.
02:33:51 Corporations are a legal nexus
02:33:53 through which production gets organized
02:33:56 in which you solicit the cooperation of workers,
02:34:00 of people who provide capital,
02:34:02 of people who provide raw materials
02:34:04 and input of customers and so on.
02:34:06 And that functionality allows for the production of goods
02:34:12 and their distribution and their earning of income
02:34:16 and its distribution,
02:34:18 which at the end of the day is the foundation
02:34:21 of our prosperity.
02:34:22 Corporations are people too.
02:34:23 Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012.
02:34:26 But corporations are nothing but a legal fiction.
02:34:28 The corporation is not a person as such,
02:34:32 but the nexus of contracts and relationships
02:34:35 amongst the stakeholders who intersect
02:34:38 in the context of the corporation
02:34:41 is the way in which we organize
02:34:43 the massively complex set of activities
02:34:46 that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits,
02:34:50 in order to feed people,
02:34:52 in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket,
02:34:55 in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent
02:34:57 to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty
02:35:01 gonna safely take off and land
02:35:04 and in order to be able to build cities and et cetera.
02:35:07 But do the markets, the ideal of the market
02:35:10 collide with the ideal of all men are created equal?
02:35:14 The identity, the struggle that we’ve been talking about
02:35:17 of what it means to sort of empower humans
02:35:21 that make up this great country.
02:35:23 Do they collide and where do they collide?
02:35:26 Well, markets are gonna produce inequality
02:35:29 and all men being equal is a statement
02:35:32 about the intrinsic worth of people,
02:35:34 not about the situation that will come about
02:35:36 when people interact with each other through markets
02:35:39 because people are actually different
02:35:41 and because there are factors
02:35:43 that are beyond anybody’s control called luck and chance
02:35:46 that you and I both invest.
02:35:49 It looked a priori like your investment and my investment
02:35:51 were equally likely to succeed.
02:35:53 But as a matter of fact, ex post facto,
02:35:55 your investment succeeds, my investment doesn’t succeed.
02:35:58 I don’t have wealth and you have wealth.
02:36:01 That is an inevitable consequence of a environment
02:36:04 in which both of us are free to make our investment choices
02:36:07 and where the consequences of investment
02:36:09 depend in part upon random circumstances
02:36:12 of which no one has control.
02:36:14 But you asked me about my politics
02:36:16 and I was just trying to lay down a foundation
02:36:18 by saying I begin as an economist
02:36:22 in the tradition of liberalism, Adam Smith and so forth,
02:36:27 John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth,
02:36:30 that Milton Friedman and so forth,
02:36:34 that Paul Samuelson, Bob Solla, James Tobin and so forth,
02:36:39 Thomas Sowell, yes, that appreciates property,
02:36:44 the virtues of free enterprise,
02:36:46 the set of institutions that allow for security of contract,
02:36:53 a rule of law, things of this kind.
02:36:56 So that’s one thing to say about my politics.
02:36:59 Another thing to say about my politics and you’re right,
02:37:01 I’ve moved around, is that I began south side of Chicago,
02:37:06 black kid, I was a liberal Democrat.
02:37:09 I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT
02:37:14 and I became trained in economics
02:37:16 in the tradition that I’ve just described.
02:37:19 And I encountered also the Reagan Revolution.
02:37:24 This is the late 70s and early 80s.
02:37:27 These are big debates about economic policy and so on.
02:37:31 And I found a lot to admire in the supply side errors,
02:37:37 the people were saying,
02:37:39 let’s get the government out of the way,
02:37:41 the people who were worried about national debt,
02:37:43 which is a lot more now than it was then,
02:37:46 the people who were worried
02:37:47 that the welfare state could be too big,
02:37:48 that the incentives of transfer programs
02:37:51 could be counterproductive, that you had a war on poverty
02:37:54 and we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
02:37:56 And that’s what I found.
02:37:58 And we did have a war on poverty and poverty won.
02:38:01 And there’s a lot of evidence that the war on poverty
02:38:04 was lost by the people who were trying to, quote unquote,
02:38:07 eradicate poverty in our time.
02:38:10 That incentives really do matter
02:38:13 and that the state, which is driven by politics,
02:38:17 is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives.
02:38:20 Whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient
02:38:24 and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives
02:38:27 because they can’t cover their bottom line
02:38:29 and they won’t persist for very long.
02:38:31 If they can’t cover their bottom line,
02:38:32 they’re forced to respond to the realities of differences
02:38:35 and costs and benefits and so forth
02:38:37 in a way that governments can cover
02:38:39 because they have their hand in our pocket.
02:38:42 They can cover their losses
02:38:43 and they can make accounts balanced,
02:38:46 not withstanding their mistakes
02:38:47 because they can take my property by fiat,
02:38:51 by the power of the state, the tax collector comes,
02:38:53 if I don’t pay, he seizes my holdings.
02:38:56 And they can carry on in that way.
02:38:59 They need the corrective influence of markets
02:39:02 in order to be responsive to the realities of life.
02:39:05 I mean, I may not like it that prices are telling me
02:39:10 that something that I wanna do is infeasible.
02:39:12 I may not like it, but what the prices are telling me
02:39:15 is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits
02:39:20 to be derived from doing it.
02:39:22 And if I persist in doing it not withstanding that,
02:39:24 I’m gonna run losses.
02:39:25 And those losses will accumulate.
02:39:26 And the net effect of that over an entire society
02:39:30 is stagnation and ultimate attenuation
02:39:34 of the economic benefits
02:39:36 that might be available to people.
02:39:37 Again, I think if you look at the developing world
02:39:40 in the postcolonial period,
02:39:42 the second half of the 20th century,
02:39:44 that’s exactly what you see.
02:39:46 Planning doesn’t work.
02:39:48 Centralized control over resource allocation doesn’t work.
02:39:50 Okay, so I became more conservative in that respect,
02:39:54 but I also, and this has to do with race,
02:39:59 lost the faith in the posture
02:40:05 that what became of the civil rights movement.
02:40:08 I mean, the civil rights movement, you quote King 1963,
02:40:11 the civil rights movement starts out as
02:40:15 we want equal membership in the polity,
02:40:17 but it becomes a systematized cover I’m going to argue
02:40:29 for deficiencies that are discernible
02:40:35 within black American society, which only we could correct.
02:40:38 That’s a very controversial statement.
02:40:40 I make it with trepidation.
02:40:43 I don’t take any pleasure in saying it,
02:40:47 but here’s what I’m talking about.
02:40:50 So I’m talking about the family.
02:40:53 So the family is a matter internal to the community
02:41:00 about how men and women relate to each other
02:41:03 and engage in social reproduction, childbearing,
02:41:07 the standing up of households,
02:41:09 the context within which children are developed,
02:41:12 are maturing and so forth and so on.
02:41:14 So the African American family is in trouble.
02:41:17 I think I can demonstrate that
02:41:20 by reference to high rates of marital dissolution,
02:41:25 by high rates of birth to out of wedlock and so forth.
02:41:31 You can’t even say that
02:41:32 the African American family is in trouble.
02:41:34 Violence, homicide is an order of magnitude more prevalent
02:41:39 amongst African Americans than it is
02:41:40 in the society as a whole.
02:41:43 This is behavior, it’s behavior of our people.
02:41:46 I speak of black people.
02:41:47 Of course, we’re not the only people in society
02:41:49 for whom violence is an issue.
02:41:51 It’s an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities.
02:41:56 I’m talking about schooling and school failure.
02:42:00 So we have affirmative action as a cover.
02:42:02 It’s a bandaid on differences in the development
02:42:06 of intellectual performance,
02:42:07 which is only partly a consequence
02:42:10 of the natural intelligence of people
02:42:12 and largely a consequence of how people spend their time,
02:42:16 what they value, how they discipline themselves,
02:42:20 what they do with their opportunities,
02:42:23 how parents raise their children,
02:42:25 what peer groups value and things of this kind.
02:42:28 The Asian students who are scoring off the charts
02:42:30 on these exams are doing it
02:42:33 not because they’re intrinsically more intelligent
02:42:35 to other people, but because they work harder,
02:42:38 because their parents are more insistent
02:42:39 on focusing on their intellectual performance
02:42:43 because they’re disciplined,
02:42:45 because of the way that they devote their time
02:42:46 and their resources to equipping their children
02:42:50 to function in the 21st century.
02:42:52 This is what I believe.
02:42:53 I think it’s demonstrably the case.
02:42:56 And it is a factor in racial disparity.
02:43:00 The way that the civil rights movement has evolved
02:43:03 under the wing of the Democratic Party
02:43:05 into an organized apologia for the failures
02:43:11 of African Americans to seize the opportunities
02:43:14 that exist for us now in the 21st century,
02:43:17 but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century,
02:43:21 the way in which the civil rights movement
02:43:22 has become an avoidance mechanism
02:43:27 for us not taking we African Americans responsible.
02:43:29 This is Glenn Loury.
02:43:30 Not everybody’s gonna agree with it.
02:43:33 It’s part of what makes me a conservative.
02:43:36 I am tired of the bellyaching.
02:43:38 I’m tired of the excuse me, white supremacy.
02:43:42 It is in my mind, a joke.
02:43:45 I lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric
02:43:49 is so seductively attractive to African Americans
02:43:53 and so widely adopted by others.
02:43:58 And as I am fond of saying, at the end of the day,
02:44:02 nobody is coming to save us.
02:44:04 I mean, higher education, MIT, Caltech, Stanford,
02:44:10 where the future is happening,
02:44:13 that is about mastery over the achievements
02:44:17 of human civilization, such as they manifest themselves
02:44:21 in the 21st century.
02:44:22 There’s no substitute for actually acquiring mastery
02:44:26 over the material.
02:44:27 There’s no substitute for that to be patronized,
02:44:33 to have the standards lowered.
02:44:34 They wanna get rid of the test.
02:44:37 They wanna tell African Americans to pat us on the head.
02:44:41 We’re gonna have a separate program for you.
02:44:43 We’re gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
02:44:45 That doesn’t make us any smarter.
02:44:48 It doesn’t make us any more creative.
02:44:51 And it doesn’t make us any more fit
02:44:54 for the actual competition that’s unfolding before us.
02:44:58 Now, you wanna be 10% of the population
02:45:01 that’s carried along for the next 100 years?
02:45:03 You wanna be a ward of the state in the late 21st century?
02:45:09 You go ahead.
02:45:10 Because the Chinese are coming.
02:45:12 You’re not gonna hold them back.
02:45:13 The world is being remade every decade
02:45:16 by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing.
02:45:19 If you don’t get on board with the dynamic advancement
02:45:23 of the civilization in which we are embedded,
02:45:26 you’re gonna end up being dependent on other people
02:45:29 to look kindly upon you.
02:45:31 And this story that you’ve got, this bellyache,
02:45:35 this excuse, my ancestors were slaves,
02:45:41 is only gonna work for so long.
02:45:45 So that makes me, I suppose, a kind of conservative.
02:45:49 I hate affirmative action.
02:45:51 I don’t just disagree with it.
02:45:52 I don’t just think it’s against the 14th amendment.
02:45:55 I hate it.
02:45:56 The hatred comes from an understanding
02:45:58 that it is a bandaid, that it is a substitute
02:46:01 for the actual development of the capacities
02:46:03 of our people to compete.
02:46:05 I’d much rather be in the position
02:46:08 of having them try to keep me out
02:46:10 because I’m so damn good,
02:46:12 like they’re doing with the Asians,
02:46:15 than having them have to beg the Supreme Court
02:46:18 to allow for a special dispensation on my behalf
02:46:21 because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging.
02:46:25 It’s not just diversity.
02:46:27 It’s not just diversity and inclusion.
02:46:28 It’s diversity and inclusion and belonging.
02:46:31 I’m whining because I feel like I don’t belong.
02:46:35 That’s a position of weakness.
02:46:37 It’s pathetic.
02:46:40 And it’s only political correctness
02:46:42 that keeps people who can see this,
02:46:43 and believe me, a lot of people can see it
02:46:47 from saying so out loud.
02:46:49 So you want the black American community
02:46:52 to represent strength.
02:46:54 Correct, and I want us to deal with what it is
02:46:56 that we have to deal with in order to be able
02:46:58 to project strength in an increasingly competitive world.
02:47:05 Let me ask you,
02:47:08 I know you said you’re angry
02:47:12 or dislike affirmative action.
02:47:14 Let me ask you about something
02:47:15 that even to my ear cut wrong.
02:47:20 Now I’m relatively apolitical.
02:47:23 So President Biden, when he was running for president,
02:47:27 gave a campaign promise that he will nominate
02:47:30 a black woman to the US Supreme Court,
02:47:33 saying, quote, the person I will nominate
02:47:36 will be someone with extraordinary qualifications,
02:47:39 character, experience, and integrity.
02:47:42 First sentence.
02:47:43 Second sentence.
02:47:44 And that person will be the first black woman
02:47:46 ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
02:47:50 Do you wish he only said the first sentence
02:47:53 and not the second?
02:47:55 Yes, I wish that he had only said the first sentence,
02:47:58 even if his intention was to do
02:48:00 what he said he was gonna do in the second sentence.
02:48:03 In other words, I wish that he had simply said,
02:48:06 if I have the opportunity to nominate someone
02:48:07 to the Supreme Court, it’s gonna be
02:48:09 a superbly qualified person to carry out that position.
02:48:13 And he might’ve kept to himself his intention
02:48:16 to name an African American woman to that position.
02:48:18 And then going ahead and named an African American woman
02:48:21 to that position.
02:48:21 And I’m sure that Katanji Brown Jackson,
02:48:25 I don’t doubt that she’s exceptionally qualified.
02:48:27 She has a distinguished career.
02:48:28 She served as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
02:48:31 She’s a graduate at Harvard Law School.
02:48:33 She has a background.
02:48:34 You do not have to be a world class
02:48:39 constitutional legal scholar
02:48:41 to get onto the United States Supreme Court.
02:48:43 A lot of members of the United States Supreme Court
02:48:45 have had different kinds of legal careers
02:48:48 before they were elevated to that position.
02:48:51 Earl Warren of the famed Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s
02:48:57 was a politician as well as a leading jurist and whatnot.
02:49:01 I mean, many kinds of people in the US Supreme Court.
02:49:03 I have no doubt that Judge Katanji Brown Jackson
02:49:06 is a qualified member to be on the Supreme Court.
02:49:10 I wish that Biden had not done what he did.
02:49:13 He could have just appointed a black woman
02:49:16 by saying that he was limiting his considerations
02:49:18 to black women.
02:49:19 And what are black women as a percentage
02:49:21 of all potential appointees to the Supreme Court?
02:49:24 3%, 4%, I don’t know, we could look the number up.
02:49:30 By saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment,
02:49:33 but it’s worse than that
02:49:35 because she will live down the asterisk
02:49:39 if a person is inclined to do that.
02:49:42 She will have the opportunity to show
02:49:44 through her performance exactly what kind of juror she is.
02:49:47 Just as Justice Clarence Thomas has shown
02:49:49 through his performance that he was qualified
02:49:52 and more than qualified to be
02:49:53 on the United States Supreme Court,
02:49:57 what I dislike was the pandering.
02:50:01 He was seeking votes from black people by pandering to us
02:50:06 and then he’s treating us like children.
02:50:09 Why should I care what color the person is
02:50:12 who’s on the United States Supreme Court?
02:50:14 What I should care about is what kind of opinions
02:50:17 they’re gonna write when they’re on the United States.
02:50:20 Do I suppose that being a black woman
02:50:22 means that you’re gonna write different kinds
02:50:23 of opinions than others?
02:50:24 Well, perhaps, perhaps that kind of identity politics
02:50:30 at the highest level of American legal establishment
02:50:35 is something that rubs me very much the wrong way.
02:50:39 What I should care about is the nature
02:50:42 and the future of the law.
02:50:43 I mean, I’m actually struck by this
02:50:45 because the court is conservative.
02:50:50 It has six conservative members on it
02:50:53 and it has three liberal members on it.
02:50:58 And if I were and I’m not a liberal Democrat,
02:51:02 the highest concern that I would have
02:51:04 about an appointment to the Supreme Court is,
02:51:07 is this a person who is going to be effective
02:51:11 in advocating my liberal views
02:51:14 within the highest counsel of American law?
02:51:17 Now, the fact that that person is a woman
02:51:19 or is a black person is way down the list
02:51:23 of the things that I would think are important
02:51:26 to the kinds of opinions that they’re going to write.
02:51:29 So, I mean, I think Joe Biden,
02:51:33 this is just a piece of a larger political strategy
02:51:39 to cobble together a coalition
02:51:41 that’ll be successful at the polls
02:51:44 in sustaining Democrats.
02:51:46 Jim Crow 2.0, this whole characterization
02:51:49 of the conflict in the states
02:51:52 about election security and voting rights
02:51:56 is another part of that strategy.
02:51:58 He is pandering to black voters.
02:52:01 He is trying to frighten us,
02:52:04 thinking that if the Republicans win,
02:52:06 our rights will be taken away.
02:52:09 And I think it is a infantilization
02:52:14 of African American politics.
02:52:16 I think black people are not to be as concerned
02:52:20 about the color of the skin of a person
02:52:22 who is serving in government
02:52:23 as they are about the content of their character
02:52:26 and the focus of their political
02:52:30 and ideological orientation,
02:52:32 which for me would be center or even center right,
02:52:37 but that’s me.
02:52:38 And it should not have a significant impact.
02:52:41 Nevertheless, he said she can overcome the asterisks,
02:52:43 but to me it was deeply disrespectful
02:52:46 that anyone would give an extra asterisk
02:52:50 to have to overcome.
02:52:51 He didn’t have to say it.
02:52:52 All he had to do was do it.
02:52:54 If he wanted to put a black woman on the court,
02:52:55 then he could have gone ahead and done it.
02:52:57 The reason he said it is because he wanted black people
02:52:59 to vote for him by saying it.
02:53:01 And I’m saying that treats us like we’re children.
02:53:04 It’s not a political statement.
02:53:05 I just thought as a leader,
02:53:06 that was kind of disgusting.
02:53:12 Let me ask you about Thomas Sowell.
02:53:13 You mentioned him.
02:53:14 He’s a colleague and somebody who was an influence
02:53:20 in the space of ideas.
02:53:22 So what broadly, what impact has he had on your ideas
02:53:27 and how do you think he shaped the landscape of ideas
02:53:33 in our culture in general?
02:53:35 I think Thomas Sowell, he’s in his 90s now.
02:53:37 He’s been around for a long time.
02:53:39 He’s still got it.
02:53:40 He’s still going at it.
02:53:41 He’s still going at it.
02:53:42 Books continue to come out.
02:53:43 I think he’s a great man.
02:53:45 I think Thomas Sowell, regardless of his race,
02:53:49 he’s black, is one of the 100 most significant economists
02:53:54 of the 20th century.
02:53:56 He has chosen as his subject,
02:53:57 a substantial part of his subject,
02:53:59 subject to investigate the deep causes
02:54:03 and consequences of racial disparity of one kind or another.
02:54:07 He’s written fundamental books about that, many of them.
02:54:13 He’s a social philosopher.
02:54:15 He is a economic historian.
02:54:18 He is a combatant in the conflict of ideas
02:54:24 around how to think about society
02:54:25 and this beyond racial differences,
02:54:28 although race has been a big part
02:54:29 of what he’s written about.
02:54:31 He’s been critical of affirmative action
02:54:33 and he didn’t just stand back and wag his finger.
02:54:36 He got busy looking at the consequences
02:54:37 of affirmative action in societies all around the world.
02:54:40 And he’s written books about that.
02:54:42 He’s been critical of the narrative about civil rights
02:54:47 and racial inequality.
02:54:48 He believes in small government.
02:54:50 He doesn’t think that efforts to redistribute income
02:54:54 have proved to be the solution
02:54:55 to the problem of racial disparity.
02:54:58 Tom has not been honored by the committee
02:55:01 that hands out Nobel recognition in economic science
02:55:05 and probably won’t be because he’s controversial.
02:55:07 And I reckon that that committee would be loath to encourage
02:55:12 the blowback that they would be sure to receive
02:55:14 if they were to take a controversial
02:55:17 and politically focus and expressive black conservative
02:55:23 and honor in that way.
02:55:24 So I think another reason is that Tom
02:55:27 as a methodological matter is not especially quantitative.
02:55:32 He pays attention to data
02:55:33 but he doesn’t do statistical analysis
02:55:36 and he doesn’t do modeling.
02:55:38 So from a methodological point of view,
02:55:40 he’s not a cutting edge kind of person
02:55:44 of mathematically sophisticated,
02:55:47 kind of quantitatively statistically oriented
02:55:51 but he does descriptive stuff.
02:55:53 He writes in a style that is much more
02:55:56 like a social historian than it is
02:55:59 like a mathematically trained analytical economist.
02:56:04 On the other hand, he is an economist in the Chicago school
02:56:07 with Milton Friedman and George Stickler
02:56:09 prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory
02:56:15 which is the analysis of the interplay of market forces,
02:56:21 mindful of incentives and so on
02:56:25 to implement the basic insights from economic science.
02:56:32 There is no free lunch.
02:56:33 I mean, there’s always gonna be a cost
02:56:34 to anything that you do and so on.
02:56:36 People respond to incentives, demand curves slope downward.
02:56:40 Competition tends to work best
02:56:42 when people are free to enter and not and so on.
02:56:45 I mean, that kind of thing.
02:56:46 But Tom is also a social historian and a philosopher
02:56:51 in the tradition of Friedrich von Hayek.
02:56:55 One of Tom’s books I’ve deeply admired,
02:56:57 “‘Knowledge and Decisions,’
02:56:59 is an extension of the Hayekian arguments
02:57:03 about the limits of central planning and whatnot.
02:57:09 So I think Thomas Sowell, African American,
02:57:15 born as I understand it in Louisiana,
02:57:18 raised in New York City, graduate of Harvard College,
02:57:22 a military veteran, a PhD in economics
02:57:26 from the University of Chicago,
02:57:29 a black conservative social scientist
02:57:31 of very high stature, I think he’s a great man.
02:57:34 And one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century.
02:57:37 And you’re saying implicitly deserves a Nobel Prize.
02:57:42 Yeah, I do think so.
02:57:45 I mean, Hayek was awarded by the committee.
02:57:50 Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist
02:57:53 who wrote about economic development,
02:57:54 wrote a famous two volume work,
02:57:56 “‘An American Dilemma,’ about the status of blacks.”
02:57:59 I mean, I think Tom could be put in that company
02:58:04 very easily without any difficulty.
02:58:06 I agree, Daniel Kahneman, them,
02:58:08 so it doesn’t have to be an American.
02:58:09 Psychologist, an economist, Eleonora Ostrom,
02:58:14 the political scientist who was honored in a joint prize
02:58:17 given to her and Oliver Williamson 15 years ago or so.
02:58:21 He could be put in that company really quite easily.
02:58:26 Let me ask you, you mentioned Obama
02:58:27 in the very beginning that we were talking about.
02:58:34 How did it feel, that seems like forever ago,
02:58:38 that in 2008, Barack Obama became president?
02:58:41 Now at that time, perhaps you identify
02:58:45 as conservative already.
02:58:48 So politics aside, just in general,
02:58:53 how did it feel that in 150 years
02:58:59 where this country has come along?
02:59:03 Well, yeah, I didn’t identify in 2008
02:59:07 as a conservative to the same extent that I do today.
02:59:12 I was kind of in transition yet again.
02:59:15 I was excited by the Obama candidacy.
02:59:18 At first I was skeptical because after all, he’s not black.
02:59:25 The man’s father is a Kenyan
02:59:27 and the man’s mother is a white American
02:59:31 and he identifies as black.
02:59:35 I find it interesting that the first black president
02:59:38 of the United States,
02:59:39 and I could have put inverted commas around black,
02:59:42 and the first black vice president of the United States,
02:59:45 neither of them descend from American slaves.
02:59:49 Kamala Harris’s father is of African ancestry in part.
02:59:54 He’s a Jamaican immigrant
02:59:56 and her mother is an Indian immigrant.
03:00:00 She was Kamala Harris,
03:00:04 raised up largely in Canada,
03:00:09 though born in the United States.
03:00:11 Barack Obama is, as I’ve said, of mixed ancestry
03:00:17 and neither of his parents are the descendants
03:00:20 of American descendants of African slaves.
03:00:26 But blackness is flexible.
03:00:31 It’s something that you can put on
03:00:35 or you can take off to a certain degree for some people
03:00:38 and so be it.
03:00:41 I was excited, our time has come, hope and change.
03:00:48 We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
03:00:51 These are slogans from 2008.
03:00:54 I can’t believe I bought that crap.
03:00:57 Oh, interesting.
03:00:58 Let me push back here.
03:01:00 You talked about, I mean, to me a Jew is a Jew.
03:01:05 Skin color is skin color.
03:01:08 Yeah.
03:01:10 I mean, Barack Obama is black when it matters,
03:01:17 when you’re talking to a white supremacist,
03:01:20 when you’re talking to, if you’re a slave owner,
03:01:25 he’s black.
03:01:26 Just like you said, when Hitler comes around,
03:01:30 a Jew is a Jew.
03:01:31 It doesn’t matter how you identify, it doesn’t matter what.
03:01:35 So in that sense, don’t you think that Barack Obama
03:01:40 is black in the most powerful of ways,
03:01:43 which is designating how far the MLK, the Dr. King vision?
03:01:49 Oh, sure.
03:01:50 And look, I said it a little bit tongue in cheek.
03:01:52 Yes, yes, of course.
03:01:54 But I think Obama has been very careful
03:01:57 about manufacturing a kind of public persona
03:02:00 that is intended to position him in the most effective way.
03:02:09 You mean like every politician?
03:02:10 Yeah, like every politician, sure.
03:02:12 And that the racial identity piece is an aspect of that.
03:02:17 I mean, anything I say here would only be speculation
03:02:21 because I have no facts about the personal history
03:02:24 of Barack Obama.
03:02:25 And I accept Barack Hussein Obama,
03:02:27 as Hillary Clinton once said, I take him at his word
03:02:30 about whatever she was talking about.
03:02:34 Well, was he a Christian?
03:02:35 I think is what the question was.
03:02:37 And there was some right wing attack on Obama
03:02:40 for having been raised for some years in the Philippines
03:02:45 and all of that, or Indonesia, I beg your pardon,
03:02:48 in Indonesia and his stepfather and all of that.
03:02:51 But she took him at his word and I take him at his word
03:02:55 about his racial identity.
03:02:58 No.
03:02:58 But you were captivated by the power of his words
03:03:01 and you regret to the degree you were captivated.
03:03:04 Well, I mean, I think in retrospect,
03:03:06 that whole campaign looks like a pie in the sky
03:03:09 kind of fairy tale.
03:03:13 We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
03:03:15 I can’t quote exactly that speech that he gave
03:03:18 in Grant Park in Chicago when he was announced
03:03:21 as the winner of the election.
03:03:23 But today is the day that the rise of the ocean
03:03:27 stopped words to this effect.
03:03:28 I mean, those who doubted that we could do it,
03:03:32 that tonight is your answer.
03:03:34 This was gonna be a new day, it was gonna be a new regime.
03:03:36 Well, it wasn’t a new day and it wasn’t a new regime.
03:03:40 It was American politics more or less as usual.
03:03:43 Barack Obama turns out not to be the Messiah.
03:03:46 Maybe there should be no surprise in that.
03:03:48 Race relations got set back during Obama’s tenure.
03:03:53 My beef with Obama is that, okay, you’re black.
03:03:57 You say you’re black, you’re black.
03:03:59 You got elected, now we have a black president.
03:04:02 A black president.
03:04:05 You can do stuff that nobody else could do.
03:04:09 You’re a black president.
03:04:11 You could tell the people burning down the city
03:04:13 to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it.
03:04:20 You could tell the race hustlers,
03:04:23 they all shocked into the world.
03:04:26 Not only has our time come
03:04:28 for those who supported my campaign,
03:04:30 your time is over for those who wanna carry on
03:04:36 a advocacy rooted in racial grievance.
03:04:40 The election of myself to this highest office proves
03:04:44 that the institution of this state are legitimate
03:04:46 and open to all comers.
03:04:50 I think Barack Obama, when the SHIT hit the fan,
03:04:56 if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.
03:04:58 I deeply regret that he said that.
03:05:00 He’s president of the United States.
03:05:02 The color of his skin and the color of Trayvon’s skin,
03:05:06 the correlation between those two things.
03:05:08 If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.
03:05:09 Now he says, when he said it,
03:05:12 he only meant to sympathize with the parents.
03:05:15 But in fact, when he said it from the highest office
03:05:18 in the land and then sent his attorney general,
03:05:20 Eric Holder out to enforce this narrative,
03:05:24 he doubled down on a racial narrative
03:05:27 that I think is actually false.
03:05:30 I think the story that systemic racism in America
03:05:35 as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people
03:05:38 because of the color of their skin is demonstrably false.
03:05:42 I think that the central threat to black lives
03:05:47 is violent crime perpetrated largely by black people
03:05:52 against other black people.
03:05:54 I think there is such a thing as police brutality
03:05:56 and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police
03:05:58 but I think it is a second order issue
03:06:02 in terms of the quality of life of African Americans.
03:06:07 I think Obama could have told the people
03:06:08 who after Freddie Gray died in police custody
03:06:12 in a van in Baltimore and who undertook
03:06:15 to burn that city down to get their asses off the street
03:06:19 and go back to their apartments and stop it.
03:06:21 I think he could have said in the aftermath
03:06:22 of Michael Brown being shot dead by Darren Wilson
03:06:26 in Ferguson, Missouri and there was a grand jury deliberation
03:06:30 that he elected not to indict Officer Wilson
03:06:34 and people took the streets in that city
03:06:35 and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on.
03:06:39 He could have told them we don’t mob around courthouses
03:06:42 in this country, we respect the rule of law,
03:06:46 get your butts off the streets
03:06:48 and back into your apartments.
03:06:49 He didn’t do that.
03:06:53 To push back a little bit.
03:06:54 Yeah, good, push back.
03:06:56 I think you’re asking Barack Obama,
03:06:59 the first black president of the United States,
03:07:04 to do the thing that I think should be done
03:07:07 by the second black president of the United States.
03:07:09 I think his very example, given the color of his skin,
03:07:15 was the most powerful thing.
03:07:17 And actually doing some of these hard Thomas Sowell type
03:07:22 of Glen Lurie type of strong words about race,
03:07:26 it may be too much to ask given the nature
03:07:29 of modern day politics.
03:07:31 He is a politician.
03:07:33 He is a politician.
03:07:34 And he needed to get elected, he needed to get reelected.
03:07:38 It was in his second term
03:07:39 where most of what I’m talking about happened,
03:07:41 so he wasn’t facing further election.
03:07:43 But Obama was what, 46 or 47 when he was inaugurated?
03:07:48 He served for eight years, so he’s in his mid 50s.
03:07:52 He’s got another half century or 40 years of life,
03:07:54 God willing.
03:07:56 His post presidency, I think,
03:07:58 was what was primarily on his mind.
03:08:00 Not getting elected to anything,
03:08:03 but being enshrined in a certain way.
03:08:05 And the persona that he is now embodying,
03:08:11 which depends upon a racial narrative
03:08:14 that I and Thomas Sowell and others object to,
03:08:18 I think was very much in the forefront of his mind
03:08:21 when he made decisions as the chief executive officer
03:08:23 of the country that we’ve all now have to live with.
03:08:28 Yeah, but the fact is, he opened the door
03:08:34 in a way that hasn’t been done
03:08:35 in the history of the United States,
03:08:40 that I don’t see there being even a significant discussion
03:08:47 when an African American, a black man or a black woman
03:08:52 runs for president, maybe a black man, let’s say,
03:08:54 because there still hasn’t been a woman president.
03:08:56 I just see that that broke open the possibility of that.
03:09:01 That’s not even a discussion.
03:09:02 And that example by itself, I mean, to me,
03:09:05 the role of the president isn’t just policy.
03:09:08 It’s to inspire.
03:09:09 It’s to do the Dr. King thing, which is, I have a dream.
03:09:16 And Barack Obama is an example of somebody
03:09:19 that could give one hell of a speech.
03:09:21 It got you to believe.
03:09:23 Obama is a smooth operator without any question.
03:09:26 He’s a master of his craft.
03:09:28 He did the impossible.
03:09:30 I mean, he beat Hillary Clinton in that primary fight,
03:09:34 and he beat John McCain in that general election,
03:09:38 and hats off to him.
03:09:39 And moreover, he remains a iconic figure in American culture.
03:09:43 I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.
03:09:46 Let me just mention, Clarence Thomas is also black.
03:09:50 Clarence Thomas has a story that is vivid and inspiring,
03:09:56 just like Obama’s story.
03:09:57 He overcome obstacles just like Obama did.
03:10:00 I mean, extreme poverty and so forth and so on.
03:10:02 Clarence Thomas has served longer than any other member
03:10:07 of the United States Supreme Court.
03:10:09 He is one of nine justices,
03:10:13 and it’s three equal branches of government.
03:10:15 So Clarence Thomas, by my arithmetic,
03:10:18 personifies 1 27th of the American state.
03:10:25 He is an iconic figure.
03:10:28 His example should be an inspiration to Americans
03:10:32 of all races, but especially a black American youngsters.
03:10:36 He happens to be conservative.
03:10:38 He’s very conservative.
03:10:41 So fucking what?
03:10:43 He too deserves to be in that pantheon.
03:10:46 He is not. By the custodians of American education,
03:10:50 Clarence Thomas’s name is not on that many schools.
03:10:53 Barack Obama’s name will be on many of them.
03:10:55 I’m not equating them.
03:10:56 They’re different people.
03:10:57 The offices are very different.
03:10:59 But the same logic that you just used
03:11:01 to extol the significance of Barack Obama’s ascendancy
03:11:07 could and should be applied to Clarence Thomas,
03:11:10 in my opinion.
03:11:12 Yes, but it’s the office, but also there is a resume
03:11:19 and there’s accomplishments,
03:11:20 but then there is oratory and charisma
03:11:23 and a number of Twitter followers.
03:11:26 So there’s ability to captivate a large number of people.
03:11:31 And that’s a skill.
03:11:33 That’s a skill that correlates,
03:11:35 but is not directly connected to
03:11:38 with how impressive your resume is.
03:11:40 I agree, and moreover, the judicial function,
03:11:43 the judge doesn’t go out and give speeches of that sort
03:11:45 because it’s exactly antithetical to what he’s doing.
03:11:48 He’s a custodian of the law,
03:11:50 and that’s not a popular feature,
03:11:53 figure in American policy.
03:11:54 He doesn’t stand for election, and it’s a good thing too.
03:11:57 So I take that point.
03:11:59 Here, I want to say something else, though,
03:12:01 that’s provocative.
03:12:02 The next black president,
03:12:03 you say the first black president
03:12:05 shouldn’t have been the one to do that.
03:12:06 The second one should,
03:12:08 is more likely than not gonna be a Republican.
03:12:10 I’m not, I don’t have a particular person in mind.
03:12:12 I’m just saying.
03:12:13 I agree, I agree, I agree.
03:12:17 And that’s why it’s gonna be super fun.
03:12:20 Let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat
03:12:25 and give advice to young people.
03:12:27 So if you’re talking to somebody
03:12:28 who’s in high school, in college,
03:12:31 what advice would you give them about their career,
03:12:34 about life in general,
03:12:37 how to live a life they can be proud of?
03:12:39 Well, I’d say the world is your oyster.
03:12:44 I mean, first order of business, you’re not a victim.
03:12:46 I don’t care what color you are.
03:12:47 I don’t care, you’re male, female,
03:12:47 you’re gay, straight, whatever.
03:12:49 The world is your oyster.
03:12:51 You are so privileged.
03:12:52 You sit here in the United States of America,
03:12:54 a free country, a rich country,
03:12:55 everything is possible for you.
03:12:56 Believe me, you can do anything, okay?
03:13:00 Secondly, I would say mastery over the medium
03:13:05 in which we’re embedded is the key to the future.
03:13:11 So get educated, focus, work hard,
03:13:17 invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need
03:13:21 to be able to navigate the 21st century.
03:13:25 I would say the Chinese are coming
03:13:28 and I don’t mean anything against China.
03:13:30 I just mean to say the world’s a small place
03:13:32 and it’s getting smaller.
03:13:34 And you better get moving and you better get moving quickly.
03:13:43 I’d say your identity, your coloration, your orientation,
03:13:47 your category is not the most important thing about you.
03:13:56 So the temptation to limit yourself,
03:14:00 I give this speech to my kids.
03:14:03 I would say, I quote James Joyce.
03:14:10 He has a passage in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
03:14:16 in which he says, do you know what Ireland is?
03:14:22 Ireland is an old sow that eats her pharaoh.
03:14:27 This is Joyce.
03:14:28 He says, Stephan Daedalus is the character
03:14:32 that he has in mind in this Chronicle.
03:14:35 He says, your ethnic inheritance,
03:14:39 he’s talking about Irish nationalism,
03:14:43 are like nets holding you back.
03:14:46 That your challenge is to learn how to turn those nets
03:14:49 into wings and thereby to fly, okay?
03:14:54 Flying into the open skies of modern society.
03:14:58 Don’t be your grandfather, don’t be your father.
03:15:02 Don’t wear your things so heavily
03:15:04 that it keeps you from being open
03:15:06 to everything that’s new in the world.
03:15:08 Wear it lightly.
03:15:10 Yes, everybody comes from somewhere,
03:15:12 but it doesn’t have to be where you end up.
03:15:15 So you’re not your father, you’re not your grandfather.
03:15:19 You are this wonderfully blessed human being
03:15:25 in the middle of, going into the middle of the 21st century
03:15:28 and don’t miss it, don’t live blinkeredly,
03:15:34 don’t live small, live big.
03:15:41 Live big and wear your history lightly.
03:15:48 Yeah, everybody’s got a mother tongue,
03:15:51 everybody’s got a story, everybody has a people,
03:15:54 but the world is a small place.
03:15:56 I love that you’re quoting an Irishman.
03:16:01 One of the greatest writers of the 20th century,
03:16:05 a profound one, but an Irishman nevertheless.
03:16:09 The levels of humor within that is not lost on me.
03:16:14 Let me just mention the great Ralph Ellison,
03:16:16 the African American writer, Invisible Man
03:16:19 is his masterpiece, embodied this spirit.
03:16:23 Okay, we black Americans, we do come from somewhere,
03:16:26 that come in from somewhere is from slavery in America,
03:16:29 that’s our ancestral heritage.
03:16:32 But that’s not what we are, skin and bone,
03:16:37 these are superficial things, the spirit.
03:16:40 And if I were a more religious person,
03:16:41 I could give a whole disposition about that,
03:16:44 but it’s the spirit, it’s that light that’s inside,
03:16:46 that’s who we are and our challenge
03:16:48 is to live in the fullness of it,
03:16:50 as opposed to this blinkered thing
03:16:53 where we don’t look left, we don’t look right,
03:16:55 we’re just fitting within this template that we inherit.
03:16:59 That is a travesty, really.
03:17:03 Glenn, you’ve lived an incredible life, a productive one,
03:17:07 but just representing some powerful ideas,
03:17:11 some powerful ideals, but life comes to an end.
03:17:17 Yeah.
03:17:18 Do you think about your death?
03:17:20 Are you afraid of it?
03:17:24 Well, it is a really interesting coincidence
03:17:29 that you posed me that question,
03:17:33 because I’m coming from a funeral.
03:17:37 Today is Sunday, on the preceding Tuesday, five days ago,
03:17:44 I was at the funeral of Eugene Wesley Smith,
03:17:48 who was my brother in law, he was my sister’s husband.
03:17:55 My sister, Leonette, passed away in August of 2021.
03:18:01 Her husband has died at the age of 68 in April of 2022,
03:18:09 and I was at his funeral.
03:18:12 He died suddenly of a heart attack
03:18:14 that came completely out of the blue.
03:18:15 He seemed to be in perfect health.
03:18:18 He was a magnificent human being.
03:18:20 I could go into the details, but take my word for it.
03:18:24 He was a businessman, a steel trader, metals trader.
03:18:29 He would buy and sell.
03:18:30 He worked mostly from his home office.
03:18:32 He had clients, counterparties,
03:18:35 people he did business with all over the world.
03:18:39 He had three sons, one of whom is in his early 30s,
03:18:44 two of whom are in their late 30s.
03:18:45 These are my sister’s children.
03:18:48 She’s deceased, now he’s deceased.
03:18:50 The older two sons are severely developmentally disabled,
03:18:54 and although they’re in their late 30s,
03:18:57 they’re not independently viable.
03:18:59 They don’t function effectively.
03:19:02 They have to be cared for.
03:19:04 That responsibility has now fallen to the family,
03:19:08 but mainly to the surviving son who lives with his wife
03:19:12 and his two young children,
03:19:14 and has assumed the responsibility.
03:19:17 They’ve cared at home, my sister and her husband, Wesley,
03:19:20 Eugene Wesley Smith, cared for their disabled sons at home.
03:19:24 They didn’t want to see them institutionalized.
03:19:26 They had some help from programs at the state
03:19:29 and social worker and so on,
03:19:30 but they mainly took on the burden
03:19:32 of caring for them at home.
03:19:34 Anyway, I go on at length here,
03:19:36 and I don’t know how much of this you will choose
03:19:38 to make use of, and it doesn’t matter, really.
03:19:41 I’m just trying to respond to your question.
03:19:43 I was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral,
03:19:49 and I offered them.
03:19:51 And I spoke well of this great man.
03:19:56 He was a great man.
03:19:57 He had a straight back.
03:19:59 He was a standup guy.
03:20:00 He could be counted on.
03:20:01 His word was his bond.
03:20:02 He had broad shoulders.
03:20:04 He carried a lot of people with him,
03:20:06 business associates, family members,
03:20:08 and so forth and so on.
03:20:10 He had a huge heart.
03:20:12 He was a giving and kind person.
03:20:13 He had a great mind.
03:20:15 He was an intellectual, even though as a businessman,
03:20:18 much of his day was taken up with the minutia of contracts
03:20:24 and the details of the order being delivered
03:20:27 and not being delivered,
03:20:28 of the quality of the product,
03:20:30 of the financing, and so forth and so on.
03:20:32 There was still a powerful mind there.
03:20:34 Yeah, he was a powerful mind, and he studied.
03:20:36 He read books.
03:20:37 He was interested in music and art.
03:20:38 He was a spiritual seeker,
03:20:43 had been ordained as a child minister in his youth,
03:20:46 and while he remained a master of the Christian canon,
03:20:53 he also explored Eastern religion and other spiritual paths
03:20:58 and kind of stood above any particular tradition
03:21:01 as a man who believed in God
03:21:03 but thought that God manifests himself in many ways
03:21:06 to human beings and that there was much to learn
03:21:09 from other religious traditions as well.
03:21:12 This is Wesley.
03:21:13 We called him Wesley by his middle name,
03:21:14 Eugene Wesley Smith.
03:21:15 May he rest in peace.
03:21:17 68.
03:21:18 That’s five years younger than I am right now.
03:21:20 He dropped dead without any warning.
03:21:23 I could, too.
03:21:25 So.
03:21:26 How did that make you feel?
03:21:29 What were the thoughts in your mind leading up to it,
03:21:31 having to give that speech in the days that followed?
03:21:34 Well, first of all, I wondered,
03:21:35 what would I say, what would I say?
03:21:36 And, you know, there was no way to prepare,
03:21:38 and I decided, you know, I rehearsed in my mind this,
03:21:41 you know, he had straight back, he had broad shoulders,
03:21:43 he had a big heart, he had a great mind,
03:21:45 you know, he had a capacious spirit and whatnot,
03:21:49 and I used that as a template for making my remarks.
03:21:52 But my main thought was, my God,
03:21:54 life is precious and life is fleeting,
03:21:57 and death is a part of life.
03:22:00 My death is a part of my life.
03:22:03 And I thought, you know, well,
03:22:05 I want to take better care of myself than I do,
03:22:07 you know, et cetera, et cetera.
03:22:09 But I also thought, a lot of this is not in my hands at all.
03:22:13 I thought, one should have his affairs in order.
03:22:16 My brother did not have all of his affairs in order,
03:22:18 in the sense that there is a lot of,
03:22:21 you know, things are going to probate,
03:22:22 there was no will, there’s, you know,
03:22:24 it’s kind of unsettled.
03:22:26 I don’t want that to happen to my surviving family members.
03:22:30 I want to have my affairs such that, should heaven forbid,
03:22:34 I fall over one day and don’t get up again.
03:22:38 People don’t have to scramble about
03:22:39 how to take care of things from that point forward.
03:22:43 But as a human, are you afraid?
03:22:47 In your own heart.
03:22:48 I’m afraid.
03:22:48 Now, I read this wonderful book called The Swerve.
03:22:52 It’s about Lucretius.
03:22:53 It’s about the nature of things,
03:22:56 which is this great classical work from the Roman period
03:23:01 by this guy, Lucretius.
03:23:03 And I’m trying to think of the name of the author,
03:23:05 but you could look it up.
03:23:06 The Swerve is the book.
03:23:07 It won like a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.
03:23:11 And it’s the history of the recovery of this book
03:23:15 by one of these Italian, Renaissance Italian people
03:23:20 who would go into the monasteries in Central Europe
03:23:24 and look through the scrolls and they discover
03:23:27 these classical works from antiquity,
03:23:29 which had been lost through the dark ages
03:23:31 and they republish and read these works.
03:23:36 And Lucretius’s great work on the nature of things
03:23:41 was one of these books, Poggio Broccolini.
03:23:45 I don’t remember the Italian guy’s name,
03:23:47 but this all could be looked up.
03:23:49 Yeah, Poggio Broccolini.
03:23:51 15th century and the name of the author
03:23:58 is Stephen Greenblatt.
03:23:59 Yeah, Stephen Greenblatt, a magnificent book
03:24:02 and a terrific story.
03:24:04 Anyway, one of Lucretius’s points, he was an atheist.
03:24:09 I mean, he was a Roman.
03:24:11 I mean, he didn’t believe in mysticism.
03:24:15 And he argued it’s irrational to be afraid of death.
03:24:20 Why should I fear death?
03:24:21 Death is coming to all of us.
03:24:24 The point of being afraid, I mean, I’m wasting my time
03:24:27 fearing something that I have no ultimate control over.
03:24:30 It’s irrational to be afraid of death.
03:24:34 Yeah, because you can’t predict when it happens.
03:24:38 You only know that it happens.
03:24:41 So why be afraid?
03:24:43 How’s that?
03:24:43 And therefore live every day fully,
03:24:45 live every day purposefully, you know,
03:24:49 and so on, but these are all just words.
03:24:52 You know, I don’t wanna die.
03:24:55 I wanna live forever.
03:24:55 I’m not gonna live forever.
03:24:57 I don’t wanna suffer.
03:24:59 I see people suffering.
03:25:01 I saw my late wife, Linda Datcher Lowry,
03:25:04 Dr. Linda Datcher Lowry, professor of economics
03:25:08 at Tufts University, whom I met in graduate school at MIT,
03:25:12 black woman from Baltimore.
03:25:14 We married, we raised two sons together.
03:25:17 She died at the age of 59 from metastatic breast cancer.
03:25:22 And I watched her suffer and I watched her die.
03:25:24 And it took a while.
03:25:27 And we cared for her at home right up until the very end.
03:25:30 She died in our bed with our sons on either side of her.
03:25:35 And the dog curled up by the door,
03:25:38 the porch door in the bedroom, and she expired.
03:25:42 And I watched her suffer and I watched her die.
03:25:45 And I don’t wanna suffer.
03:25:46 Who does?
03:25:48 I don’t wanna die.
03:25:50 I am likely to suffer before I die.
03:25:54 I am likely to see my death coming and to lament it.
03:26:00 There’s a book by Richard John Newhouse, the theologian,
03:26:04 called As I Lay Dying,
03:26:07 As I Lay Dying, Richard John Newhouse.
03:26:12 He had stomach cancer and he thought he was dying.
03:26:15 And he wrote this book As I Lay Dying.
03:26:18 And then he recovered, he went into remission
03:26:22 and he had another couple of years.
03:26:24 He thought he was dying and he had another couple of years.
03:26:27 And I can remember meeting him at a bookstore
03:26:30 in suburban Boston when he was on a tour.
03:26:34 He was just a friend of mine,
03:26:35 a theologian and a public intellectual.
03:26:39 He founded the Institute on Religion and Public Life
03:26:43 in New York City, which still exists,
03:26:45 Richard John Newhouse.
03:26:47 And he’s contemplating his own death
03:26:49 from the point of view of a Christian minister.
03:26:51 He was first a Lutheran pastor
03:26:53 and then he converted to Catholicism
03:26:55 or as he would have put it, I returned to the church
03:26:58 because he thought the Renaissance was over.
03:27:00 I mean, I’m sorry, the Reformation,
03:27:03 Richard thought was over.
03:27:04 He says there’s only one church, et cetera.
03:27:07 Get into theology stuff here.
03:27:11 But I’m saying all that to say,
03:27:14 I read that book aloud to my wife, Linda,
03:27:16 as she lay dying in that bed.
03:27:17 I read that book and it was filled with hope.
03:27:21 I mean, it first acknowledged the dread.
03:27:25 Yes, I lie dying.
03:27:27 I don’t wanna die.
03:27:29 I’m a Christian minister.
03:27:30 Christ was raised from the dead.
03:27:32 I’m supposed to believe in everlasting life
03:27:34 but the fact of the matter is this is me
03:27:35 and I’m lying here and I’m dying.
03:27:37 This is the end of me.
03:27:39 How are you gonna do anything other than dread
03:27:42 the end of me?
03:27:43 So let’s acknowledge that I don’t wanna die, okay?
03:27:45 I’m just gonna tell you that upfront.
03:27:47 But that is not the end of,
03:27:53 my death is not the end of life.
03:27:55 I have lived well and fully.
03:27:58 I will go and do my best right up until the end.
03:28:02 I will accept what is inevitable
03:28:05 and I will hold out this belief.
03:28:07 And he’s a Christian minister so he holds out this belief.
03:28:09 And he knows that the belief is not rational.
03:28:12 It’s not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion.
03:28:16 It’s spiritual in the most fundamental way.
03:28:21 It is something that people hold on to and they have hope
03:28:25 and he had hope.
03:28:27 I don’t know if I have that hope.
03:28:29 I used to be, but I’m no longer a Christian
03:28:36 and I’m no longer a theist really.
03:28:39 I’m with Lucretius there.
03:28:42 I mean, there’s no magic that’s going on here.
03:28:46 There’s no unseen hand behind the scene
03:28:49 that’s arranging things.
03:28:51 What I believe is that when I look at the natural world,
03:28:54 I see the evolution of the species
03:28:56 and I see the organic development of the planets.
03:28:59 I mean, the earth is going to not exist
03:29:02 in a finite number of years.
03:29:04 I think with a very high probability,
03:29:06 the sun is gonna die.
03:29:08 It’s gonna implode.
03:29:10 It’s gonna go supernova, whatever is gonna happen.
03:29:13 And there’s not gonna be any there, there.
03:29:17 What’s the meaning of life, Glen Lowry?
03:29:19 That’s the meaning of life.
03:29:21 Yeah, let’s go, let’s go.
03:29:23 What’s the why?
03:29:25 Or is that something economists and social scientists
03:29:29 and mathematicians are not equipped to answer?
03:29:33 Surely.
03:29:34 You know, I think we try to live well and meaningfully
03:29:38 within our time.
03:29:39 We bond, we reproduce, we try to pass on
03:29:43 and we accept our limitations and our mortality.
03:29:48 We try to contribute
03:29:53 and that’s through our children and through our work.
03:30:00 And we’re in this together, we’re not in this alone.
03:30:03 We are connected to other people.
03:30:08 I get a lot of gratitude out of teaching.
03:30:11 I’m a teacher.
03:30:13 My students are gonna outlive me.
03:30:16 They’re gonna have students.
03:30:18 I’m a writer.
03:30:19 My writing is gonna outlive me.
03:30:20 I don’t wanna be self important or pretentious here.
03:30:25 I doubt that I’m gonna be the James Joyce
03:30:27 of the 21st century.
03:30:29 They may not be reading my stuff in a hundred years
03:30:31 because people will certainly be reading Ulysses
03:30:36 in a hundred years.
03:30:38 But I try to have an impact on the world that I’m a part of
03:30:43 and try to leave a legacy that’s dignified.
03:30:47 I mean, I could give some flowery words
03:30:49 here, truth seeking and whatnot.
03:30:51 What about love?
03:30:52 Love.
03:30:55 What role does love play in this life thing?
03:30:59 Love makes the world go round.
03:31:00 I mean, without love, I mean, what have we got?
03:31:03 I mean, we don’t have family and, you know,
03:31:13 we certainly have missed out if love is not a central part
03:31:16 of our existence.
03:31:18 But stop asking me questions like that.
03:31:20 Yeah.
03:31:21 Glenn, thank you for doing everything you do,
03:31:24 for thinking the way you do, for being fearless and bold.
03:31:27 And the Glenn show and your writing and your work
03:31:32 and just being who you are.
03:31:33 Thank you for being you.
03:31:34 And thank you for giving me the huge honor
03:31:37 of spending your extremely valuable time with me today.
03:31:39 This was awesome.
03:31:40 It’s been my pleasure, Lex.
03:31:42 I mean, really, and it has been like four hours, man.
03:31:45 You’re wearing me out for me.
03:31:47 I love it.
03:31:49 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Glenn Lowry.
03:31:52 To support this podcast,
03:31:53 please check out our sponsors in the description.
03:31:55 And now let me leave you with some words
03:31:57 from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
03:32:00 If you can’t fly, then run.
03:32:02 If you can’t run, then walk.
03:32:05 If you can’t walk, then crawl.
03:32:07 But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
03:32:11 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.