July 17, 2024 • 42 mins
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with Matthew Crawford about the rise of the Humanitarian Party and what it means for civil society and self-governance.
Matthew Crawford is the author of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, and the New York Times best seller Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. He has also written several highly penetrating essays and articles, including "The Workings of the Party-State," published last year in American Affairs.
Is sovereignty slipping away from traditional government structures? Matthew shares how power has shifted to a coalition of corporations, foundations, media, universities, and NGOs. Jeremy and Matthew dissect the implications of this shift, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where expert authority often bypassed democratic channels, steering public opinion and political power like never before. They also discuss the victimhood mentality and how figures like Trump have redefined victimhood, and the unsettling role of technology, such as driverless cars, is perpetuating these dynamics.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and recommendations for the podcast! You can shoot Katie Janus, GDT's producer, an email anytime!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Today we talk to MatthewCrawford about the rise of the
humanitarian party and what itmeans for civil society and
self-governance.
Let's go.
Givers, doers and Thinkersintroduces listeners to the
(00:21):
fascinating people and importantideas at the heart of American
(00:45):
civil society.
Thank you for joining us foranother episode of Givers, doers
and Thinkers.
Today is February 20th, 2024.
I am very pleased to be speakingto you from beautiful Phoenix,
arizona Spring is now in the airand genuinely honored to have
as our guest today one of themost brilliant writers working
(01:07):
today in, matthew Crawford, whocomes to us from San Jose,
california.
I don't know if he would acceptthis way of putting it, but I
would say that Matthew Crawfordburst onto the scene in 2009
with his book Shop Class asSoulcraft, an inquiry into the
value of work.
That book was named one of thetop 10 books of the year by
(01:28):
Publishers Weekly.
He followed that up in 2016with A World Beyond your Head On
Becoming an Individual in anAge of Distraction, and most
recently with his book why weDrive Toward a Philosophy of the
Open Road.
Matt has also written a numberof highly penetrating essays and
articles, including one onwhich we will focus a good deal
(01:48):
of our conversation today.
It's called the Workings of theParty State, published last
year in American Affairs.
We're also going to talk aboutwhy we drive and some other
things as well.
Matthew Crawford welcome.
Thanks, jeremy, it's a pleasureto have you here, so we'll just
jump into it.
I think about you basicallyevery time I see one of Google's
(02:12):
self-driving cars here inPhoenix, which is fairly often.
This was like a test metro area, apparently, and now they are
actively giving rides to peopleand stuff.
So that's definitely one of thetopics I want to discuss with
you today.
I thought we would workbackwards, starting with a
thesis you put forward in thatarticle.
I just mentioned the workingsof the party state and then
(02:36):
talking a bit about why we drive, the reaction to COVID, the
importance of working with yourhands and what it all reveals
about the logic and thestructure of the regime.
Maybe that's a word I'm gonnahave to.
I'll ask you to unpack a littlebit the regime in which we live
today.
So, uh, sound good yeah let'sdo it all right.
So, uh, this article which cameout, what is it last fall, fall
(02:59):
2023 I think yep, that's right.
You started with a brief but, Ithink, profound observation
about sovereignty, that is,about who has the authority to
decide in today's world, andabout how sovereignty has
migrated away from government.
Obviously naturally, we wemaybe not naturally, but
(03:21):
conventionally we associatesovereignty with government.
It is the government,ultimately the state, that has
the authority to decide, andthat is not so much the case
anymore.
You argue what do you mean bythat and where does sovereignty
lie today?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah Well, according to the kind of classic theory of
liberal democracy, sovereigntyactually lies with the people,
and so the government is made upby representatives of the
people who act on their behalf.
But yeah, so because we havethis big, it's not a little
(03:59):
ancient polis, it's a huge,sprawling society so we have to
delegate in this way torepresentatives and they decide.
But I think there has been amigration of sovereignty away
from representative bodies, awayfrom parliamentary bodies,
toward an entity that's a littlehard to characterize, to
(04:20):
characterize, but it's sort ofmade up of um entities, things
like corporations, foundations,media, universities, ngos, that
(04:42):
kind of coalesce into somethinglike a party, um, in other words
, the question is how, how doall these entities coordinate to
get things done, um, and howare they gathered to a shared
political vision?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
um, and I guess we're going to talk about that a
little bit yeah, and it's inother words, though it it's
these entities no longer seemslike they no longer, in order to
exercise power authority, nolonger have to work through the
state so much.
Or you know that you have tosort of appeal to the people,
(05:17):
because the people you know, toput representatives in power who
will give them what they wantbut are able to exercise power
sort of independently of thestate.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, I mean we saw during COVID a really striking
example of an extension ofexpert jurisdiction over every
domain of life really, and thatdid not proceed by somebody
passing laws anywhere.
It was, um, again, this kind ofparis state that managed to
(05:49):
kind of get all of its ducks umor what was the right metaphor,
herding cats into going all inthe same direction, and it was
somewhat terrifying, I thought,just how kind of um coordinated
it all seemed, without anymechanism of sort of popular
referendum on what was going onand one just kind of sensed
(06:13):
where you know right opinionlies.
So if you want to be a memberin good standing of the, you
know the right thinking class ofprestige opinion.
You knew what you had to think.
But, again, this was a realexercise of political power that
(06:36):
was in no way accountable todemocratic pressures, which, of
course, such democraticpressures, where they were being
heard, were reviled as populism, which is now characterized as
a threat to democracy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, that's an interesting move, isn't it?
We could talk about thedifferent ways to view populism.
That is a sort of way todiminish the status of the voice
of the people, the Vox Populifor lack of a better term is to
kind of throw a label like thaton it.
What happened and I'm just sortof riffing now on this
(07:14):
conversation why does it seemlike there is a more the party
state, as you put it, is moremonolithic now in its
perspective, um, than it wasmaybe a generation ago?
Or is that a false view?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
no, that's a, that's a.
That's a big question, um, andI don't have a you know, a pithy
or even you know answer thatI'm very confident in, but I
think it has something to dowith the formation of our elites
.
They come up throughinstitutions, these gatekeeping
(07:51):
institutions, universitiesprimarily, where there does seem
to be a kind of hegemonic setof opinions and principles that
one has to get on board with inorder to be a member in good
standing of the professionalmanagerial class and, I think, a
(08:15):
growing intolerance of dissentfrom the program.
So, and this gets to thequestion we were just
considering of how these variousnon-governmental entities that
make up the kind of shadowgovernment, if you want to get
(08:37):
conspiratorial, how theycoordinate.
And I think you don't have toposit the back room,
smoke-filled room, you know,know, conspiracy type thing.
It's more a matter of signalingto one another based on a
shared idiom and shared set ofcommitments.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Well, so you write that one way to sort of
characterize that sharedcommitment is to call this new
state-like entity you might callit the humanitarian party, and
that's with a capital H and thecapital P in your piece and you
write and I'll quote expands itsdominion on two fronts the woke
revolution, that's number one,and the colonization of ordinary
(09:17):
life by technical expertise.
That's the end of the quote.
I think most people I'm goingto ask you to elaborate on that
I think most people have a say.
I understand kind of what youmean by the woke revolution, but
maybe not so much the latterterm, the colonization of
ordinary life by technicalexpertise.
Nor would we ordinarily putthose two things together.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So yeah, well, first, just to sort of flesh out that
second term, you know as farback as you know the 1970s, when
Christopher Lash was writing,he identified what he called the
colonization of the life worldby actually I think he got that
(10:02):
term from Habermas maybe.
But in any case, this idea thatsort of everyday life is
subject to a kind of study andultimately supervision by bodies
of expertise.
Rearing practices you feelincumbent on you to learn what
(10:28):
the experts say about how youshould raise your children.
The home economics wassomething that grew up, I guess,
in the late 19th century, thisidea that just the ordinary
practices of keeping house wereto be an object of study and
optimization.
Sex education in schools thiswas another area.
(10:50):
So on sort of so many frontsthere's this sense that common
sense is inadequate and oneneeds to kind of defer to expert
bodies.
So right, so how does that haveanything to do with the woke
revolution?
They appear unrelated, but Ithink they share an underlying
(11:12):
logic Both displace anddelegitimize common sense and
common practices.
On both fronts, the legitimacyof this ruling entity rests on
an anthropology that posits aparticular kind of self.
It's a vulnerable one, whichthe governing entity then
(11:35):
positions itself to protect Both.
You know the woke business andthe sort of expertise.
Business expand the reach ofmanagerial authority.
They generate new bureaucraticconstituencies and disqualify
common sense as a guide toreality.
(11:56):
Governing entity expandsthrough claims of special
knowledge.
You know whether it's publichealth or the DEI caters that
now sit astride everyinstitution.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
In both cases.
Yeah, the key seems to be that,if I understand you correctly,
you cannot trust, can't trust,your lying eyes.
Everybody needs to sort of beeducated out of what is commonly
believed or has been handeddown to us by tradition or more,
or what are considered to betraditional authorities, what
(12:33):
are, almost, like, labeled assuch.
Including the family itselfright, right, right, exactly.
In any both cases, experts needto re-educate us into
understanding how things reallyare ought to be.
It's interesting that youcalled this the humanitarian
party, and that's the part Iwant to concentrate on.
Next, compassion you talk aboutis a weapon here.
(12:55):
Compassion, or at least the, Ishould say, the claim of
compassion, not necessarily thegenuine article.
Maybe you could explain to usus how is it used to augment
social or institutional power?
Why do we see that dynamictoday, in today's world, in ways
we haven't before?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
yeah.
So we identify classes of peoplewho need special protection.
It you know, maybe sexual orracial minorities, it might be
the immunocompromised, climaterefugees, et cetera, and so
these are kind of adopted asclients and they kind of serve
(13:31):
as mascots for various programsof social control that are
powered by this ideal ofcompassion, which may be
entirely sincere ideal ofcompassion, which may be
entirely sincere, but the thingto notice is that this transfers
power to a kind of new class ofsocial managers and really
(13:52):
political rent seekers.
So there's a kind ofsubterranean class war, and I
think that's what distinguishes,or it's kind of a power grab,
and I think that's whatdistinguishes, or it's kind of a
power grab, and I think that'swhat distinguishes this new you
could call it minoritarianismfrom the standards of interest
group politics that was wellknown to post-war liberal theory
(14:16):
, which had set out to explainhow organized minorities were
able to punch above their weightin democratic contests to
secure their interests.
It's pretty straightforward.
But in this new world we'retalking about, it's not that
these groups are acting on theirown behalf to secure their
interests.
Rather, they're used by othersas emblems of this kind of
(14:42):
tendency to harm that somehowemanates from the majority.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
In fact, in some cases we've seen that the group
does not know it exists until ithas been called into being by
the humanitarian party.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And there are also mechanisms, at least not in its
fullness, you know.
Yeah, and there are mechanismsfor sort of eliciting groups
into existence.
So for example, the Americanswith Disabilities Act.
You know it's built up byanalogy with previous civil
rights legislation.
(15:47):
So if you have a disability,it'siving this as an
oppositional identity, like acivil rights identity right and
become a protected class rightso this is the kind of
vulnerability is identified andbecomes the basis for like a
(16:09):
special dispensation whichcreates an opportunity for there
to be a kind of class ofprofessional rent seekers on
their behalf and you see thiseverywhere.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
It's a dynamic that in principle, seems not to have
an end.
They can sort of continue moreor less forever, am I?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
right yeah, and the thing about that is that you
always have to conjure some kindof moral emergency to sort of
whip up initiative on theirbehalf.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
And this explains why we see so many moral
emergencies now.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, it's constant, it's literally constant.
You know, whether it's whitesupremacy or COVID, I mean.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Do we see this on both left and right?
If I could just like, is therea way to see someone like Trump
as essentially sort of creatinga victim class of sort of white
working class types?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
and adopting them as his client.
Yeah, I think that Trump haskind of managed to extend this
cultural logic of victimhood tothe majority and it's, you know,
(17:29):
it's in a sense it's maybe itwas inevitable.
If you're going to have a kindof racialized spoils system in
law and policy, well theneventually you're going to get
the majority feeling displacedand see themselves in this way,
Eventually everybody comes tosee the advantages of allowing
oneself to be seen as a victim.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
The downside is you have to give away power to some
sort of overseer, so to speak,you know, sort of a patron class
, I guess.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
But yeah, yeah, so, yeah.
So what's lost in all this isthe very idea of self-government
and the idea of citizenship asopposed to victimhood,
citizenship being a kind ofstate of responsibility and kind
of agency.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
And absolutely central to the sort of concept
of this podcast a civil societyright Citizenship.
Citizens are who populate civilsociety in their private
voluntary actions, takingresponsibility for pursuing
certain goods that are nototherwise pursuable through
business activities or the state.
Responsibility for pursuingcertain goods that are not
otherwise pursuable throughbusiness activities or the state
.
Once it was seen, this sort ofdynamic, you explain, which is
(18:30):
why I wanted to talk to youtoday.
This humanitarian party.
Adopt and create a victim classto speak for and thereby to be
able to wield power on behalf ofis completely antithetical to
to civil society, is sort ofAmerica has understood the term
the last 200 years.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, I think it.
It kind of encourages a certainpassivity and dependence that
happens to line up pretty wellwith the progress of technology
also seems to lead us everfurther into passivity and
dependence, and the idea of sortof taking things in hand for
yourself is reconstrued assomething inconvenient.
(19:11):
Or wouldn't you rather be freeto do something else?
If you follow that logic farenough, I think the whole world
becomes like one big assistedliving facility Just let
everything be done for you,which brings us to driverless
cars.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
It does bring us to driverless cars.
So actually I'm going to goright to that.
I'm going to go to a break,we're going to come back and
let's just go right todriverless cars, cause it's a
very interesting topic ofconversation.
We will be right back withauthor Matthew Kroff.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Hi, this is Joe Gerecht, the director of the
Center for Civil Society.
The Center for Civil Society,also known as C4CS, is proud to
produce the Givers, doers andThinkers podcast.
At C4CS, our mission is tostrengthen civil society.
We do this by conductingprograms and activities that
(20:08):
increase the knowledge andefficacy of America's nonprofit
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donors.
We offer classes, webinars,conferences and more to help
your organization have a biggerimpact.
If you'd like to learn moreabout the Center for Civil
Society and our programs, pleasevisit us online at
(20:31):
centerforcivilsocietyorg.
Thank you for listening to theGDT Podcast.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
All right, we are back with Matthew Crawford,
author of why we Drive Toward aPhilosophy of the Open Road,
among other books, most famouslyperhaps, shop Class Soulcraft.
We've been talking about hisarticle the Workings of the
Party State.
Now we're going to talk aboutself-driving cars for a bit.
We were just talking about thisencouragement to do less and
less for ourselves, and so, ashe just very memorably put it,
(21:01):
so the whole world will becomean assisted living facility not
too far from now.
Talk about this phenomenon ofdriverless cars.
Was it driverless cars and theprospect thereof, that made you
want to pursue a philosophy ofdriving, or did you want to
pursue kind of dive into thephilosophy of driving first?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Well, I've always been an enthusiast of driving,
driving first.
Well, I've always been anenthusiast of driving, um, and I
tend to like sort of light,primitive you know, cars in the
60s or whatever, um.
And then I've also, um, youknow, professionally worked as a
mechanic, uh, and, and alsoI've this um 10 year project of
(21:42):
building essentially a homemadecar.
You should tell people that,well, my first car I got when I
was 15 was a 63 VW bug and Iproceeded to hop it up, um, well
, starting from 40 horsepower,you know, if you go to 60, like,
ooh, you can, you can have,have, uh, you can be sideways at
(22:04):
20 miles an hour and feel likea superhero, um, and I worked at
a porsche shop, um, anyway.
So, yeah, now in middle aged, Ifinally had the money to build
the, the car that I sort oflusted after as a teenager but
couldn't afford, and it's it'spretty over top, it's got crazy
(22:24):
horsepower and everything else,but in any case, yeah, but there
was also a kind of irritant forbeginning that book, which was
all this talk about driverlesscars.
So this would have been like2015.
All of a sudden, it was likethis was on the agenda, this is
(22:46):
going to happen and you know,polling by pew at the time and
shortly thereafter showed thatreally nobody was interested in
this and the people were notclamoring for driverless cars.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
This is not.
This is not the market speakingup and businesses simply acting
to fulfill a need.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, so this was very much a top-down project,
kind of social engineering forprofit, you might say.
Maybe it's an attempt ofSilicon Valley to grab some of
the profits from Detroit.
You can think of it in terms ofkind of regional the data grab.
There's an incredible amount ofdata to be had.
That turns out to be the onlyway to make sense of driverless
(23:32):
cars as part of the surveillanceeconomy, but that's another
topic.
So, yeah, so let me just relatean anecdote that kind of gives
you a flavor of what we'retalking about here.
This must have been 2013 orsomething like that.
There was a Google self-drivingcar, you know sort of a test bed
(23:55):
rolling, but I think it wasrolling on actual streets.
They somehow got permission todo that way back then, and so it
came to a four-way stopintersection and it came to a
complete stop and waited for theother cars to do the same
before going through, becauseapparently that's the rule it
(24:17):
was taught, but of course that'snot what people do, and so the
car got completely paralyzed andsort of melted down.
I guess somebody had to comeand reboot it or something.
Meanwhile it's clogging theintersection.
So the Google guy in charge ofthis project said that what he
had learned from the episode isthat quote human beings need to
(24:41):
be less idiotic.
Okay, so what do people do atsuch an intersection?
Well, there's always ambiguouscases of right-of-way.
Often they make eye contact,maybe one person waves the other
through.
There's almost a kind of bodylanguage of driving, and for the
most part we manage to workthings out and get it done.
(25:05):
It's not a problem.
And get it done, it's not aproblem.
But none of that socialintelligence was visible to this
Google guy.
I mean, maybe he was a kind ofclassic computer dork who's a
little bit autistic, who knows.
So what he meant that humanbeings should be less idiotic is
that they should behave morelike computers, they should be
(25:25):
rule followers.
And again, the invisibility ofthis social intelligence I think
is very significant.
Now, tocqueville thought thatit's an everyday sort of
small-bore practical activitiesthat demand cooperation and
improvisation that thedemocratic characters formed,
(25:47):
and he thought this wassignificant.
It's not something that happensin civics class, it's just in
everyday life.
So I think if we're to kind ofdisburden ourselves of the
requirements of learning how towork things out for ourselves,
this is going to be politicallysignificant.
I think it's going to nudge usever more into again this kind
(26:07):
of passivity and dependence.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
It leads me to a question about AI.
The ultimate way ofdisburdening ourselves from
working things out for ourselves, as you put it, would be to
have somebody else, somethingelse, do all the thinking for us
.
Right now, chachibt and otherfrom what I've witnessed in
business, these tools are beingused to generate first drafts of
(26:32):
things, or they're used as sortof just like more sophisticated
search engines.
You know, tell me this, youtell me that, but often you use
to generate drafts of documents,employee handbooks, you know,
training modules, things likethat and then, oh, you got to go
in there, you got to look itover and it'll be some things
you need to correct.
It seems to me that we're nottoo far out from sort of things
(26:55):
just talking to themselves.
It's obviously drawing fromwhat's already out there.
It doesn't do any real thinkingitself, and it comes in and you
spit that out and some AI takesit.
On the other end, there's asort of a complete elimination
of the human that would seem tobe fearsomely on the horizon.
Is that overstated?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know any more about it than you
do, but it sounds like an aptcharacterization of it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
I mean, I assume, self-driving cars, or AI is a
significant aspect of theirtechnology.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
So what's striking is that?
So what's implicit in this?
Well, in the case of driverlesscar version of this, it's that
human beings are terribledrivers.
You hear that constantly.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Right.
So there's a kind of low regardfor the human being that
underwrites a lot of thesedevelopments.
I call it anti-humanism, and itjustifies in the case of
driverless cars.
Again, I think it's anexpensive solution to a
non-problem, Because in facthuman beings are actually pretty
(28:03):
good at driving, and you couldprobably make a case like that
in all kinds of areas.
Well, in fact, what is AI?
It's an inferential body that'sbuilt up by sort of scouring
the internet for human speechand writing.
(28:27):
So it's ultimately based onhuman intelligence, but then the
point, of course, is to renderthe exercise of such
intelligence obsolete.
Now, who does this benefit?
Well, whoever owns the AI, Isuppose.
So the propaganda that humanbeings are inadequate seems like
(28:47):
it just serves to sort of clearthe way for a massive grab of
wealth and power.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
The debater at this point steps in and says Mr
Crawford, that's all very welland good, you say this is
anti-humanism, but in factdriverless cars will save
thousands, tens of thousands,hundreds of thousands of lives
every year from reduction inaccidents.
Who's the true humanist, mrCrawford?
(29:16):
There is a security, there is asafety first hammer that seems
to always can be sort ofdeployed in such debates Other
than sort of speaking to adifferent set of values or goods
.
Is there any response to thatkind of objection?
Yeah, on a number of differentlevels debate other than sort of
speaking to a different set ofvalues or goods.
Is there any response to thatkind of objection?
Speaker 2 (29:30):
yeah, on a number of different levels.
First, just factually, that wasthe claim made for driverless
cars.
You know, maybe as recently asfive years ago but it's turned
out to be a far greaterengineering challenge than was
anticipated that the challengereally lies in getting robot
cars to share the road withhuman drivers.
(29:51):
I mean, the problem becomestrivial if you don't have human
drivers and if you don't havedogs or children running out.
So in order to make the worldhospitable to the driverless
cars, you have to do away withhuman drivers.
That seems to be the logic ofthis.
(30:11):
But I think you raise a deeperpoint about safety.
Yeah, safety can be invoked asa kind of club to shut down
debate, because anyone who's notmaximally safe-minded is
labeled pro-death, and so youend up sort of not considering
(30:36):
the larger human landscapethat's being dramatically
altered by whatever new safetyinnovation is on offer.
And I think we have to considerthat larger human landscape,
because there's an atrophy ofhuman competence from lack of
(30:58):
use, there's an atrophy of thehuman spirit of well.
Again, that sort of cooperationthat we do as citizens and also
, you know, risk-taking isitself, I think, an important
element of human excellence,right?
(31:21):
So there's an ideology ofsafety-ism that, if left
completely unchecked, wouldagain have us um, reduced to
like wally world.
You ever see the movie wally?
Yeah, so you have these, uh,you know blob like human
(31:42):
characters who are ferriedaround on these hoverings or
self-driving pods, slurping fromin the enormous cup holders you
know slurpees or something andand the entertainments are
beamed into their cockpit andtheir faces beam with this sort
of slackened pleasure and theyseem to be completely safe and
(32:07):
content, but somehow, I'm sureI've said this on this podcast
before because I say it ineveryday life a lot, but I'm
always asking people to helpmake sense of it to me.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
why is risk aversion so prevalent?
It seems to me that we have nowthe most risk averse world, the
most risk-averse world, themost risk-averse young
generation possibly in humanhistory certainly that I know of
in recorded human history.
Surely this has something to dowith the rise of safetyism and
(32:38):
so forth, but how is it that thespiritedness of even young
people seems to have seriouslyattenuated?
I think that's something thatnobody really would have
predicted 30 years ago.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Well, this probably ties into what we were talking
about at the beginning, namelythat we have a political
establishment that kind of feedson the attribution of
vulnerability to everybody,right.
So to take the COVID example,again, you know there was a very
steep age-based gradient ofrisk for COVID.
(33:13):
That had to be the knowledge ofwhich, you know.
We knew this pretty early inthe pandemic.
But it had to be suppressed soas to characterize the whole
population as one big vulnerablepopulation with, you know, very
concrete harms to children youto children from not being in
school On every front.
(33:34):
It seems like we're encouragedto think of ourselves this way.
There's like a construction ofa kind of new modern subject who
regards himself as vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, and young people probably are.
Particularly well, it's newnumber one and two.
They're particularly good atpicking up cues of what provides
status and what's at thecutting edge and so forth.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Yeah, I mean yeah, like you see kids wearing masks
to school even when they're notrequired to.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
But it's In the workings of the party state.
Take us through sort of howthis works.
It's an attribution ofvulnerability to more and more
people, or the entire populationin the case of COVID.
Another phenomenon you call outis I'll quote you here a
coordinated effort to saturatepublic space with
representations that are notrepresentative, and I think when
(34:26):
you put it that way, I thinkpeople will sort of at least for
me like a light bulb goes on.
Oh yeah, it might seem trivial,but it seems like that happens
all the time.
Maybe ways that areuncomfortable to talk about.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah.
So the question is, why ispublic space saturated with
images that seem designed tocounter stereotypes, so they're
kind of anti-typical, and whyare so-called underrepresented
groups so overrepresented indepictions of social reality?
(35:00):
So you know, in advertising yousee a lot of this.
So it might be it's usuallysomething abnormal that's
presented as an idol.
It might be a picture ofsomeone who's gender atypical
that you feel subtly enjoined toaffirm because he or she
(35:22):
appears in association with someprestigious brand.
Or you're presented with anobese person of uncertain sex,
let's say in lingerie, and weunderstand that we're to admire
this person's defiant self-love.
Or it might be a depiction thatisn't outlandish like that but
registers at some level of yourbrain for being pointedly
(35:43):
anti-stereotypical.
So a common appearance inpopular entertainment is the
petite young woman who easilydispatches three burly male
attackers.
And my hunch is that kind of insevering the things you're
supposed to applaud from what'snormal or healthy, and the
(36:05):
normal here has to be put inscare quotes because it's almost
prohibited to use it otherwise.
There's some kind of deeppolitical conditioning that's
happening here and it works intandem with this colonization of
the life world by expertisethat we talked about and the
disqualification of common senseas morally and epistemically
(36:28):
suspect, namely that all thishas a disorienting effect.
I think people lose confidencein their own intuitions and
maybe even your sense of reality, and I think this erodes
self-confidence as well, whichis the assertive basis of
self-government.
So maybe these are kind of thepsychic preconditions that give
(36:53):
the party latitude to kind ofdelimit the influence of
representative bodies in theparliamentary sense and transfer
power to itself.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, the general sort of thread here is a sort of
um delegitimization ofself-governance or just an
attack on the self-governance asa.
Yeah, I think a worthy goal.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Well, on our sort of everyday moral intuitions, and
yeah, um, the things that areattractive or repellent to us
need to be troubled, as they say.
So, for example, sportsIllustrated put a transgender
person on the cover of theirannual swimsuit issue.
Right, right, so it's like youcan't.
(37:40):
Here's a demographic readers ofSports Illustrated.
That's maybe especiallyproblematic and needs to be
subject to a bit of politicaltherapy in this way.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah yeah, that's definitely a change from a
generation ago.
Just a couple of questions.
You're not a religious writer,have not been in uh.
You know write much on thattopic, but you do conclude this
uh article by quoting uh withapproval, like christopher lash,
who's a writer.
That's meant a lot to you.
He's also meant a lot to me, ahistorian, but he was also
(38:13):
really kind of a social theoristin the last half of the 20th
century.
The quote is submission to Godmakes peoples less submissive in
everyday life.
I think this is part of yourthinking through what a solution
not solution is too strong aword, but a response to this the
(38:33):
humanitarian party and its kindof power grab might look like.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
As far as I know, there's no indication that Lash
was himself a believer but justas in a story and this is
something he noticed thatreligious people seem to be less
submissive to kind of secularauthority in a way that he found
healthy.
And that's something I've becomemore alert to.
And so just I mean in thebackground here a basis for
(39:15):
asserting the dignity of man.
I mean, we are made in theimage of God and that is by
itself kind of emboldening rightas against the kind of
anti-humanism that we've beentalking about.
And of course it also withinthe Christian framework,
(39:36):
suffering has meaning, so thatthis kind of safetyism and kind
of imperative to eliminate everypossible source of suffering
starts to look a little bit Idon't know somehow wrongheaded
Because of all the unintendedconsequences that go with it.
(39:56):
You have to be willing toaccept suffering.
I think you also have to bekind of cognizant of our fallen
nature.
So this idea that we'reinfinitely perfectible and
plastic leads us into all kindsof totalitarian temptations.
So there's any number of frontson which I think the Christian
(40:23):
anthropology, really the pictureof the human being, is a very
powerful antidote to sort oftendencies to degradation that
we're living through right now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
I don't think there could possibly be a better place
for us to leave this interview,so I'm going to leave it right
there.
I was wonderfully put, matthewCrawford.
Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Jeremy.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
You have a website, matthewbcrawfordcom.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Actually that one.
It's kind of dead, but I have asub stack that.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I oh, much better.
Yeah, you have a sub stack now,that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, that I hope your listeners will check out.
It's called Arcadelia, whichyou're not going to remember how
to spell anyway, but if youjust look up Matthew B Crawford
Substack, you'll find it.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Okay, very good.
Yes, I am a subscriber.
You should be too.
It's very good and you can buy,of course, why we Drive the
World Beyond your Head ShopClasses, soulcraft anywhere.
You want to buy them on Amazonand you're not on Twitter.
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, I've never done any of those.
Good for you, good for you.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Neither am I Wonderful.
Thank you, matt, reallyappreciate it.
Yeah, it was a pleasure, jeremy, take care.
Thank you for joining us fortoday's episode.
If you enjoyed it, we inviteyou to subscribe and or rate and
review this discussion on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen
to our podcasts and have aguest you'd like to hear from.
Send your request to ourproducer, katie Janis, at
(41:55):
kjanisatamphilcom.
That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.
Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Today we talk to MatthewCrawford about the rise of the
humanitarian party and what itmeans for civil society and
self-governance.
Let's go.
Givers, doers and Thinkersintroduces listeners to the
(00:21):
fascinating people and importantideas at the heart of American
(00:45):
civil society.
Thank you for joining us foranother episode of Givers, doers
and Thinkers.
Today is February 20th, 2024.
I am very pleased to be speakingto you from beautiful Phoenix,
arizona Spring is now in the airand genuinely honored to have
as our guest today one of themost brilliant writers working
(01:07):
today in, matthew Crawford, whocomes to us from San Jose,
california.
I don't know if he would acceptthis way of putting it, but I
would say that Matthew Crawfordburst onto the scene in 2009
with his book Shop Class asSoulcraft, an inquiry into the
value of work.
That book was named one of thetop 10 books of the year by
(01:28):
Publishers Weekly.
He followed that up in 2016with A World Beyond your Head On
Becoming an Individual in anAge of Distraction, and most
recently with his book why weDrive Toward a Philosophy of the
Open Road.
Matt has also written a numberof highly penetrating essays and
articles, including one onwhich we will focus a good deal
(01:48):
of our conversation today.
It's called the Workings of theParty State, published last
year in American Affairs.
We're also going to talk aboutwhy we drive and some other
things as well.
Matthew Crawford welcome.
Thanks, jeremy, it's a pleasureto have you here, so we'll just
jump into it.
I think about you basicallyevery time I see one of Google's
(02:12):
self-driving cars here inPhoenix, which is fairly often.
This was like a test metro area, apparently, and now they are
actively giving rides to peopleand stuff.
So that's definitely one of thetopics I want to discuss with
you today.
I thought we would workbackwards, starting with a
thesis you put forward in thatarticle.
I just mentioned the workingsof the party state and then
(02:36):
talking a bit about why we drive, the reaction to COVID, the
importance of working with yourhands and what it all reveals
about the logic and thestructure of the regime.
Maybe that's a word I'm gonnahave to.
I'll ask you to unpack a littlebit the regime in which we live
today.
So, uh, sound good yeah let'sdo it all right.
So, uh, this article which cameout, what is it last fall, fall
(02:59):
2023 I think yep, that's right.
You started with a brief but, Ithink, profound observation
about sovereignty, that is,about who has the authority to
decide in today's world, andabout how sovereignty has
migrated away from government.
Obviously naturally, we wemaybe not naturally, but
(03:21):
conventionally we associatesovereignty with government.
It is the government,ultimately the state, that has
the authority to decide, andthat is not so much the case
anymore.
You argue what do you mean bythat and where does sovereignty
lie today?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah Well, according to the kind of classic theory of
liberal democracy, sovereigntyactually lies with the people,
and so the government is made upby representatives of the
people who act on their behalf.
But yeah, so because we havethis big, it's not a little
(03:59):
ancient polis, it's a huge,sprawling society so we have to
delegate in this way torepresentatives and they decide.
But I think there has been amigration of sovereignty away
from representative bodies, awayfrom parliamentary bodies,
toward an entity that's a littlehard to characterize, to
(04:20):
characterize, but it's sort ofmade up of um entities, things
like corporations, foundations,media, universities, ngos, that
(04:42):
kind of coalesce into somethinglike a party, um, in other words
, the question is how, how doall these entities coordinate to
get things done, um, and howare they gathered to a shared
political vision?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
um, and I guess we're going to talk about that a
little bit yeah, and it's inother words, though it it's
these entities no longer seemslike they no longer, in order to
exercise power authority, nolonger have to work through the
state so much.
Or you know that you have tosort of appeal to the people,
(05:17):
because the people you know, toput representatives in power who
will give them what they wantbut are able to exercise power
sort of independently of thestate.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, I mean we saw during COVID a really striking
example of an extension ofexpert jurisdiction over every
domain of life really, and thatdid not proceed by somebody
passing laws anywhere.
It was, um, again, this kind ofparis state that managed to
(05:49):
kind of get all of its ducks umor what was the right metaphor,
herding cats into going all inthe same direction, and it was
somewhat terrifying, I thought,just how kind of um coordinated
it all seemed, without anymechanism of sort of popular
referendum on what was going onand one just kind of sensed
(06:13):
where you know right opinionlies.
So if you want to be a memberin good standing of the, you
know the right thinking class ofprestige opinion.
You knew what you had to think.
But, again, this was a realexercise of political power that
(06:36):
was in no way accountable todemocratic pressures, which, of
course, such democraticpressures, where they were being
heard, were reviled as populism, which is now characterized as
a threat to democracy.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, that's an interesting move, isn't it?
We could talk about thedifferent ways to view populism.
That is a sort of way todiminish the status of the voice
of the people, the Vox Populifor lack of a better term is to
kind of throw a label like thaton it.
What happened and I'm just sortof riffing now on this
(07:14):
conversation why does it seemlike there is a more the party
state, as you put it, is moremonolithic now in its
perspective, um, than it wasmaybe a generation ago?
Or is that a false view?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
no, that's a, that's a.
That's a big question, um, andI don't have a you know, a pithy
or even you know answer thatI'm very confident in, but I
think it has something to dowith the formation of our elites
.
They come up throughinstitutions, these gatekeeping
(07:51):
institutions, universitiesprimarily, where there does seem
to be a kind of hegemonic setof opinions and principles that
one has to get on board with inorder to be a member in good
standing of the professionalmanagerial class and, I think, a
(08:15):
growing intolerance of dissentfrom the program.
So, and this gets to thequestion we were just
considering of how these variousnon-governmental entities that
make up the kind of shadowgovernment, if you want to get
(08:37):
conspiratorial, how theycoordinate.
And I think you don't have toposit the back room,
smoke-filled room, you know,know, conspiracy type thing.
It's more a matter of signalingto one another based on a
shared idiom and shared set ofcommitments.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Well, so you write that one way to sort of
characterize that sharedcommitment is to call this new
state-like entity you might callit the humanitarian party, and
that's with a capital H and thecapital P in your piece and you
write and I'll quote expands itsdominion on two fronts the woke
revolution, that's number one,and the colonization of ordinary
(09:17):
life by technical expertise.
That's the end of the quote.
I think most people I'm goingto ask you to elaborate on that
I think most people have a say.
I understand kind of what youmean by the woke revolution, but
maybe not so much the latterterm, the colonization of
ordinary life by technicalexpertise.
Nor would we ordinarily putthose two things together.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
So yeah, well, first, just to sort of flesh out that
second term, you know as farback as you know the 1970s, when
Christopher Lash was writing,he identified what he called the
colonization of the life worldby actually I think he got that
(10:02):
term from Habermas maybe.
But in any case, this idea thatsort of everyday life is
subject to a kind of study andultimately supervision by bodies
of expertise.
Rearing practices you feelincumbent on you to learn what
(10:28):
the experts say about how youshould raise your children.
The home economics wassomething that grew up, I guess,
in the late 19th century, thisidea that just the ordinary
practices of keeping house wereto be an object of study and
optimization.
Sex education in schools thiswas another area.
(10:50):
So on sort of so many frontsthere's this sense that common
sense is inadequate and oneneeds to kind of defer to expert
bodies.
So right, so how does that haveanything to do with the woke
revolution?
They appear unrelated, but Ithink they share an underlying
(11:12):
logic Both displace anddelegitimize common sense and
common practices.
On both fronts, the legitimacyof this ruling entity rests on
an anthropology that posits aparticular kind of self.
It's a vulnerable one, whichthe governing entity then
(11:35):
positions itself to protect Both.
You know the woke business andthe sort of expertise.
Business expand the reach ofmanagerial authority.
They generate new bureaucraticconstituencies and disqualify
common sense as a guide toreality.
(11:56):
Governing entity expandsthrough claims of special
knowledge.
You know whether it's publichealth or the DEI caters that
now sit astride everyinstitution.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
In both cases.
Yeah, the key seems to be that,if I understand you correctly,
you cannot trust, can't trust,your lying eyes.
Everybody needs to sort of beeducated out of what is commonly
believed or has been handeddown to us by tradition or more,
or what are considered to betraditional authorities, what
(12:33):
are, almost, like, labeled assuch.
Including the family itselfright, right, right, exactly.
In any both cases, experts needto re-educate us into
understanding how things reallyare ought to be.
It's interesting that youcalled this the humanitarian
party, and that's the part Iwant to concentrate on.
Next, compassion you talk aboutis a weapon here.
(12:55):
Compassion, or at least the, Ishould say, the claim of
compassion, not necessarily thegenuine article.
Maybe you could explain to usus how is it used to augment
social or institutional power?
Why do we see that dynamictoday, in today's world, in ways
we haven't before?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
yeah.
So we identify classes of peoplewho need special protection.
It you know, maybe sexual orracial minorities, it might be
the immunocompromised, climaterefugees, et cetera, and so
these are kind of adopted asclients and they kind of serve
(13:31):
as mascots for various programsof social control that are
powered by this ideal ofcompassion, which may be
entirely sincere ideal ofcompassion, which may be
entirely sincere, but the thingto notice is that this transfers
power to a kind of new class ofsocial managers and really
(13:52):
political rent seekers.
So there's a kind ofsubterranean class war, and I
think that's what distinguishes,or it's kind of a power grab,
and I think that's whatdistinguishes, or it's kind of a
power grab, and I think that'swhat distinguishes this new you
could call it minoritarianismfrom the standards of interest
group politics that was wellknown to post-war liberal theory
(14:16):
, which had set out to explainhow organized minorities were
able to punch above their weightin democratic contests to
secure their interests.
It's pretty straightforward.
But in this new world we'retalking about, it's not that
these groups are acting on theirown behalf to secure their
interests.
Rather, they're used by othersas emblems of this kind of
(14:42):
tendency to harm that somehowemanates from the majority.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
In fact, in some cases we've seen that the group
does not know it exists until ithas been called into being by
the humanitarian party.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And there are also mechanisms, at least not in its
fullness, you know.
Yeah, and there are mechanismsfor sort of eliciting groups
into existence.
So for example, the Americanswith Disabilities Act.
You know it's built up byanalogy with previous civil
rights legislation.
(15:47):
So if you have a disability,it'siving this as an
oppositional identity, like acivil rights identity right and
become a protected class rightso this is the kind of
vulnerability is identified andbecomes the basis for like a
(16:09):
special dispensation whichcreates an opportunity for there
to be a kind of class ofprofessional rent seekers on
their behalf and you see thiseverywhere.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
It's a dynamic that in principle, seems not to have
an end.
They can sort of continue moreor less forever, am I?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
right yeah, and the thing about that is that you
always have to conjure some kindof moral emergency to sort of
whip up initiative on theirbehalf.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
And this explains why we see so many moral
emergencies now.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah, it's constant, it's literally constant.
You know, whether it's whitesupremacy or COVID, I mean.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Do we see this on both left and right?
If I could just like, is therea way to see someone like Trump
as essentially sort of creatinga victim class of sort of white
working class types?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
and adopting them as his client.
Yeah, I think that Trump haskind of managed to extend this
cultural logic of victimhood tothe majority and it's, you know,
(17:29):
it's in a sense it's maybe itwas inevitable.
If you're going to have a kindof racialized spoils system in
law and policy, well theneventually you're going to get
the majority feeling displacedand see themselves in this way,
Eventually everybody comes tosee the advantages of allowing
oneself to be seen as a victim.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
The downside is you have to give away power to some
sort of overseer, so to speak,you know, sort of a patron class
, I guess.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
But yeah, yeah, so, yeah.
So what's lost in all this isthe very idea of self-government
and the idea of citizenship asopposed to victimhood,
citizenship being a kind ofstate of responsibility and kind
of agency.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
And absolutely central to the sort of concept
of this podcast a civil societyright Citizenship.
Citizens are who populate civilsociety in their private
voluntary actions, takingresponsibility for pursuing
certain goods that are nototherwise pursuable through
business activities or the state.
Responsibility for pursuingcertain goods that are not
otherwise pursuable throughbusiness activities or the state
.
Once it was seen, this sort ofdynamic, you explain, which is
(18:30):
why I wanted to talk to youtoday.
This humanitarian party.
Adopt and create a victim classto speak for and thereby to be
able to wield power on behalf ofis completely antithetical to
to civil society, is sort ofAmerica has understood the term
the last 200 years.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, I think it.
It kind of encourages a certainpassivity and dependence that
happens to line up pretty wellwith the progress of technology
also seems to lead us everfurther into passivity and
dependence, and the idea of sortof taking things in hand for
yourself is reconstrued assomething inconvenient.
(19:11):
Or wouldn't you rather be freeto do something else?
If you follow that logic farenough, I think the whole world
becomes like one big assistedliving facility Just let
everything be done for you,which brings us to driverless
cars.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
It does bring us to driverless cars.
So actually I'm going to goright to that.
I'm going to go to a break,we're going to come back and
let's just go right todriverless cars, cause it's a
very interesting topic ofconversation.
We will be right back withauthor Matthew Kroff.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Hi, this is Joe Gerecht, the director of the
Center for Civil Society.
The Center for Civil Society,also known as C4CS, is proud to
produce the Givers, doers andThinkers podcast.
At C4CS, our mission is tostrengthen civil society.
We do this by conductingprograms and activities that
(20:08):
increase the knowledge andefficacy of America's nonprofit
organizations, charitablefoundations and individual
donors.
We offer classes, webinars,conferences and more to help
your organization have a biggerimpact.
If you'd like to learn moreabout the Center for Civil
Society and our programs, pleasevisit us online at
(20:31):
centerforcivilsocietyorg.
Thank you for listening to theGDT Podcast.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
All right, we are back with Matthew Crawford,
author of why we Drive Toward aPhilosophy of the Open Road,
among other books, most famouslyperhaps, shop Class Soulcraft.
We've been talking about hisarticle the Workings of the
Party State.
Now we're going to talk aboutself-driving cars for a bit.
We were just talking about thisencouragement to do less and
less for ourselves, and so, ashe just very memorably put it,
(21:01):
so the whole world will becomean assisted living facility not
too far from now.
Talk about this phenomenon ofdriverless cars.
Was it driverless cars and theprospect thereof, that made you
want to pursue a philosophy ofdriving, or did you want to
pursue kind of dive into thephilosophy of driving first?
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Well, I've always been an enthusiast of driving,
driving first.
Well, I've always been anenthusiast of driving, um, and I
tend to like sort of light,primitive you know, cars in the
60s or whatever, um.
And then I've also, um, youknow, professionally worked as a
mechanic, uh, and, and alsoI've this um 10 year project of
(21:42):
building essentially a homemadecar.
You should tell people that,well, my first car I got when I
was 15 was a 63 VW bug and Iproceeded to hop it up, um, well
, starting from 40 horsepower,you know, if you go to 60, like,
ooh, you can, you can have,have, uh, you can be sideways at
(22:04):
20 miles an hour and feel likea superhero, um, and I worked at
a porsche shop, um, anyway.
So, yeah, now in middle aged, Ifinally had the money to build
the, the car that I sort oflusted after as a teenager but
couldn't afford, and it's it'spretty over top, it's got crazy
(22:24):
horsepower and everything else,but in any case, yeah, but there
was also a kind of irritant forbeginning that book, which was
all this talk about driverlesscars.
So this would have been like2015.
All of a sudden, it was likethis was on the agenda, this is
(22:46):
going to happen and you know,polling by pew at the time and
shortly thereafter showed thatreally nobody was interested in
this and the people were notclamoring for driverless cars.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
This is not.
This is not the market speakingup and businesses simply acting
to fulfill a need.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, so this was very much a top-down project,
kind of social engineering forprofit, you might say.
Maybe it's an attempt ofSilicon Valley to grab some of
the profits from Detroit.
You can think of it in terms ofkind of regional the data grab.
There's an incredible amount ofdata to be had.
That turns out to be the onlyway to make sense of driverless
(23:32):
cars as part of the surveillanceeconomy, but that's another
topic.
So, yeah, so let me just relatean anecdote that kind of gives
you a flavor of what we'retalking about here.
This must have been 2013 orsomething like that.
There was a Google self-drivingcar, you know sort of a test bed
(23:55):
rolling, but I think it wasrolling on actual streets.
They somehow got permission todo that way back then, and so it
came to a four-way stopintersection and it came to a
complete stop and waited for theother cars to do the same
before going through, becauseapparently that's the rule it
(24:17):
was taught, but of course that'snot what people do, and so the
car got completely paralyzed andsort of melted down.
I guess somebody had to comeand reboot it or something.
Meanwhile it's clogging theintersection.
So the Google guy in charge ofthis project said that what he
had learned from the episode isthat quote human beings need to
(24:41):
be less idiotic.
Okay, so what do people do atsuch an intersection?
Well, there's always ambiguouscases of right-of-way.
Often they make eye contact,maybe one person waves the other
through.
There's almost a kind of bodylanguage of driving, and for the
most part we manage to workthings out and get it done.
(25:05):
It's not a problem.
And get it done, it's not aproblem.
But none of that socialintelligence was visible to this
Google guy.
I mean, maybe he was a kind ofclassic computer dork who's a
little bit autistic, who knows.
So what he meant that humanbeings should be less idiotic is
that they should behave morelike computers, they should be
(25:25):
rule followers.
And again, the invisibility ofthis social intelligence I think
is very significant.
Now, tocqueville thought thatit's an everyday sort of
small-bore practical activitiesthat demand cooperation and
improvisation that thedemocratic characters formed,
(25:47):
and he thought this wassignificant.
It's not something that happensin civics class, it's just in
everyday life.
So I think if we're to kind ofdisburden ourselves of the
requirements of learning how towork things out for ourselves,
this is going to be politicallysignificant.
I think it's going to nudge usever more into again this kind
(26:07):
of passivity and dependence.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
It leads me to a question about AI.
The ultimate way ofdisburdening ourselves from
working things out for ourselves, as you put it, would be to
have somebody else, somethingelse, do all the thinking for us
.
Right now, chachibt and otherfrom what I've witnessed in
business, these tools are beingused to generate first drafts of
(26:32):
things, or they're used as sortof just like more sophisticated
search engines.
You know, tell me this, youtell me that, but often you use
to generate drafts of documents,employee handbooks, you know,
training modules, things likethat and then, oh, you got to go
in there, you got to look itover and it'll be some things
you need to correct.
It seems to me that we're nottoo far out from sort of things
(26:55):
just talking to themselves.
It's obviously drawing fromwhat's already out there.
It doesn't do any real thinkingitself, and it comes in and you
spit that out and some AI takesit.
On the other end, there's asort of a complete elimination
of the human that would seem tobe fearsomely on the horizon.
Is that overstated?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, I mean, I don't know any more about it than you
do, but it sounds like an aptcharacterization of it.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
I mean, I assume, self-driving cars, or AI is a
significant aspect of theirtechnology.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
So what's striking is that?
So what's implicit in this?
Well, in the case of driverlesscar version of this, it's that
human beings are terribledrivers.
You hear that constantly.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Right.
So there's a kind of low regardfor the human being that
underwrites a lot of thesedevelopments.
I call it anti-humanism, and itjustifies in the case of
driverless cars.
Again, I think it's anexpensive solution to a
non-problem, Because in facthuman beings are actually pretty
(28:03):
good at driving, and you couldprobably make a case like that
in all kinds of areas.
Well, in fact, what is AI?
It's an inferential body that'sbuilt up by sort of scouring
the internet for human speechand writing.
(28:27):
So it's ultimately based onhuman intelligence, but then the
point, of course, is to renderthe exercise of such
intelligence obsolete.
Now, who does this benefit?
Well, whoever owns the AI, Isuppose.
So the propaganda that humanbeings are inadequate seems like
(28:47):
it just serves to sort of clearthe way for a massive grab of
wealth and power.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
The debater at this point steps in and says Mr
Crawford, that's all very welland good, you say this is
anti-humanism, but in factdriverless cars will save
thousands, tens of thousands,hundreds of thousands of lives
every year from reduction inaccidents.
Who's the true humanist, mrCrawford?
(29:16):
There is a security, there is asafety first hammer that seems
to always can be sort ofdeployed in such debates Other
than sort of speaking to adifferent set of values or goods
.
Is there any response to thatkind of objection?
Yeah, on a number of differentlevels debate other than sort of
speaking to a different set ofvalues or goods.
Is there any response to thatkind of objection?
Speaker 2 (29:30):
yeah, on a number of different levels.
First, just factually, that wasthe claim made for driverless
cars.
You know, maybe as recently asfive years ago but it's turned
out to be a far greaterengineering challenge than was
anticipated that the challengereally lies in getting robot
cars to share the road withhuman drivers.
(29:51):
I mean, the problem becomestrivial if you don't have human
drivers and if you don't havedogs or children running out.
So in order to make the worldhospitable to the driverless
cars, you have to do away withhuman drivers.
That seems to be the logic ofthis.
(30:11):
But I think you raise a deeperpoint about safety.
Yeah, safety can be invoked asa kind of club to shut down
debate, because anyone who's notmaximally safe-minded is
labeled pro-death, and so youend up sort of not considering
(30:36):
the larger human landscapethat's being dramatically
altered by whatever new safetyinnovation is on offer.
And I think we have to considerthat larger human landscape,
because there's an atrophy ofhuman competence from lack of
(30:58):
use, there's an atrophy of thehuman spirit of well.
Again, that sort of cooperationthat we do as citizens and also
, you know, risk-taking isitself, I think, an important
element of human excellence,right?
(31:21):
So there's an ideology ofsafety-ism that, if left
completely unchecked, wouldagain have us um, reduced to
like wally world.
You ever see the movie wally?
Yeah, so you have these, uh,you know blob like human
(31:42):
characters who are ferriedaround on these hoverings or
self-driving pods, slurping fromin the enormous cup holders you
know slurpees or something andand the entertainments are
beamed into their cockpit andtheir faces beam with this sort
of slackened pleasure and theyseem to be completely safe and
(32:07):
content, but somehow, I'm sureI've said this on this podcast
before because I say it ineveryday life a lot, but I'm
always asking people to helpmake sense of it to me.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
why is risk aversion so prevalent?
It seems to me that we have nowthe most risk averse world, the
most risk-averse world, themost risk-averse young
generation possibly in humanhistory certainly that I know of
in recorded human history.
Surely this has something to dowith the rise of safetyism and
(32:38):
so forth, but how is it that thespiritedness of even young
people seems to have seriouslyattenuated?
I think that's something thatnobody really would have
predicted 30 years ago.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Well, this probably ties into what we were talking
about at the beginning, namelythat we have a political
establishment that kind of feedson the attribution of
vulnerability to everybody,right.
So to take the COVID example,again, you know there was a very
steep age-based gradient ofrisk for COVID.
(33:13):
That had to be the knowledge ofwhich, you know.
We knew this pretty early inthe pandemic.
But it had to be suppressed soas to characterize the whole
population as one big vulnerablepopulation with, you know, very
concrete harms to children youto children from not being in
school On every front.
(33:34):
It seems like we're encouragedto think of ourselves this way.
There's like a construction ofa kind of new modern subject who
regards himself as vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, and young people probably are.
Particularly well, it's newnumber one and two.
They're particularly good atpicking up cues of what provides
status and what's at thecutting edge and so forth.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Yeah, I mean yeah, like you see kids wearing masks
to school even when they're notrequired to.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
But it's In the workings of the party state.
Take us through sort of howthis works.
It's an attribution ofvulnerability to more and more
people, or the entire populationin the case of COVID.
Another phenomenon you call outis I'll quote you here a
coordinated effort to saturatepublic space with
representations that are notrepresentative, and I think when
(34:26):
you put it that way, I thinkpeople will sort of at least for
me like a light bulb goes on.
Oh yeah, it might seem trivial,but it seems like that happens
all the time.
Maybe ways that areuncomfortable to talk about.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah.
So the question is, why ispublic space saturated with
images that seem designed tocounter stereotypes, so they're
kind of anti-typical, and whyare so-called underrepresented
groups so overrepresented indepictions of social reality?
(35:00):
So you know, in advertising yousee a lot of this.
So it might be it's usuallysomething abnormal that's
presented as an idol.
It might be a picture ofsomeone who's gender atypical
that you feel subtly enjoined toaffirm because he or she
(35:22):
appears in association with someprestigious brand.
Or you're presented with anobese person of uncertain sex,
let's say in lingerie, and weunderstand that we're to admire
this person's defiant self-love.
Or it might be a depiction thatisn't outlandish like that but
registers at some level of yourbrain for being pointedly
(35:43):
anti-stereotypical.
So a common appearance inpopular entertainment is the
petite young woman who easilydispatches three burly male
attackers.
And my hunch is that kind of insevering the things you're
supposed to applaud from what'snormal or healthy, and the
(36:05):
normal here has to be put inscare quotes because it's almost
prohibited to use it otherwise.
There's some kind of deeppolitical conditioning that's
happening here and it works intandem with this colonization of
the life world by expertisethat we talked about and the
disqualification of common senseas morally and epistemically
(36:28):
suspect, namely that all thishas a disorienting effect.
I think people lose confidencein their own intuitions and
maybe even your sense of reality, and I think this erodes
self-confidence as well, whichis the assertive basis of
self-government.
So maybe these are kind of thepsychic preconditions that give
(36:53):
the party latitude to kind ofdelimit the influence of
representative bodies in theparliamentary sense and transfer
power to itself.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, the general sort of thread here is a sort of
um delegitimization ofself-governance or just an
attack on the self-governance asa.
Yeah, I think a worthy goal.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Well, on our sort of everyday moral intuitions, and
yeah, um, the things that areattractive or repellent to us
need to be troubled, as they say.
So, for example, sportsIllustrated put a transgender
person on the cover of theirannual swimsuit issue.
Right, right, so it's like youcan't.
(37:40):
Here's a demographic readers ofSports Illustrated.
That's maybe especiallyproblematic and needs to be
subject to a bit of politicaltherapy in this way.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah yeah, that's definitely a change from a
generation ago.
Just a couple of questions.
You're not a religious writer,have not been in uh.
You know write much on thattopic, but you do conclude this
uh article by quoting uh withapproval, like christopher lash,
who's a writer.
That's meant a lot to you.
He's also meant a lot to me, ahistorian, but he was also
(38:13):
really kind of a social theoristin the last half of the 20th
century.
The quote is submission to Godmakes peoples less submissive in
everyday life.
I think this is part of yourthinking through what a solution
not solution is too strong aword, but a response to this the
(38:33):
humanitarian party and its kindof power grab might look like.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (38:38):
As far as I know, there's no indication that Lash
was himself a believer but justas in a story and this is
something he noticed thatreligious people seem to be less
submissive to kind of secularauthority in a way that he found
healthy.
And that's something I've becomemore alert to.
And so just I mean in thebackground here a basis for
(39:15):
asserting the dignity of man.
I mean, we are made in theimage of God and that is by
itself kind of emboldening rightas against the kind of
anti-humanism that we've beentalking about.
And of course it also withinthe Christian framework,
(39:36):
suffering has meaning, so thatthis kind of safetyism and kind
of imperative to eliminate everypossible source of suffering
starts to look a little bit Idon't know somehow wrongheaded
Because of all the unintendedconsequences that go with it.
(39:56):
You have to be willing toaccept suffering.
I think you also have to bekind of cognizant of our fallen
nature.
So this idea that we'reinfinitely perfectible and
plastic leads us into all kindsof totalitarian temptations.
So there's any number of frontson which I think the Christian
(40:23):
anthropology, really the pictureof the human being, is a very
powerful antidote to sort oftendencies to degradation that
we're living through right now.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
I don't think there could possibly be a better place
for us to leave this interview,so I'm going to leave it right
there.
I was wonderfully put, matthewCrawford.
Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Jeremy.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate your time.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
You have a website, matthewbcrawfordcom.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Actually that one.
It's kind of dead, but I have asub stack that.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
I oh, much better.
Yeah, you have a sub stack now,that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, that I hope your listeners will check out.
It's called Arcadelia, whichyou're not going to remember how
to spell anyway, but if youjust look up Matthew B Crawford
Substack, you'll find it.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Okay, very good.
Yes, I am a subscriber.
You should be too.
It's very good and you can buy,of course, why we Drive the
World Beyond your Head ShopClasses, soulcraft anywhere.
You want to buy them on Amazonand you're not on Twitter.
Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Yeah, I've never done any of those.
Good for you, good for you.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
Neither am I Wonderful.
Thank you, matt, reallyappreciate it.
Yeah, it was a pleasure, jeremy, take care.
Thank you for joining us fortoday's episode.
If you enjoyed it, we inviteyou to subscribe and or rate and
review this discussion on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen
to our podcasts and have aguest you'd like to hear from.
Send your request to ourproducer, katie Janis, at
(41:55):
kjanisatamphilcom.
That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.
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