Matthew Crawford & the rise of the Humanitarian Party

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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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers. Today we talk to Matthew Crawford about the rise of the humanitarian party and what it means for civil society and self-governance. Let's go. Givers, doers and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Givers, doers and Thinkers. Today is February 20th, 2024.

Speaker 1: 0:55

I am very pleased to be speaking to you from beautiful Phoenix, arizona Spring is now in the air and genuinely honored to have as our guest today one of the most brilliant writers working today in, matthew Crawford, who comes to us from San Jose, california. I don't know if he would accept this way of putting it, but I would say that Matthew Crawford burst onto the scene in 2009 with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, an inquiry into the value of work. That book was named one of the top 10 books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He followed that up in 2016 with A World Beyond your Head On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, and most recently with his book why we Drive Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Matt has also written a number of highly penetrating essays and articles, including one on which we will focus a good deal of our conversation today. It's called the Workings of the Party State, published last year in American Affairs. We're also going to talk about why we drive and some other things as well. Matthew Crawford welcome.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Thanks, jeremy, it's a pleasure to have you here, so we'll just jump into it. I think about you basically every time I see one of Google's self-driving cars here in Phoenix, which is fairly often. This was like a test metro area, apparently, and now they are actively giving rides to people and stuff. So that's definitely one of the topics I want to discuss with you today. I thought we would work backwards, starting with a thesis you put forward in that article. I just mentioned the workings of the party state and then talking a bit about why we drive, the reaction to COVID, the importance of working with your hands and what it all reveals about the logic and the structure of the regime. Maybe that's a word I'm gonna have to. I'll ask you to unpack a little bit the regime in which we live today. So, uh, sound good yeah let's do it all right.

Speaker 1: 2:55

So, uh, this article which came out, what is it last fall, fall 2023 I think yep, that's right.

Speaker 1: 3:03

You started with a brief but, I think, profound observation about sovereignty, that is, about who has the authority to decide in today's world, and about how sovereignty has migrated away from government. Obviously naturally, we we maybe not naturally, but conventionally we associate sovereignty with government. It is the government, ultimately the state, that has the authority to decide, and that is not so much the case anymore. You argue what do you mean by that and where does sovereignty lie today?

Speaker 2: 3:37

Yeah Well, according to the kind of classic theory of liberal democracy, sovereignty actually lies with the people, and so the government is made up by representatives of the people who act on their behalf. But yeah, so because we have this big, it's not a little ancient polis, it's a huge, sprawling society so we have to delegate in this way to representatives and they decide. But I think there has been a migration of sovereignty away from representative bodies, away from parliamentary bodies, toward an entity that's a little hard to characterize, to characterize, but it's sort of made up of um entities, things like corporations, foundations, media, universities, ngos, that kind of coalesce into something like a party, um, in other words, the question is how, how do all these entities coordinate to get things done, um, and how are they gathered to a shared political vision?

Speaker 1: 4:53

um, and I guess we're going to talk about that a little bit yeah, and it's in other words, though it it's these entities no longer seems like they no longer, in order to exercise power authority, no longer have to work through the state so much. Or you know that you have to sort of appeal to the people, because the people you know, to put representatives in power who will give them what they want but are able to exercise power sort of independently of the state.

Speaker 2: 5:25

Yeah, I mean we saw during COVID a really striking example of an extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life really, and that did not proceed by somebody passing laws anywhere. It was, um, again, this kind of paris state that managed to kind of get all of its ducks um or what was the right metaphor, herding cats into going all in the same direction, and it was somewhat terrifying, I thought, just how kind of um coordinated it all seemed, without any mechanism of sort of popular referendum on what was going on and one just kind of sensed where you know right opinion lies. So if you want to be a member in good standing of the, you know the right thinking class of prestige opinion.

Speaker 2: 6:28

You knew what you had to think. But, again, this was a real exercise of political power that was in no way accountable to democratic pressures, which, of course, such democratic pressures, where they were being heard, were reviled as populism, which is now characterized as a threat to democracy.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Yeah, that's an interesting move, isn't it? We could talk about the different ways to view populism. That is a sort of way to diminish the status of the voice of the people, the Vox Populi for lack of a better term is to kind of throw a label like that on it. What happened and I'm just sort of riffing now on this conversation why does it seem like there is a more the party state, as you put it, is more monolithic now in its perspective, um, than it was maybe a generation ago? Or is that a false view?

Speaker 2: 7:31

no, that's a, that's a. That's a big question, um, and I don't have a you know, a pithy or even you know answer that I'm very confident in, but I think it has something to do with the formation of our elites. They come up through institutions, these gatekeeping institutions, universities primarily, where there does seem to be a kind of hegemonic set of opinions and principles that one has to get on board with in order to be a member in good standing of the professional managerial class and, I think, a growing intolerance of dissent from the program. So, and this gets to the question we were just considering of how these various non-governmental entities that make up the kind of shadow government, if you want to get conspiratorial, how they coordinate. And I think you don't have to posit the back room, smoke-filled room, you know, know, conspiracy type thing. It's more a matter of signaling to one another based on a shared idiom and shared set of commitments.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Well, so you write that one way to sort of characterize that shared commitment is to call this new state-like entity you might call it the humanitarian party, and that's with a capital H and the capital P in your piece and you write and I'll quote expands its dominion on two fronts the woke revolution, that's number one, and the colonization of ordinary life by technical expertise. That's the end of the quote. I think most people I'm going to ask you to elaborate on that I think most people have a say. I understand kind of what you mean by the woke revolution, but maybe not so much the latter term, the colonization of ordinary life by technical expertise. Nor would we ordinarily put those two things together.

Speaker 2: 9:39

So yeah, well, first, just to sort of flesh out that second term, you know as far back as you know the 1970s, when Christopher Lash was writing, he identified what he called the colonization of the life world by actually I think he got that term from Habermas maybe. But in any case, this idea that sort of everyday life is subject to a kind of study and ultimately supervision by bodies of expertise. Rearing practices you feel incumbent on you to learn what the experts say about how you should raise your children. The home economics was something that grew up, I guess, in the late 19th century, this idea that just the ordinary practices of keeping house were to be an object of study and optimization. Sex education in schools this was another area.

Speaker 2: 10:50

So on sort of so many fronts there's this sense that common sense is inadequate and one needs to kind of defer to expert bodies. So right, so how does that have anything to do with the woke revolution? They appear unrelated, but I think they share an underlying logic Both displace and delegitimize common sense and common practices. On both fronts, the legitimacy of this ruling entity rests on an anthropology that posits a particular kind of self. It's a vulnerable one, which the governing entity then positions itself to protect Both. You know the woke business and the sort of expertise. Business expand the reach of managerial authority. They generate new bureaucratic constituencies and disqualify common sense as a guide to reality. Governing entity expands through claims of special knowledge. You know whether it's public health or the DEI caters that now sit astride every institution.

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 be educated out of what is commonly believed or has been handed down to us by tradition or more, or what are considered to be traditional authorities, what are, almost, like, labeled as such.

Speaker 1: 12:35

Including the family itself right, right, right, exactly. In any both cases, experts need to re-educate us into understanding how things really are ought to be. It's interesting that you called this the humanitarian party, and that's the part I want to concentrate on. Next, compassion you talk about is a weapon here. Compassion, or at least the, I should say, the claim of compassion, not necessarily the genuine article. Maybe you could explain to us us how is it used to augment social or institutional power? Why do we see that dynamic today, in today's world, in ways we haven't before?

Speaker 2: 13:10

yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:11

So we identify classes of people who need special protection.

Speaker 2: 13:16

It you know, maybe sexual or racial minorities, it might be the immunocompromised, climate refugees, et cetera, and so these are kind of adopted as clients and they kind of serve as mascots for various programs of social control that are powered by this ideal of compassion, which may be entirely sincere ideal of compassion, which may be entirely sincere, but the thing to notice is that this transfers power to a kind of new class of social managers and really political rent seekers.

Speaker 2: 13:56

So there's a kind of subterranean class war, and I think that's what distinguishes, or it's kind of a power grab, and I think that's what distinguishes, or it's kind of a power grab, and I think that's what distinguishes this new you could call it minoritarianism from the standards of interest group politics that was well known to post-war liberal theory, which had set out to explain how organized minorities were able to punch above their weight in democratic contests to secure their interests. It's pretty straightforward. But in this new world we're talking about, it's not that these groups are acting on their own behalf to secure their interests. Rather, they're used by others as emblems of this kind of tendency to harm that somehow emanates from the majority.

Speaker 1: 14:46

In fact, in some cases we've seen that the group does not know it exists until it has 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 mechanisms for sort of eliciting groups into existence. So for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act. You know it's built up by analogy with previous civil rights legislation.

Speaker 2: 15:47

So if you have a disability, it'siving this as an oppositional identity, like a civil rights identity right and become a protected class right so this is the kind of vulnerability is identified and becomes the basis for like a special dispensation which creates an opportunity for there to be a kind of class of professional rent seekers on their behalf and you see this everywhere.

Speaker 1: 16:21

It's a dynamic that in principle, seems not to have an end. They can sort of continue more or less forever, am I?

Speaker 2: 16:29

right yeah, and the thing about that is that you always have to conjure some kind of moral emergency to sort of whip up initiative on their behalf.

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 white supremacy or COVID, I mean.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Do we see this on both left and right? If I could just like, is there a way to see someone like Trump as essentially sort of creating a victim class of sort of white working class types?

Speaker 2: 17:06

and adopting them as his client. Yeah, I think that Trump has kind of managed to extend this cultural logic of victimhood to the majority and it's, you know, it's in a sense it's maybe it was inevitable. If you're going to have a kind of racialized spoils system in law and policy, well then eventually you're going to get the majority feeling displaced and see themselves in this way, Eventually everybody comes to see 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 is the very idea of self-government and the idea of citizenship as opposed to victimhood, citizenship being a kind of state of responsibility and kind of agency.

Speaker 1: 18:07

And absolutely central to the sort of concept of this podcast a civil society right Citizenship. Citizens are who populate civil society in their private voluntary actions, taking responsibility for pursuing certain goods that are not otherwise pursuable through business activities or the state. Responsibility for pursuing certain goods that are not otherwise pursuable through business activities or the state. Once it was seen, this sort of dynamic, you explain, which is why I wanted to talk to you today. This humanitarian party. Adopt and create a victim class to speak for and thereby to be able to wield power on behalf of is completely antithetical to to civil society, is sort of America has understood the term the last 200 years.

Speaker 2: 18:49

Yeah, I think it. It kind of encourages a certain passivity and dependence that happens to line up pretty well with the progress of technology also seems to lead us ever further into passivity and dependence, and the idea of sort of taking things in hand for yourself is reconstrued as something inconvenient. Or wouldn't you rather be free to do something else? If you follow that logic far enough, I think the whole world becomes like one big assisted living 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 go right to that. I'm going to go to a break, we're going to come back and let's just go right to driverless cars, cause it's a very interesting topic of conversation. We will be right back with author 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 and Thinkers podcast. At C4CS, our mission is to strengthen civil society. We do this by conducting programs and activities that increase the knowledge and efficacy of America's nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations and individual donors. We offer classes, webinars, conferences and more to help your organization have a bigger impact. If you'd like to learn more about the Center for Civil Society and our programs, please visit us online at centerforcivilsocietyorg. Thank you for listening to the GDT Podcast.

Speaker 1: 20:39

All right, we are back with Matthew Crawford, author of why we Drive Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, among other books, most famously perhaps, shop Class Soulcraft. We've been talking about his article the Workings of the Party State. Now we're going to talk about self-driving cars for a bit. We were just talking about this encouragement to do less and less for ourselves, and so, as he just very memorably put it, so the whole world will become an assisted living facility not too far from now. Talk about this phenomenon of driverless cars.

Speaker 1: 21:09

Was it driverless cars and the prospect thereof, that made you want to pursue a philosophy of driving, or did you want to pursue kind of dive into the philosophy of driving first?

Speaker 2: 21:20

Well, I've always been an enthusiast of driving, driving first. Well, I've always been an enthusiast 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, you know, professionally worked as a mechanic, uh, and, and also I've this um 10 year project of building essentially a homemade car. You should tell people that, well, my first car I got when I was 15 was a 63 VW bug and I proceeded 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 20 miles an hour and feel like a superhero, um, and I worked at a porsche shop, um, anyway.

Speaker 2: 22:11

So, yeah, now in middle aged, I finally had the money to build the, the car that I sort of lusted after as a teenager but couldn't afford, and it's it's pretty over top, it's got crazy horsepower and everything else, but in any case, yeah, but there was also a kind of irritant for beginning that book, which was all this talk about driverless cars. So this would have been like 2015. All of a sudden, it was like this was on the agenda, this is going to happen and you know, polling by pew at the time and shortly thereafter showed that really nobody was interested in this and the people were not clamoring for driverless cars.

Speaker 1: 23:01

This is not. This is not the market speaking up 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 for profit, you might say. Maybe it's an attempt of Silicon Valley to grab some of the profits from Detroit. You can think of it in terms of kind of regional the data grab. There's an incredible amount of data to be had. That turns out to be the only way to make sense of driverless cars as part of the surveillance economy, but that's another topic. So, yeah, so let me just relate an anecdote that kind of gives you a flavor of what we're talking about here. This must have been 2013 or something like that.

Speaker 2: 23:49

There was a Google self-driving car, you know sort of a test bed rolling, but I think it was rolling on actual streets. They somehow got permission to do that way back then, and so it came to a four-way stop intersection and it came to a complete stop and waited for the other cars to do the same before going through, because apparently that's the rule it was taught, but of course that's not what people do, and so the car got completely paralyzed and sort of melted down. I guess somebody had to come and reboot it or something. Meanwhile it's clogging the intersection. So the Google guy in charge of this project said that what he had learned from the episode is that quote human beings need to be less idiotic. Okay, so what do people do at such an intersection? Well, there's always ambiguous cases of right-of-way. Often they make eye contact, maybe one person waves the other through. There's almost a kind of body language of driving, and for the most part we manage to work things out and get it done. It's not a problem. And get it done, it's not a problem.

Speaker 2: 25:12

But none of that social intelligence was visible to this Google guy. I mean, maybe he was a kind of classic computer dork who's a little bit autistic, who knows. So what he meant that human beings should be less idiotic is that they should behave more like computers, they should be rule followers. And again, the invisibility of this social intelligence I think is very significant. Now, tocqueville thought that it's an everyday sort of small-bore practical activities that demand cooperation and improvisation that the democratic characters formed, and he thought this was significant. It's not something that happens in civics class, it's just in everyday life. So I think if we're to kind of disburden ourselves of the requirements of learning how to work things out for ourselves, this is going to be politically significant. I think it's going to nudge us ever more into again this kind of passivity and dependence.

Speaker 1: 26:10

It leads me to a question about AI. The ultimate way of disburdening ourselves from working things out for ourselves, as you put it, would be to have somebody else, something else, do all the thinking for us. Right now, chachibt and other from what I've witnessed in business, these tools are being used to generate first drafts of things, or they're used as sort of just like more sophisticated search engines. You know, tell me this, you tell me that, but often you use to generate drafts of documents, employee handbooks, you know, training modules, things like that and then, oh, you got to go in there, you got to look it over and it'll be some things you need to correct. It seems to me that we're not too far out from sort of things just talking to themselves. It's obviously drawing from what's already out there. It doesn't do any real thinking itself, and it comes in and you spit that out and some AI takes it. On the other end, there's a sort of a complete elimination of the human that would seem to be 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 apt characterization of it.

Speaker 1: 27:23

I mean, I assume, self-driving cars, or AI is a significant aspect of their technology.

Speaker 2: 27:28

So what's striking is that? So what's implicit in this? Well, in the case of driverless car version of this, it's that human beings are terrible drivers. You hear that constantly.

Speaker 1: 27:41

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:43

Right. So there's a kind of low regard for the human being that underwrites a lot of these developments. I call it anti-humanism, and it justifies in the case of driverless cars. Again, I think it's an expensive solution to a non-problem, Because in fact human beings are actually pretty good at driving, and you could probably make a case like that in all kinds of areas. Well, in fact, what is AI? It's an inferential body that's built up by sort of scouring the internet for human speech and writing. So it's ultimately based on human intelligence, but then the point, of course, is to render the exercise of such intelligence obsolete. Now, who does this benefit? Well, whoever owns the AI, I suppose. So the propaganda that human beings are inadequate seems like it just serves to sort of clear the 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 well and good, you say this is anti-humanism, but in fact driverless cars will save thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives every year from reduction in accidents. Who's the true humanist, mr Crawford? There is a security, there is a safety first hammer that seems to always can be sort of deployed in such debates Other than sort of speaking to a different set of values or goods. Is there any response to that kind of objection? Yeah, on a number of different levels debate other than sort of speaking to a different set of values or goods. Is there any response to that kind of objection?

Speaker 2: 29:30

yeah, on a number of different levels. First, just factually, that was the claim made for driverless cars. You know, maybe as recently as five years ago but it's turned out to be a far greater engineering challenge than was anticipated that the challenge really lies in getting robot cars to share the road with human drivers. I mean, the problem becomes trivial if you don't have human drivers and if you don't have dogs or children running out. So in order to make the world hospitable to the driverless cars, you have to do away with human drivers. That seems to be the logic of this.

Speaker 2: 30:11

But I think you raise a deeper point about safety. Yeah, safety can be invoked as a kind of club to shut down debate, because anyone who's not maximally safe-minded is labeled pro-death, and so you end up sort of not considering the larger human landscape that's being dramatically altered by whatever new safety innovation is on offer. And I think we have to consider that larger human landscape, because there's an atrophy of human competence from lack of use, there's an atrophy of the human spirit of well. Again, that sort of cooperation that we do as citizens and also, you know, risk-taking is itself, I think, an important element of human excellence, right? So there's an ideology of safety-ism that, if left completely unchecked, would again have us um, reduced to like wally world.

Speaker 2: 31:33

You ever see the movie wally? Yeah, so you have these, uh, you know blob like human characters who are ferried around on these hoverings or self-driving pods, slurping from in the enormous cup holders you know slurpees or something and and the entertainments are beamed into their cockpit and their faces beam with this sort of slackened pleasure and they seem to be completely safe and content, but somehow, I'm sure I've said this on this podcast before because I say it in everyday life a lot, but I'm always asking people to help make sense of it to me.

Speaker 1: 32:17

why is risk aversion so prevalent? It seems to me that we have now the most risk averse world, the most risk-averse world, the most risk-averse young generation possibly in human history certainly that I know of in recorded human history. Surely this has something to do with the rise of safetyism and so forth, but how is it that the spiritedness of even young people seems to have seriously attenuated? I think that's something that nobody really would have predicted 30 years ago.

Speaker 2: 32:48

Well, this probably ties into what we were talking about at the beginning, namely that we have a political establishment that kind of feeds on the attribution of vulnerability to everybody, right. So to take the COVID example, again, you know there was a very steep age-based gradient of risk for COVID. That had to be the knowledge of which, you know. We knew this pretty early in the pandemic. But it had to be suppressed so as to characterize the whole population as one big vulnerable population with, you know, very concrete harms to children you to children from not being in school On every front. It seems like we're encouraged to think of ourselves this way. There's like a construction of a kind of new modern subject who regards himself as vulnerable.

Speaker 1: 33:44

Yeah, and young people probably are. Particularly well, it's new number one and two. They're particularly good at picking up cues of what provides status and what's at the cutting edge and so forth.

Speaker 2: 33:56

Yeah, I mean yeah, like you see kids wearing masks to school even when they're not required to.

Speaker 1: 34:03

But it's In the workings of the party state. Take us through sort of how this works. It's an attribution of vulnerability to more and more people, or the entire population in the case of COVID. Another phenomenon you call out is I'll quote you here a coordinated effort to saturate public space with representations that are not representative, and I think when you put it that way, I think people 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 are uncomfortable to talk about.

Speaker 2: 34:37

Yeah. So the question is, why is public space saturated with images that seem designed to counter stereotypes, so they're kind of anti-typical, and why are so-called underrepresented groups so overrepresented in depictions of social reality? So you know, in advertising you see a lot of this. So it might be it's usually something abnormal that's presented as an idol. It might be a picture of someone who's gender atypical that you feel subtly enjoined to affirm because he or she appears in association with some prestigious brand. Or you're presented with an obese person of uncertain sex, let's say in lingerie, and we understand that we're to admire this person's defiant self-love. Or it might be a depiction that isn't outlandish like that but registers at some level of your brain for being pointedly anti-stereotypical.

Speaker 2: 35:44

So a common appearance in popular entertainment is the petite young woman who easily dispatches three burly male attackers. And my hunch is that kind of in severing the things you're supposed to applaud from what's normal or healthy, and the normal here has to be put in scare quotes because it's almost prohibited to use it otherwise. There's some kind of deep political conditioning that's happening here and it works in tandem with this colonization of the life world by expertise that we talked about and the disqualification of common sense as morally and epistemically suspect, namely that all this has a disorienting effect. I think people lose confidence in their own intuitions and maybe even your sense of reality, and I think this erodes self-confidence as well, which is the assertive basis of self-government. So maybe these are kind of the psychic preconditions that give the party latitude to kind of delimit the influence of representative bodies in the parliamentary sense and transfer power to itself.

Speaker 1: 37:06

Yeah, the general sort of thread here is a sort of um delegitimization of self-governance or just an attack on the self-governance as a. Yeah, I think a worthy goal.

Speaker 2: 37:17

Well, on our sort of everyday moral intuitions, and yeah, um, the things that are attractive or repellent to us need to be troubled, as they say. So, for example, sports Illustrated put a transgender person on the cover of their annual swimsuit issue. Right, right, so it's like you can't. Here's a demographic readers of Sports Illustrated. That's maybe especially problematic and needs to be subject to a bit of political therapy 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 that topic, but you do conclude this uh article by quoting uh with approval, like christopher lash, who's a writer. That's meant a lot to you. He's also meant a lot to me, a historian, but he was also really kind of a social theorist in the last half of the 20th century. The quote is submission to God makes peoples less submissive in everyday life. I think this is part of your thinking through what a solution not solution is too strong a word, but a response to this the humanitarian party and its kind of 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 just as in a story and this is something he noticed that religious people seem to be less submissive to kind of secular authority in a way that he found healthy.

Speaker 2: 38:54

And that's something I've become more alert to. And so just I mean in the background here a basis for asserting the dignity of man. I mean, we are made in the image of God and that is by itself kind of emboldening right as against the kind of anti-humanism that we've been talking about. And of course it also within the Christian framework, suffering has meaning, so that this kind of safetyism and kind of imperative to eliminate every possible source of suffering starts to look a little bit I don't know somehow wrongheaded Because of all the unintended consequences that go with it. You have to be willing to accept suffering. I think you also have to be kind of cognizant of our fallen nature. So this idea that we're infinitely perfectible and plastic leads us into all kinds of totalitarian temptations. So there's any number of fronts on which I think the Christian anthropology, really the picture of the human being, is a very powerful antidote to sort of tendencies 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, matthew Crawford. 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 a sub 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, which you're not going to remember how to spell anyway, but if you just 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 Shop Classes, soulcraft anywhere. You want to buy them on Amazon and 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, really appreciate it. Yeah, it was a pleasure, jeremy, take care. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and review this discussion on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts and have a guest you'd like to hear from. Send your request to our producer, katie Janis, at kjanisatamphilcom. That's K-J-A-N-U-S at amphilcom.