Kind: captions
Language: en
i hate
affirmative action i don't just disagree
with it i don't just think it's
against the 14th amendment i hate it
the hatred comes from an understanding
that it is a band-aid that it is a
substitute for the actual development
over the capacities of our people to
compete they want to tell african
americans uh pat us on the head
uh we're gonna have a separate program
for you we're gonna give you a side door
that you can come into that doesn't make
us any smarter
it doesn't make us any more creative
and it doesn't make us any more fit
for the actual competition that's
unfolding before us
the following is a conversation with
glenn lowery professor of economics and
social sciences at brown university he
is one of the great minds and
communicators of our time writing and
speaking about race and inequality
i highly encourage you to listen to his
show on youtube and stack simply called
the glen show
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's glenn
lowry
martin luther king juniors i have a
dream speech i think is the greatest
speech in american history if i may i'd
like to read a few words of it sure and
uh ask you a question about this dream
i have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its
creed
we hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal
i have a dream
that one day on the red hills of georgia
the sons of former slaves and the sons
of former slave owners will be able to
sit down together at the table of
brotherhood
i have a dream that one day even the
state of mississippi
a state sweltering with the heat of
injustice sweltering with the heat of
oppression
will be transformed into an oasis of
freedom and justice
i have a dream
that my four little children will one
day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character
i have a dream today
first of all damn
i mentioned to you offline i immigrated
to
to america and this is why i love this
country this is one of the great species
that represents what this country is
about yeah so
what is this ideal of equality
uh that we should strive for as a nation
this that all men are created equal what
does that mean to you this equality
well
if we put this in historical context
king is speaking in
1963 when he gives that speech it's
exactly 100 years after
abraham lincoln signs the
emancipation proclamation declaring
the enslaved people
to be free
they're not yet citizens in 1863
but the end of slavery is has become the
position of the federal government when
lincoln issues that emancipation
proclamation
so
putting it in context
enslaved people four million or so
african descended enslaved people
how do they become
citizens how do they become
in this uh
status of
subjugation and domination and stigma
and exclusion
how do they become citizens it seems to
me that that's the
that's this the heart of it
the the equality that king
is talking about is an equality of
status as members of the nation
as free and equal citizens within the
republic
now
i think it's really important to
understand that
slavery
was not merely a legal
order but it was also
a social
system that had the symbolism
attached to it
they had a big journey to make from
their subjugated status as serfs as
landless people as uneducated unfit for
citizenship really in the minds of many
so i think that's what in
100 years later that king is appealing
to this idea that
when thomas jefferson in the declaration
of independence writes these words all
men are created equal and endowed by
their creator with
certain inalienable rights
he didn't thomas jefferson a slave owner
didn't have in mind when he wrote those
words
the people who were slaves
but by the time you get to 1963
king is
invoking
this idea all
men and of course he means all persons
he doesn't only mean men
he means men and women are created equal
he wants this idea to be embraced by the
country in reference to the descendants
of the african slaves
that's his dream that's his idea
the legacy of slavery would be erased
uh that that the
uh position of african-americans would
be equalized within the
political community which is the united
states of america
that's my sense of it in any case so on
a very basic level
the worth of a human being is equal it's
just literally the worth
of a human being so i mentioned to you
offline that
i came from the soviet union
my grandfather
fought in world war ii
and
for hitler
the worth of a slavic person
as they were captured
there's different numbers but it's in
the hundreds to one german
in terms of
the value of the person
to the great germany so he wanted
germany to expand and conquer a large
part of the world and within that future
world that third reich
the worth of a russian or slavic person
is
one hundredth or one thousands of a
german person of a pure german person so
that has to do with
not some kind of public policy or
politics or all that kind of stuff it
has to do with the basic worth of a
human being and that's what dr king is
speaking to
that
all people
on some kind of deep level are
worth the same
if you're somehow weighing uh the value
of a person
we're equal and that's basic fundamental
worth
yeah i think that's correct i think
that's very well said
i don't know that he had in mind the
position of slavic people in central
europe
in the middle of the 20th century in the
first part of the 20th century king i
don't know that he had that in mind he
might well have done
but
certainly that's the idea so you don't
think he was really thinking about
this particular civil rights struggle
and the particular
struggle of
against the backdrop of the history of
slavery in america and thinking about
african americans he wasn't thinking
about the basic
he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of
all human beings no i don't mean to say
that
the speech
in washington
the dream
in in 1963 at that march
was
within the context of the united states
and he was it was within the context of
the civil rights movement there was a
movement that was going on
he was
a actor in a political drama that was
american
that had to do with the fight
over
equal rights
for voting
for housing
for employment
for uh citizenship
of blacks in america but king
was informed i think by a much broader
christian
ethic
of uh the equality of all persons i mean
he he gets killed in 1968.
the five years after that
speech in washington he spends
uh developing his
world view
and
the things that he had to say for
example about the war in southeast asia
that was going on at that time
made appeals to universal
principles of equality he was a pacifist
to some degree he was against war
he was
a socialist to some degree he might not
have worn that label
publicly but he believed in a decent
society where the poor would not go
untended where health care would be
available to people who needed it and
this kind of thing
a humanitarian who saw that the value of
a life was not dependent upon the color
of the skin
upon the native
mother tongue that might be spoken
upon whether male or female
all persons are created equal this this
is very much
the ethic
of martin luther king on my
understanding broadly speaking
what do you learn about human nature by
looking at
the history of slavery in america
oh my so what does that tell you about
people
well
i think of two things right off the top
of my head
one is about the capacity
of people
for
looking the other way in the face of
uh unethical and
you know morally
profoundly problematic
practice
so i mean slavery was controversial it
was controversial
going all the way back to the founding
of the united states of america the
country was founded on a compromise
where
half of the country
uh thought that slavery was uh was
abhorrent and would not have had it uh
countenanced
in the constitution the other half of
the country were
steeped in the dependence on the labor
of these african captives
and their descendants the economy
depended upon it they owned them as
property that was their wealth their
wealth was invested to some degree in
the value of these
human beings
and in order for the united states to
come together as a confederation of the
several colonies
there had to be a compromise made and it
was made
where slavery was allowed to persist
and
the people who were against it or who
thought it
morally problematic
were able to countenance
the practice in the southern
states where slavery flourished and that
went on for 75 years after the founding
of the country until the crisis of
the late 1850s that led to the civil war
and ultimately to the emancipation so
one thing
i think about human nature
from the fact of slavery is that
the ability of
people to live with
terrible
morally
questionable practices and have that as
a part of their institutions
it took a a movement of
a massive movement of abolitionists
uh struggling against slavery
for the better part of a century
before
um before that that practice could be
eradicated
but the other thing about human nature
uh that i see
is the ability of people to sustain
their humanity under the most
awful oppressive conditions
um
the enslaved persons the slaves
um and their children i mean they were
chatted they were bought and sold like
horses or or cattle
and yet
they were not their humanity was not
destroyed by that and
they were able to
sustain their dignity
to some degree in such a manner that
once emancipation finally did arrive the
freedmen and women the the persons who
had been
enslaved and who were set free were able
to
over the
following
decades
uh build a foundation
for the
development of african americans within
the context of american society
that eventually culminated in the civil
rights movement of the middle of the
20th century
and
has led us into the present day
so
you know
human nature can countenance awful evil
but human nature can also survive in the
face of terrible evil
that's what i take from
slavery that's
that flame can burn even when uh
this the world around it tries to put it
out this there's still a little flame of
human consciousness of spirit of culture
of whatever the hell that is that makes
humans flourish and makes humans
beautiful that lives on
that's what everyone said yeah i think
you you put it very well there's got to
be some
poetic way of expressing that
leave it to the poets yeah
what about the people that look the
other way how many people do you think
just regular people
knew that something is this is wrong
or did do people
through generations convince themselves
most people most regular people convince
themselves that there's nothing wrong
all right
yeah
i asked this question because i wonder
what we're looking the other way on
today
also
because
you mean you have to kind of if we're
you have to ask yourself these difficult
questions of
assuming we're the same people we were
yeah back then
then we're we can be flawed in that same
kind of way we can look the other the
other way just as others have
in history
yeah
you spoke of the european uh context and
of the nazis and
certainly
a lot of people had to be looking the
other way
when the massive crimes that were
committed by that regime were being
undertaken i mean the railroad cars full
of human
beings being taken off to be slaughtered
or to be worked to death in
labor camps or to be gassed uh etc a lot
of people had to know about what was
going on and
look the other way
or enthusiastically supported the
the persecution of the jews and the
gypsies and
so on
and i don't know i wasn't you know i
wasn't around in 1840
my sense of the matter is that like of
many practices that are unjust most
people thought
uh that's just the way it is i mean
that's the world that they inherited
they they they were not moralists they
were not revolutionaries
they they just wanted to go along
uh some people might have been troubled
by it but thought there's nothing that
can be done some people might have
thought well
they're
these black africans they're not really
like us and you know they are lucky to
be here if they were in africa they'd be
worse off still
some people might have thought that
some people might have been disturbed
but not been able to see what it is that
they could do about it
they they might have thought oh this is
you know this is disgusting this is
uh you know not something i wouldn't
want to have anything to do with but
uh not knowing whether there's any
practical way of opposing it that that's
why
you need a movement you need
for the people who are
troubled by the practice to know that
there are others like themselves equally
troubled and
as they gather together
collectively they can exert their
their influence i mean debates about the
the wrongness of slavery as i say go all
the way back to the founding of the
country
uh there were abolitionists and there
were people who were who opposed the
compromise that led to the uh framing
documents and uh institutions that
created the united states of america
opposed the countenancing of
slavery in that in that situation
um but it took a while before that could
come to uh come to a head
and
produce the crisis which ultimately led
to the
eradication of slavery i would note that
slavery is not unique to the united
states it's not unique to the western
hemisphere
that enslavement of people the
trafficking in human
channel uh is something that one sees in
on on a global basis one sees it going
all the way back to uh antiquity
so
we might ask how is it that people
finally came
to turn their backs and eradicate the
practice that that might be the thing
worth
really trying to understand because the
practice itself is
you know there's a wonderful book
by the sociologist orlando patterson
called slavery and social death
that was published in 1982
which is a comprehensive history and
social analysis of the institution of
slavery
over
2500 years
going back to the classical greek and
roman civilizations finding slavery in
africa amongst africans finding slavery
in the middle east finding slavery in
the far east finding slavery in south
asia
the enslavement of people
the practice of taking someone as a
captive in war and then instead of
killing them which you could do making
them into your property
was a very very widespread
in human culture
so i mean i'd like to make this point
sometimes when we people are talking
about how wrong slavery was and i agree
without any question
that the practice was
profoundly morally
problematic
but i like to make the point that
given how wrong it was
think about how uh
impressive was the accomplishment of the
eradication of slavery now that was
something there were 600 000 dead
in the war between the states 1861 to
1865 in a country of 30 million people
that's a that's a lot of dead people
uh
who
gave their lives not to eradicate
slavery and in every instance probably
most of them were just
fighting for uh you know
they enlisted or were
conscripted into the forces and they
fought and they died
but the net effect of their having
fought and died uh was to
push along a process that led to the
eradication of slavery that's an amazing
achievement
the slaves themselves
were
largely
uneducated and
you know backward in their
of course what else could they have been
they they were kept in captivity they
were uh prevented from developing their
human potential and yet
uh after the end of slavery that
population that four million plus
african descended people
became the foundation for what a century
later
leads to martin luther king standing in
the
washington mall
and giving that great speech
and now here we are 150 years down the
road
and barack obama is president of the
united states now he did not descend
from slaves i think we must not lose
track of that
but he identified as an african-american
and was a part of the population
that consisted largely of people who
descended from slaves
and
we are we african americans are
for all practical purposes
fully equal citizens of this great
republic that has happened within a
century and a half
and i don't know that you can find any
parallel to that kind of
transformation in the status of people
from human chattel
uh to full citizens of the republic
anywhere in human history it's certainly
um worth celebrating the achievement of
the eradication of slavery i would say
and it probably started with a few
people
that
inside their mind dared to rebel
you know it's interesting to think about
how it all started
how
in the state of injustice
the
the revolution percolates
like where it starts you said people
that see something is wrong find each
other
it's you know
it's in the ideas of charismatic
individuals that not only know that
something is wrong but they're able to
tell others about it
and be
convincing
and then together gather
and rise up it's interesting to make
this kind of incredible progress from
slavery to where we are today to live
out the ideal of this all men and creed
created equal
yeah the power of individual because i i
don't i don't know what you think about
it but i tend to think that
a few small individuals
probably originated this like it's the
power of the individual because
sometimes we think there's injustice in
the world what can i possibly do i tend
to think one person can
be the seed
of starting to fix the injustice
sure
one person here one person there
yeah
um one thinks of course of
frederick douglass the
massively
significant figure
who was born in slavery
who
stole his
freedom and uh because he was property
and he he decided he was not going to be
property anymore and he took it unto
himself to
emancipate himself personally and who
became an educated
powerfully
articulate
uh
massively influential person in the
united states and in england
uh going around
presenting himself as uh an embodiment
of human dignity and
commitment to ideals of equality and
you know i mean he's just one person
but there were others
just one person all it takes is just one
person so here we are
on this topic of equality
in uh
the 21st century
so what does equality mean today
if you start to think
about this idea of equality of outcome
or the injustice of inequality
at which point does equality of outcome
is just at which point is it unjust
sort of looking at our world today and
looking at in inequality
how do we know
that some inequality is a sign of
injustice and some is the way of life
so what does equality mean when we look
at the world today different from dr
king's speech of the basic humanity i
don't think king's speech
i have a dream that one day my four
little children will be judged not by
the color of their skin but by the
content of their character
requires
equality of outcome
he says his children will be judged by
the content of their character
that's a conditional statement
that is
the judgment will depend upon the
content of their character
not the color of their skin but it
doesn't
follow from that that the outcomes
whatever outcomes we consider wealth and
economic power
um
position within the society
representation in the various
professions uh the
various measures of social achievement
doesn't follow from
judging by the content of character and
not color of skin
that when we look at the end of the day
at the social outcomes that they will be
equal across the different groups
in fact i think there's a contradiction
in the idea that groups will be equal in
all the various social outcomes that
they will be
equally successful in business that they
will be
proportionately represented in the
various professions that
they will have the same educational
achievement that the
occupational profiles will look the same
if they are in fact distinct groups with
their own cultural traditions and
practices
with their own ideals and norms
um various immigrant populations
people coming to the united states of
america from all corners of the world
uh the descendants of the african slaves
the
black americans here today who are
ourselves various with different origins
and so on
the different religious practices and
commitments that
jewish or
mormon or
christian or whatever
however we parcel up
the total population into the various
groups these groups are themselves
different from one another
they have different
norms within their own
cultural practice
how would we expect if in fact we
recognize that the groups are different
from one another
that in a world that is fair they would
all come out
equally represented in every undertaking
they're not equally represented and that
fact i'm arguing is in and of itself
insufficient
to justify the conclusion
that they're not somehow being
fairly treated fair treatment doesn't
imply
equal outcomes in a world in which
the populations in question are
themselves different
with respect to their culture their
practices their norms their traditions
their beliefs their ideals
and so on the fact of those different
norms traditions beliefs
cultural orientations and ideals will
have consequences in terms of their
different
social outcomes so i just think it's a
mistake
that people are making
when they think
fairness of treatment
implies equality of outcomes it does not
is the process by which uh we're we're
speaking now
uh in the midst of the of the national
basketball association's playoffs
uh i confess to being a boston celtics
fan i mean i'm just
it's a very good team and i'm excited
about my celtics
we defeated
the uh brooklyn
uh nets
i mean we defeated kevin durant and
kyrie irving and company okay in a
playoff series
we whip them
and we're on our way to you know
the eastern conference finals and we're
on our way to the nba finals and i'm you
know
if i were a betting man i'd put down a
few bucks that the boston celtics
underrated as we are
have a very good chance to win in the
nba finals
okay so that's the nba that's the
national basketball association i'm a
sports fan i like basketball slightly
biased prediction but yes
yeah it is somewhat biased
all i'm saying is
if you take a look at who the star
players are in the national basketball
association you're going to find that
there's some eastern europeans
you know there's some really good
basketball players coming out of uh
eastern europe you know
and more power to them
um and there are a lot of african
americans
uh we're overrepresented
uh they're not that many jews as far as
i know no offense intended there lex but
i mean
the
nba
is not
equally representative of all of the
different populations in the united
states now we could go into the reasons
why but i'm just saying the process
by which you get to be playing in the
nba is fair
if you can play
you can get on the court that they all
they're looking for is people who can
play i think something like that is true
in many different venues i expect if
you're a really good
technical
engineer
companies are going to employ you
and if you can make money
they're going to advance you and and you
will be able to
rise to the top of that profession i i
expect that the people who are
engaged in financial transactions who
are actually making bets on the market
by and large are the people who are good
at that activity and if you're good at
that activity in this world in this
modern world
you're gonna
rise to uh rise to the top um
i'm not saying that there are no
barriers of discrimination of course of
course there are of many different sorts
but i'm saying that to expect that there
would be
okay i mean let's look at who's actually
writing code let's look at who's
actually trading bonds let's look at uh
who's who's actually starting businesses
um and so on to say that if that in a
fair world i would expect that if black
said ten percent of the population
they'd be ten percent of every one of
those things
is to ignore the reality
that the differences in the culture and
practices and norms
of the various population groups will
lead to differences in their
representation amongst people who are
outstanding performers in
one or another
activity how do you know
if the difference in culture accounts
for the difference in outcomes
or it's the existence of barriers
especially barriers early on in life
of discrimination that are racially
based so if you think about affirmative
action
is
in which ways is affirmative action
empowering and which way is it limiting
for these early development of the of
the different groups but let's just
speak to african americans we should say
that
you went to some no name northwestern
university at first but then you ended
up with a great university of mit
uh so uh so that's that's your not early
but middle development
um so speaking of the development
the opportunities
the equality of opportunity
how do we know we got that equality
right
yeah i'm glad you put it like that we
were talking about results now we're
talking about opportunity i was taking a
position that
when king says i have a dream and he
envisions a world where his children
will not be
barred from
the good things in life because of the
color of their skin
we're talking about
opportunity
not about results
but opportunity is not just something
that depends upon
what the law is and what public policies
are opportunity also depends upon
the the social conditions in which
people are are raised the social and
economic conditions so
the child of a poor
family that has no resources
it doesn't have the same opportunity as
a child of a wealthy family
to realize their full human potential
you ask me how can we tell whether or
not a
difference in outcomes
is a reflection of unequal opportunity
or it's a reflection of differences in
culture and interest and and practice
and i don't know that there's a single
answer to that question but i think
one wants to look at the data one one
wants to try to
measure
you know as a social scientist i would
say you what you want to do is you want
to estimate
the
uh
the significance of various factors for
determining the outcome if the outcome
is
how much money does a person make when
they work in the labor market so you
look at their wages
and you think well that depends upon a
number of things it depends upon how
educated they are what kind of skills
they have
what kind of work experience they have
and so on and those things are all
legitimate factors
that might determine how much they end
up making in the labor market
but you also want to perhaps con
controlling for those things see whether
or not
the fact that they are black or they are
latino or whatever fact that they are
male or that they are female
the fact that they do or do not speak
english as their native language this
kind of thing whether those
factors also
are implicated in determining
uh how successful they are in the labor
market and if you find that after you
have
controlled for the things that are
legitimately
determining
uh success and failure in the labor
market like skills and education
and experience having controlled for
those things
the fact that a person is black or is
a woman or is an immigrant or
is of
of a
latino
background
also
affects their earnings then you might
conclude that to that extent
they're not getting equal opportunity
labor that kind of idea
but i want to focus
a little bit more here
on what we mean by opportunity because
it's not just whether employers
treat the worker
on a fair
and even basis irregardless of the
workers racial or ethnic background
that's one
opportunity issue but that's how that's
at the end of the development
process they are now
presenting themselves to the market
trying to find work
and being employed at this or that wage
that's the end of the line
what about the developmental opportunity
the opportunity to acquire skills in the
first place
that goes all the way back that goes all
the way back to birth it even goes back
to before birth
um
the mother
carrying the infant in the womb
she has certain nutritional
uh
practices she might be smoking or
drinking alcohol or something like that
i'm not saying she is i'm not saying she
is and i'm just saying whether she is so
she is and it will affect the
development of the fetus uh the newborn
uh now there's a question of environment
uh there's a question of the development
of their
uh neurological uh potential do they
learn how to read do
are they stimulated
verbally how many words have they heard
spoken
are they
being
nurtured in a home environment so as to
maximize the possibility of them
achieving their human potential
what about the peer group influences
what about the
values and norms of the surrounding
communities in which they're embedded do
they encourage the young person to apply
themselves
uh in a systematic way
to their studies and to their
focus on their
acquisition of language command and of
their
educational potential
so development
is not only something that
is controlled by
the society's practices it's also
something that is influenced by the the
cultural background
of the individual and those things are
not
equal
uh those things vary across
uh groups in in a very uh significant
way
and that too will be a factor
determining disparities of outcome
so when i see outcomes that are
different
i see wealth holding
that's different i see educational
achievement that's different i see
representation in the professional
schools in law school and medical school
that's different between groups
one question is are the institutions
treating people fairly but another
question is
do the background in social and cultural
influences equip people
in the same way
and we know that the answer to that not
in every instance do they equip people
in the same way
and so it makes the judgment the moral
judgment that we make when we see
inequality of outcome
complicated
inequality of outcome is a systemic
factor to some degree
but it is also
a cultural factor to some degree
i want to say and that's controversial i
know
a lot of people
they think of themselves as being
progressive
uh they they want to
point a finger at society whenever they
see a disparity
uh but i think that that's a mistake i
think it misunderstands
the the
difficulty of the problem
you think that if you get the right law
uh if you have the right public policy
uh if the right politicians are elected
to office suddenly those disparities
will go away
and um i'm here to tell you that uh that
that's uh a false hope
um
and and moreover it is probably the
wrong goal
uh but i mean we could go into that
you were talking about affirmative
action which is is something else
altogether
uh and you were talking about me and my
education which is also something
that's a little bit different and i'm
happy to talk about those things
northwestern university by the way was a
great university i'm just joking it's
one of the great universities of the
world yes and i'd study mathematics at
northwestern university which is how i
ended up at mit in the first place and i
got a very good technical training
in mathematics when i was at
northwestern so you love both
mathematics and human nature and so
which is why you ended up going into
economics
at one of the great economics programs
in the world at mit and getting your pg
there so one of the many hats you wear
is that of an economist which allows you
to think
systematically and rigorously about the
way the world and the way humans work at
scale
um
trying to remove the full mushy mess of
humans like a psychology perspective
economics allows you to do
well economics is one of the social
sciences i i think there's value in
psychology and in sociology there's a
lot to know that doesn't
come up within the study of economics
we study markets and you know the
dynamics of economic
development and
you know trade and um
you know so on
but uh yeah uh speaking personally as i
was coming along
i was fascinated by mathematics i was
good at it and i ended up at
northwestern and
took a lot of courses there and you know
functional analysis and logic and
mathematics and uh
dynamical systems and you know stuff
that i ended up employing in my graduate
studies in economics
but
you're right i
was not satisfied simply to be
proving theorems i wanted to be
addressing issues of social significance
and economics
i discovered
to my delight
was a field of study that allowed me
both to
develop rigorous
analytical frameworks you know modeling
uh and precision of logical
uh you know deduction and and inference
uh on the one hand
satisfying my mathematical uh
interest
but on the other hand could address
questions of social significance like
why does racial inequality persist
why are some countries prospering and
growing and others less so
why do the prices of
raw materials fluctuate in the way that
they do over time and so on and so forth
and i ended up
falling in love with the application of
mathematical analysis
to the study
of social issues what do you use
beautiful about
mathematics about mathematical puzzles
about logic all those kinds of things
because you
it's still there the love for math is
still there for you so is there
something you could speak to what is the
the kernel the flame of that love
it's like magic
i mean you know
being able to prove something and uh i
mean you know i think of uh offhand you
know there's low there's no largest
prime number okay so
how do i how would somebody know that
okay what's a prime number so a prime
number is a number that has a whole
number that has no divisor
other than one there are no
divisors of the number that makes it a
prime number like 13
or 19
or 37 whatever okay
so they're prime numbers
there's no largest prime number their
infinite number of prime numbers there's
no largest prime number okay that's an
idea you can get your mind around it in
an instant it it doesn't take a whole
lot of depth to see
the question
there's no largest prime number i wonder
if prime numbers show up in economics i
mean that oh they don't show up in
economics but except if cryptography i
understand that's important yes yes for
code
you know in in encoding stuff and that
shows up in economics but in terms of
models
yeah um
probably not that's that's so prime
numbers
are little
um you know in uh uh um
abstract algebra it's like they show up
in all these places they're just like
beautiful mathematical puzzles that
don't immediately have an application
but somehow maybe challenge you
and as a result push mathematics forward
like for mars last theorem you know
as far as i know no obvious real world
application but it has challenged
mathematicians throughout the centuries
indeed
and
and somehow
indirectly progressed uh the field but
uh that the rational numbers are
countable
they can be put in one to one uh
relationship with the integers and you
know
but that the real numbers are not
countable and there's a lot more real
number more real numbers these are
orders of infinity this is
uh cantor gay or cantor and all that
kind of
that kind of stuff or girdles of uh
theorem i i studied this as an
undergraduate you know the
incompleteness theorem that there are
propositions within any logical system
that's rich enough to accommodate
uh
accommodate arithmetic they're going to
be
propositions that you can formulate that
are true but that you
cannot prove to be true
uh so the idea that you could
systematically develop a logical
framework for mathematical inquiry
that could demonstrate the truth or
falsity of any proposition
is
not a feasible goal this was hilbert's
project as i understand it and
uh
girdle showed that there was no hope
ever of being able to
demonstrate the closure of of logical
systems that were rich enough to
accommodate
the real numbers they gave an
existential crisis to all uh
mathematicians and scientists alike and
humans because maybe you can't prove
everything i remember
you know when i was uh
i was a junior college a community
college student before i transferred to
northwestern and i took a calculus
course
uh and it was a lot of fun
and it was differentiating
algebraic
expressions and integrating and using
trigonometric substitutions and
it was a lot of simple problem solving i
get to northwestern i take a course in
differential equations
and again it was a lot of formulaic you
know applying if you get a differential
equation of this structure like if it's
linear you've got exponentials etc you
can solve it
and then i took a course that showed me
you know where the question was not how
to solve any particular
functional expression but it was proving
the existence of a solution to a
differential equation
where it was like x dot equals f of x
and t and f is just some arbitrary
function
what do i have to assume about the
function f in order to know that there
exists the solution to the differential
equation
dx dt
equals f of x and t
and it's basically they called it a
lipschitz condition it's a condition
about the bounding of the
the slope of
the function f as a function of x that
it doesn't
uh
that you can sort of uniformly bound the
slope on that function and then you can
use a
iterative process to uh show that the
sequence of
you know partial solutions to the thing
converges to something that's a solution
to the real thing anyway again i'm not
not going to bore you or
pretend that i'm a mathematician i'm not
but what i'm saying is the difference
between
a specific
algebraic formula that you can
manipulate and solve on the one hand
and the abstract question of whether
there exists a solution in the general
case
is like a huge was like a huge step for
me uh in my study of mathematics and um
the techniques that you have to employ
to address these
larger questions and and so on so i
you know when i was an undergraduate i
took the first year phd sequence in math
analysis
at northwestern from a brilliant
mathematician named avner friedman
and learned about measure theory and
you know learned about uh
uh
some some early functional analysis
ideas
and when i saw that those ideas were
being applied by advanced study and
economics i was delighted i found an
intellectual home
so that
one of the
fascinating challenges of mathematics is
to think
how can you cons
which echoes the challenge of economics
what are the properties of an equation
that allow you to
say something profound and say it simply
and so the question of economics is how
do you construct a model where you can
generalize nicely and say something
profound and say it simply
uh so one of the
questions one of the challenges of
economics
is macro versus microeconomics yeah is
um
you know the world is made up of
individuals so there's a connection to
this our discussion of
of race and discrimination and outcomes
and all those kinds of things
the world is made up of individuals
but in order to say something
general
we have to construct
groups
in order to analyze the data we have to
aggregate that data somehow we have to
make an average over some set of people
so what are the pros and cons of
looking at things like equality of
opportunity and equality of outcome
based on groups versus based on
individuals
and
uh
what are the groups
if there's any pros to looking at groups
that we should be looking at
okay well those those are big questions
i mean in economics
you're right i mean micro you have a an
account of how individuals make
decisions about spending their money
on this consumption side and about how
enterprises make decisions about
uh what to produce how much of it what
inputs to use what techniques of
production and so on
individual firms individual consumers
and then you want to aggregate so
there's a theory of so-called theory of
general equilibrium where
you know you think
supply and demand in a bunch of markets
you think prices that move to
equilibrate
but you recognize that the price in one
market affects people's behavior in
another the market's interacting with
each other
you realize that the behavior one
individual affects the
supplies and
available resources and for other
individuals so they're knitted together
in some kind of
systematic way
and you you
want to try to demonstrate the fact that
notwithstanding all these
interdependencies
there exists a solution to the
system of equations that equates demand
and supply across all the different
markets this is
the existence of general equilibrium
then you want to try to say something
about the properties of an equilibrium
if it exists
is it efficient what do you mean by
efficiency
well the idea of so-called pareto
efficient outcomes these are outcomes
that cannot be uniformly improved upon
everybody can't be made better off by an
alternative outcome
you want to demonstrate the efficiency
of competitive equilibrium
what do you mean by competition you mean
that people take their actions to
do the best for themselves that they can
profits of firms well-being of consumers
they try to do the best for themselves
that they can
but they do so in reference to a set of
prices that they believe they cannot
control that's the criterion of
competitive
market circumstance so
does a competitive equilibrium exist do
there exist a set of prices which if
everybody recognizes them as given and
responds to those prices
on behalf of their own interest
the outcome will be
supply equaling demand in all the
markets where people are interacting
with one another
and that requires the use of some
concepts in topology fixed point
theorems and whatnot that are familiar
to mathematics not very deep
mathematical results but important
to economics that's all about general
equilibrium and whatnot
but you ask about groups
by the way
amazing worldwide summary of all of
economics but yes go ahead that was that
was great
markets
of competition of pareto efficiency
anyway but yes groups and prices and
prices
and by the way there are some very
beautiful
you know
uh
formalizations of everything that i'm
saying here you know you end up in
vector spaces you you end up with sets
of
bundles of consumption and production
you end up with convexity you end up
with
hyperplanes which are
you know in in this uh finite
dimensional vector space which are uh
you know
uh
all of the bundles that have the same
value at a certain price you end up with
inner products you know and and you know
it's just
it's very pretty yeah but you almost
forget that it's just a bunch of humans
transacting with each other
uh
that that markets are made up of
individuals
markets are made up of individuals and
in order to carry out this formalization
you have to make assumptions
about the individuals and
the end result is true in a formal sense
but may not be true as a representation
of the reality
because it depends upon assumptions that
themselves may not hold
but at least you know what it is that
has to be true in order for your formal
framework to be
relevant
which is already a step in the right
direction i think i mean the
formalization is better than the
intuition
the aren't your intuition where we sit
back and we don't really know
exactly what we're talking about because
we haven't pinned it down
um in in a precise way i'm in favor of
the formalization people
they think what is mathematics and the
social sciences after all we're dealing
with people people are not automata i
agree with that
but
the analysis of the interaction of
people i think to be rigorous
requires us to be specific
uh about what we're talking about about
markets about consumers about firms
about profits
uh about technology about preferences
and uh that's the language of economics
um but people's behavior depends upon
what they seek
in life what depends upon their goals
and their objectives
those things are at play
uh they can be pushed this way or that
so
i mean i you know nationalism
fighting and dying for your country
um religion
uh sacrificing on behalf of some
abstract ideal of the good or of you
know what is the human situation and
what is the meaning of life
economists have to assume that these
things are some particular thing before
they can
turn the crank on their machine to
analyze the outcomes of human
interaction and yet these things
uh belief in
my identity
but the things that i'm willing to
sacrifice and die for
purposes of life that i affirm and pass
on to my children
are important preconditions for actually
carrying out any economic analysis and
they are subject to manipulation and to
change over time
and that's not something that economics
has a whole lot to say about
well is there some general things that
are really powerful in terms of you said
nation
religion those are groups
yeah can you group people nicely
in helping you understand human nature
so
group them into nations based on their
citizenry
that's geography right
the geographic location of your birth
or your uh long-term residence or maybe
religious belief what you what religion
you believe over time
is there groups like that and then
race
is that
useful
what are the pros and cons of looking at
outcomes based on
these kinds of groups
race in particular
i think they're pros and i think they're
cons i mean i am myself glenn lowery
sits before you right now
a black american an african american i i
quote unquote i identify as you know
that's the way they talk about it
nowadays i identify as a black american
my skin is brown
my hair is coarse
my nose is broad
uh relative to the way other people's
noses look my lips are thicker
that's a
consequence of my
ancestral descent
from
the human population
resident in the african continent in
millennia past
my race
uh here in the united states we have
various quote unquote races
uh defined crudely in the way that i
just tried to define myself
you could say and i think there is a
very powerful argument that these are
superficial differences
i mean
really why should it matter that your
eye color
or your hair color
or the shape of the bones in your face
uh or the color the tone of your skin
the amount of melon and how it is that
you react to ultraviolet radiation in
terms of your
skin
what is that
to bait the basis of anything i mean
that's arbitrary that's not meaningful
could there really be meaning in these
superficial differences among human
beings isn't that a
archaic or barbaric way of thinking
about ourselves to
look at each other's skin color or hair
texture and then to decide oh that's a
black or that's a white or that's a
latin or that's an asian or that's a
whatever
that's
something that we should outgrow
a person might say
that's a relic of a kind of tribal
society of a kind of pre-modern
society where
uh we built real
structure on the basis of such
superficial difference a person could
say that
on the other hand i
am
a black american i mean that's part of
my
identity that's part of my
heritage it's part of the
stories that i tell myself about
who my people are
why do i need a people why do i need a
narrative of
dissent
in which i affiliate with
a racially defined people do i really
need that i mean i think that's an
important question i i in fact
this is a confession
think of myself as black i could
think of myself as simply human i could
not identify specifically as black i
could i could say
my my eyes are brown too so what i'm a
brown eye i mean you know i'm going to
invent a group based on my eye color um
i weigh 290 pounds i'm gonna have a body
size group i'm a plus 200 and that's
quote who i am close quote i don't do
that
i came from chicago yes i do have a
certain sense of affinity with my
hometown i'm a chicago-born
person but frankly i haven't lived in
chicago since 1979.
that's a long time
uh i wear my chicago origins very very
lightly
i would not go to war with someone from
cleveland or st louis
and fight to the death with that uh st
louis person or that cleveland person
based upon the fact that we come from
different cities and you have even
abandoned in your heart the chicago
bulls there's some chicago that's still
in me i suppose but it's not it's not
very deep it it's not quote who i am
anymore and i'm wondering uh i hear i'm
trying to pose a question why is it that
being
a descendant of african slaves should be
who i am so there's some answers
one answer is
people will look at me and deal with me
differently based upon what they see
i don't have control over that
i'm going to be perceived as a member of
a group whether or not i elect to
affiliate myself with that group
or not
therefore
i need to be mindful of the fact that
regardless of what my internal
orientation is
the world will perceive me in a
particular way and will perceive me
differently based upon the color of my
skin so a police officer who stops me at
two o'clock in the morning because my
tail light is out
and asked me for my
automobile registration and i reached
quickly to the glove compartment
to get my registration
and the police officer says show me your
hands and i don't quite hear what he
says or i ignore what he says i'm
getting my
document out of my glove compartment but
the police officer thinks because i have
not responded
to his demand to show my hands that i
might be reaching for a weapon
and the police officer sees that i'm
black and
fears that the likelihood that i might
have a weapon is higher because in that
town at that time
a lot of the people who get stopped with
weapons in their car happen to be
black and male and so on
and he pulls his weapon and he
discharges it and i'm bleeding out there
and i'm dead now and i all of that is a
possibility that's very real and it's
based upon the color of my skin and
therefore
when he stops me i keep my hands on the
steering wheel and i don't go to the
glove compartment and i'm fearful of the
fact that he might
mistake me for a criminal etc
or i walk into a high-end
store clothing store uh i see you're
nicely dressed there lex uh i'm not but
that's okay
i i do have some good clothes at home i
just didn't wear them here today yeah uh
but you know what i mean and the clothes
the the salesman in the clothing store
either
treats me like uh you know an old friend
and is warm and welcoming and what can i
do for you sir and let me show you this
and that and what are you looking for
and what because he thinks i'm going to
spend a thousand dollars there that day
and he's going gonna get a five percent
commission or whatever it is and you
know he either does that or he ignores
me and looks at me with suspicion and
thinks i might be trying to shoplift
something or thinks i'm only going to
spend fifty dollars and not five hundred
dollars and therefore i'm not worth his
time and i'm aware of the fact that when
i go into the clothing store especially
the high-end places where i can buy some
buy a good suit or you know buy some
really good dress shirts or slacks that
fit me well and so on i'm aware of the
fact that i may not be taken seriously
by the salesman based upon the fact that
he's looking at me and he sees
a black person and therefore
um
i dress up before i go to go out to buy
clothes to get you know because i want
to present myself as not someone who
just walked in off the street but as one
of those black people who is really
prepared to spend some money in the
store so that i can be treated with
respect and i have to carry the
burden such as it is
of knowing that i need to earn
the uh
being taken seriously
by overcoming the suppositions that
people may have about me based upon the
color of my skin
something like that
or i ask myself
what am i going to teach my children
about who they are and where they come
from what stories am i going to tell
them
about their ancestors who are their
ancestors
every african-american has european
ancestors every black person in the
united states of america
i think that i can say that almost
without exception
we could go to 23andme and look at the
dna
they have european ancestors they're not
purely african
uh that's a fact and that's a
consequence of the uh experience of
african descended people because it's a
mixed population
my name is lowry
spelled l-o-u-r-y but pronounced as if
it were l-o-w-e-r-y
and uh i gather if you trace the history
of that name that it's uh
scottish
so somewhere you could identify as a
scot all right well i could claim some
scottish descent
but i don't i don't know who those
ancestors are and frankly i don't know
who my enslaved ancestors
are i i can't trace my family history
back
very far
into the 19th century
um but so what what stories do i tell my
children about who we are about who
their ancestors are i mean i want to
tell my children some story and that
story is going to be colored
quote unquote
by
my race
so even though it is superficial
and in an ideal world you might think
why would human beings
i mean i read science fiction so that
there's this chinese writer chiksan liu
is his name i might not pronounce it
exactly right c-i-x-i-n
l-i-u chickson lou he has a trilogy of
the three-body problem
the dark forest
and death's end those are the three
books of chicks and lou's trilogy about
how try solaris
which is another star system within a
few light light years of the solar
system
and earth
get into a conflict
and when the tricelerians come down
to dominate earth
suddenly all of these differences
between the chinese and the
north americans and the europeans and
the africans and the south asians
become kind of insignificant because
after all the tricelerians with their
advanced civilization uh whose star
system is dying
have their eyes on the solar system
which has a planet the third rock from
the sun that is pretty habitable and
you know the difference between us
become pretty insignificant
so
we shouldn't need
for an invasion by extraterrestrial
beings
to have to happen
before we would recognize the common
humanity that we all share
that is profound
and is deep we all descend in effect
from the same ancestral population of
homo sapiens who walked out of east
africa eons ago and have
survived amongst all of the different
possible
you know variations of species and
whatnot of humanoid
population homo sapiens have flourished
the others have died out
and here we are and and you know we can
just look at the genetic endowments that
characterize our biological
essence and we can see that uh
we are all quote unquote the same
beneath the skin and yet
we end up
uh freighting so much weight
onto these superficial differences so i
can i can see both sides of the
issue is what i'm saying i can see the
argument race is an irrelevancy
because
at the end of the day
deep down it is
but i can also see the argument that i
hold on to racial identity because a
my racial presentation colors how other
people
deal with me but because
everybody needs a story
you know everybody needs an account you
tell me you're jewish i mean i don't
know how deep that is i don't know how
genetically profound that is i do know
that it's a culturally
profound
identity for a lot of people
uh based upon maybe some of the same
kind of forces that i'm talking about a
they won't let you not be jewish
you you could say you're not jewish but
when hitler is rounding people up
what you say doesn't have a whole lot to
do with the with what the gestapo was
about
and b you need to tell your children a
story yeah you know that's the
fascinating thing about this tribalism
that you spoke about
that
we form tribes
as humans throughout human history
formed tribes and have directed hate
toward other tribes
and sometimes violence and destruction
and yet
tribalism allows you to tell a story to
your children allows you to grow a
culture
there's something about defining
yourself within a particular tribe yeah
that allows you to uh have a tradition
yeah um you have a
um article that you wrote called the
case for black patriotism
oh yeah
so i should also say it's so interesting
because for me personally
i
feel identify as
believe i am an american
and yet within the american umbrella
it feels that there's a longing for
other tribes you mentioned jewish but
what i honestly feel
is i mean a lot of it is humor and
culture and so on is russian and
ukrainian because that's that's where i
come
from that's where my family is from
you know there's like
stereotypical things that are
um funny
humorous type of thing about russians
that's showing no emotion
um
good at chess and math
uh into wrestling okay uh drinking vodka
i mean this is literally every single
stereotype i'm in the embodiment of that
so there's a you celebrate that in
certain kinds of ways there's a
tradition there within the american
umbrella and some of it is humor
some of it is uh
little quarks of culture but now with
the war in russian ukraine interestingly
enough
even that little thing
it becomes also a source of
uh
tribalism but anyway
uh that context aside
what is black patriotism
and why do you feel
i mean i'm speaking in an article called
the case for black
patriotism in a particular context
and i
what i'm saying basically
is very simple i'm saying we are african
americans
and the emphasis should be on the
american
i actually don't even much care for the
framing
african-american but i'm not gonna fight
with people about it it it's you know i
don't think it's worth fighting about
that's not how i would just say we're
americans or if you want we're black
americans
we're certainly not african
that is the african-american population
is a population of people
who come into existence here in north
america
through the cauldron of slavery
there are also immigrants immigrants
from east africa immigrants from west
africa immigrants from southern africa
immigrants from the caribbean
who descend from
an ancestral population which is african
we you know the history of the world
since 1500 is a history in which people
of african descent are scattered because
of slavery
throughout the western hemisphere
and uh so here we are
but
the institution of slavery ended in 1863
in the united states
the struggle that we started out talking
about
which um gave rise to martin luther king
giving that speech that you say is the
greatest speech in american history and
i'm not going to argue with you about
that
happened right here in the united states
yes
we are this what is the united states
the united states is a nation of
immigrants
the population of the north american
continent was sparsely populated by an
indigenous population which was
destroyed
in conquest
by a european population has settled
here in north america and appropriated
the land
and have built a civilization here
which has been peopled by a large influx
of individuals from uh europe the irish
and italian
and
greek and slavic and
jewish russian jews coming in large
numbers and so on in wave after wave
after wave of immigration
asian
latin american population of people who
have come
to reside here in the united states and
we black americans who descend from
slaves
we african americans who descend from
slaves so here we are
this is a great nation i mean this is
a monumentally significant
political
force which is the united states of
america founded in
1776 1787
uh fought a war of independence from the
british uh established a republic which
is a
confederation of these independent
colonies which has grown into now the 50
states of the united states of america
continental nation
the
richest
and most powerful nation on the planet
with massive influence throughout the
world
for good and for ill
that's who we are i want to say to black
people
there is no other home for us
the this fantasy
of we being a people apart
uh back in the day when i was coming
along in the 1960s there was something
called the republic of new africa
movement and they wanted some states in
the south given over to black people and
we were going to have our own country
and that's a it's a joke it's a fantasy
it's it's uh it's it's a mythic
uh
uh un
uh
balanced unrealistic
uh
fanciful
politics it's not a serious politics
we're americans we're not going anywhere
here
the idea that
and i want to say this in a number of
different registers i want to say first
of all
we need to make peace with the fact that
that's who we are and that's where we
are
so uh
nobody is coming
the world court is not going to litigate
our disputes
the united nations is not going to set
up a desk
for people of african descent who reside
in north america
we have to work out whatever our
concerns are with our fellow americans
right here within the context of
american politics
that means compromise
that means looking for frame a framework
for political expression which is
broader than our racial identity
etc so i i want to say that but i also
want to say there's no reason to
apologize for this there's something
positive to affirm i take on this
question about slavery i'm in in brief
in brief
because in fact slavery was awful and it
was wrong and it was
on the backs of the enslaved africans
and it had consequences that endured
that have endured long after the
termination of the thing but i also want
to say
look at what has happened in the last
150 years for african americans
and i want to say
look at the
vitality of the institutions here in the
united states of america of the
democratic republic of the united states
of america
again not perfect
which are which are malleable enough
these institutions to allow for the
transformation of the status of african
americans such as has occurred
since
the end of slavery
and i want to say there's a lot to
celebrate in that
so this is our country
we are
uh full members of the polity
uh we have
uh burdens and responsibilities as well
as privileges that are associated with
our membership in this republic
that does not mean that we should not
fight for what we believe to be right
although we are not one
voice here we black americans it does
not mean that we should not protest
things that we think are deserving of
protest
but i want to say it does mean that we
should not
reject the
framework that we're operating in
because we basically don't have any
alternative and because when viewed in
full context
a noble and profoundly
significant achievement the united
states of america and a beacon
uh to the rest of the world i don't want
to
you know go off in some starry eyed kind
of
jingoistic celebration of america as the
greatest civilization etc etc
but this great nation
uh is um
our
nation and i think we do best by
beginning we black americans do best by
beginning this is my argument in the
piece by beginning
from a framework which accepts that fact
and then builds on it
so black patriotism is
if not exactly the same
rhymes
echoes american patriotism
so a black american is first and
foremost an american yeah
a black american is first and foremost
an american
and it's a good thing too
let me return
to the question of dr king
and
another
powerful impactful individual malcolm x
to ask you the question
well first
people often perhaps inaccurately
uh portray them as
representing two different
ideals approaches
to the fight for civil rights so martin
luther king for the non-violent approach
the peacemaker and malcolm x
is the
by any means necessary
what do you think about this distinction
and broadly speaking in black patriotism
in the future
of black americans in the 21st century
what is the role of anger
what is the role of
protest
even
you know violence encompasses a lot of
things but just aggression
and uh you know fuck the man we're going
to have to make change force change
okay i think you put your finger on
something really important in the
context of we were just discussing my
black patriotism essay and
um
it's not the only it's not the only
story
there there is another story and malcolm
x is someone you identify and his
memory
lives on and is powerfully influential
uh and i think you see it in black lives
matter and i think you see it in the
protest and rioting and so forth
that has broken out periodically going
all the way back to the 1960s and before
but especially
since uh the 1960s
he saw it in los angeles in 1992 in the
rodney king civil disturbances that
broke out there
and the the balled up fist
the radical
uh
afrocentric
rejection of the
american
story that martin luther king he
believed in he believed in a magnificent
promissory note
and a lot of people are rolling their
eyes you know and saying you know as you
say fuck the man magnificent promissory
no
i mean just get your knee off my neck
that's what you can do for me don't ask
me to believe in your bs about some
magnificent promissory you know some
founding fathers who were all slave
owners anyway i mean just get your knee
off my neck
now
i can relate to that uh as i mentioned i
grew up in chicago in the 1950s and the
1960s i remember malcolm x i mean
literally in real time
i remember when he was murdered
in 1965 in the audubon
ballroom
in harlem in manhattan in new york city
um
i remember my uncle i i was raised in a
house where my aunt and uncle were the
master of the house and my mother and my
sister and i lived in a small
apartment upstairs in the back of this
of this big house that my successful
aunt and uncle owned
and my uncle was a small businessman a
barber and
a tradesman
he was he was a hustler i mean legally i
mean he did what he had to do to make
money he was very enterprising
not especially well educated but a very
intelligent and
disciplined
and resourceful
provider for his family which included
myself my
sister and my mother in their household
and we called him uncle mooney because
he had
moon-shaped eyes that protruded and were
around uncle mooney
uh james
ellis was his name uncle mooney
james ellis lee
that was my uncle mooney but i'm saying
all that to say this
he admired the nation of islam
i mean
king and malcolm x martin king and
malcolm x differed along a number of
different dimensions malcolm x was a
muslim
and martin luther king jr was a
christian minister
my uncle mooney
didn't have any time for these christian
ministers
he thought that was a white man's
religion
he you know and back in that day you go
into a black church and you'd see a
portrait of jesus
and he'd be a
blonde hair blue-eyed yeah
he didn't even look like uh like a
mediterranean he didn't i mean he didn't
look like somebody who came from uh
palestine i mean he looked like somebody
who came uh from northern europe or
something like that the picture of jesus
and my uncle mooney rejected that whole
thing he would be damned if he was going
to bend his knee to some
white jesus
but he was not a muslim either
but he respected
the muslims he brought home their
newspaper it was called muhammad speaks
this is the nation of islam
which is the black muslim movement
founded
in
american cities in detroit and in
chicago
going back to the early middle
20th century and growing into a very
significant movement
that had a lot of influence louis
farrakhan and a controversial figure
descends from this movement it has
fractured now and
has the major part of the legacy of the
black muslims
has assimilated itself into islam
proper
malcolm x made a
famous pilgrimage to mecca and medina
and
came back with a very different vision
about what it meant to be a muslim and
understood himself to be a part of the
large tradition and religious
culture of islam that has a global reach
and he had a different vision when he
came back from that
some people say that's why he was killed
and so on um i don't know
i certainly find that to be plausible
that he became the constitute a threat
to the sect
uh which was the uh the black muslims
and i had to be had to be dealt with
uh i don't know if we'll ever know the
full story on that
but anyway what i'm trying to say is
the black muslims were there malcolm x
was there and in my
experience
they constituted a counterpoint
to the position of king which depended
on a kind of respect
for the best of the tradition
of american democracy
appealing to the better nature
of our oppressors live up to the full
meaning
of our creed i mean these are words that
he would use a magnificent promissory
note is what he would think of as the
declaration of independence and
the legacy of abraham lincoln
unfulfilled ideal
and
the black muslims were like
fuck that
we're going to take care of our own
we we're going to build our own schools
we're going to build our own businesses
uh
we're we're not waiting for the white
man to do anything get your knee off my
neck and get out of my way and let me
take care of my own and my uncle
respected that he respected the straight
back
the the stand up straight with your
shoulders back that's a jordan peterson
but i mean that was this is way before
jordan peterson but that was his
philosophy stand up straight but just
raise your children don't be depending
upon welfare you're taking welfare from
the white man you need to get busy you
need to educate yourself you need to
clean up your act put down the fried
chicken because it's going to kill you
my uncle mooney
loved this book
that elijah muhammad they they called
him the honorable elijah muhammad was
the founder
and the leader of the nation of islam he
had a book and all the books said was
be smart eat green vegetables
don't eat fried food
uh don't eat pork they're muslims don't
eat pork
uh and take responsibility for your diet
and be healthy and uh you know don't be
putting a whole lot of pills into your
body you don't need to do that if you
just get control of your diet and you
you know you eat probably now my uncle
loves this idea
of responsibility for self
and a determination to build
uh you know he
he respected that in the muslims even if
he didn't
by the religious part of it
and so
and and by the way when my uncle died
uh in 1983
he left me a bequest
it wasn't money unfortunately
it was his complete collection of the
recorded speeches of malcolm x
and i have i have these albums these are
33 and a third lps there's six of them
uh and i have a complete collection as
best as my uncle could assemble the
recorded speeches of malcolm x now why
did he do that
he did that because he did not want me
to forget don't be dependent upon the
white man build your own
stand up straight with your shoulders
back
proud black man take care of your
business take care of your children
pick up the trash in front of your house
uh
get busy
this was this philosophy
uh so
violence now
that's another story i mean malcolm x
would say you know
we're going to defend ourselves you're
going to mess with us you know you
racist ku klux klan or whatever we're
going to arm ourselves
and we're going to fight you back you
racist police who are
oppressing and persecuting and abusing
our people well
you better be ready because we're going
to fight you back
and
that too was the spirit that my uncle
that was a kind of attitude a kind of
posture
uncle was not a radical he was he was a
businessman but
he respected this idea
you uh
take your life in your own hands when
you mess with us because we're prepared
to defend ourselves so that blood runs
in you too that threat is when you write
about black patriotism that threat is
there too
it's like
you embody both the ideal that we're all
american
but also
that there is this oppressive history
there there is the powerful
that
are
manipulating you
that are oppressing you
and you can't just wait around for
things to fix themselves
you have to take action
you have to take things into your own
hands and sometimes that means being
angry sometimes that means being violent
that's there too
yeah it's there but
um here in in the butt is
i don't me today glenn lowry in 2022
think that
that is the answer i i don't think that
violent
rebellion gets us anywhere at the end of
the day
i think we're past
that
uh there there aren't knight rider ku
klux klan uh people breaking down your
door and dragging you away they are not
uh nooses throw thrown over a tree uh
limb
uh where you hang somebody from the tree
because they whistled at a white woman
or they
got too much property in your community
and you became you know they were uppity
negroes and whatnot like that that is
a thing of the past in america that the
uh
uh situation is no longer the one that
requires that kind of
violent reaction and that there there is
if we look at the net effect
of the so-called rebellions
um
in the american cities
they're negative
uh the the
george floyd
protests which became violent and
arsonists in the aftermath of civil
disturbance and what not in the summer
of 2020 i think set back
the program for african americans i
don't think it advanced it
i i think there are things to be
concerned about
schools that are not working
uh police that are not not respecting
citizens and so forth but i think that
those are things
that affect
white americans as well and that the way
to
ultimately
correct those things
is to
uh
make uh
alliance and associate oneself with
americans who are concerned to change
these things and i don't think it's
properly framed as a racial
um as a racial problem and i certainly
don't think
that uh
you know violent
rebellion uh gets us anywhere i i'm you
know i i get the historical
salience of that posture
and it made a lot of sense
in the early in the mid 20th century i
don't think it makes very much sense at
all in the early 21st century
well thank you for allowing me for a
brief moment to try to channel your
uncle mooney and maybe malcolm x in this
conversation as we as we look forward to
the 21st century you mentioned that um
in part you're troubled by the term
african-american
so words are funny things
until they're not so let me ask you
about
what i think is one of the most powerful
and controversial words in the english
language the n-word
so this is a word that i
can't say
that only certain people have the right
to say
i have a friend joe rogan
yeah who has
um
what would you say there was mass
pushback or highlighting of of the fact
that he
didn't just say n-word but
said the full word
many times
throughout his conversations when
referring to
um
in a meta way
about the power of words
especially when related to certain
comedians using those words
um yeah
what do you think about this word
is it
empowering is it destructive
what is it what does it mean for
race in america
um what does it mean that people like
joe rogan
were
essentially
there's an attack to cancel
him for using the word
just as a scholar of human nature what
do you think about this whole thing
it this is a phenomenon that interests
me
okay
the n-word
nigger i could say it because i'm black
but i mean i can also say it because i
like hip-hop
and when i listen to hip-hop i hear the
word all the time these niggas did you
know
watch out for these you know etc
i heard the word constantly as i was
growing up as a boy and a young man in
chicago niggas ain't shit
that was said
that was you know the the and that could
be a reflection of some kind of
pathology within the african-american
community of self-hatred and so forth it
could be or it could just be a
colloquial
linguistic way i mean i assume other
groups also have uh their
various i don't know how the irish talk
about their irish brothers and you know
whatever and um i i don't know how the
jews talk about the jewish brothers and
whatever
but black people when talking about
other black people use the n word
all the time
my nigga yeah nigga
yeah you know my nigga
uh that is a term of endearment
my friend randall
kennedy uh the law professor at harvard
university has a book called nigger
and he uses the word in the title of the
book
the history of a strange history of a
of a provocative word it's something
that there's a subtitle but the title of
the book
is n-i-g-g-e-r
colon
and then
he has a subtitle
um
i think
of course
the use of the word as a slur and an
insult
which is a
part of the history
of black people in the united states the
use of the word by the southern racist
segregationist we don't want no niggas
up in here y'all you know niggas niggas
have no place in my restaurant in my
store etc
that's meant to be an insult it's an
insult to people it's a fighting word
it's a way that you say that to somebody
it's a it's a invitation for conflict
that said
what is it that about this particular
word and also the asymmetry of it
that do you think it's empowering to the
black community
to own a word
my honest answer to you is i don't know
i don't fully understand it
it has become symbolic in a way
and the policing of the use of the word
i can say it but white people can't say
it i can say it i'm not a racist i'm not
a self-hating black
you know i'm just speaking the language
of colloquial english
that has emerged amongst african
americans in which that word plays a big
role
but the prohibition on its use by others
and of course in the joe rogan case
it wasn't as if he was calling anybody
an n-word
he was simply pointing out
that people had said stuff in which the
n-word was a part of what they said
now he did make this statement about uh
uh how did he put in the planet of the
apes that one of the
offensive things that he said had you
know he walked into a room there's a
bunch of black guys standing around he
says like planet of the apes he said
it's like africa planet of the apes yeah
he should have it and he should have
been a little bit more careful that was
that was an insult
that was that was you know
something that uh
you know if you say that and people are
offended they have a right to be
offended and if you didn't mean to
offend them you can apologize and he did
apologize i accept his apology joe's
okay with me as far as that goes
um in fact uh mcwhorter and i john
mcwhorter and i at the podcast that i do
the glenn show i had a conversation part
of which touched on the joe rogan
phenomenon and we concluded he didn't
really do anything wrong i mean i mean
you can like remember you can hate him
or whatever but the idea that he's a
racist is kind of ridiculous so frankly
i mean
you know uh if that's your test of what
constitutes a racist the utterance of
the word
uh
then you know
it's kind of a it's it's kind of silly
as far as i'm concerned what do you
think about
the
rigorous testing of people to the degree
they're racist or not
the accusation of racism being a way
um to attack to uh to bully
to divide
so what are the pros and cons of that
once again because it does reveal the
assholes and the racists but it can now
hurt people
who are not well i think we have a
history here
in the united states
of blatant racism
that goes back a long way
and that has present day echoes
so
there are races i mean there are people
who look and see
all those are black people they're
they're patronizing this business i
don't want to patronize this business
anymore who if their daughter or their
son is dating somebody that is black
they will say i really wish you wouldn't
do that i mean why are you hanging out
with those people don't you know who
they are
uh there are people there are racists
okay there are black races
that is black people who see somebody
who's white and who then invoke a whole
lot of stereotypes or whatever or have a
uh
you know visceral
dislike based upon nothing other than
the color of the person's skin such
people exist racism is a real thing etc
on the other hand
i think this uh throwing around you know
uh the accusation of racism
a college professor is teaching a course
he says in the context of teaching the
course
that
the underrepresentation of blacks
in physics
uh program at this university is because
they score lower on the test than other
groups
and they're not qualified
so say the professor gives a lecture
and he says
we don't have more blacks in the physics
department at this university because
there are not enough qualified blacks
somebody in the
classroom who hears that a black student
objects he's a racist
okay
that's a power move
it's a move to try to control
the conversation
it's not an argument it's an epithet
you've said that a person who has a
particular idea that you don't like
maybe that idea is i'm against
affirmative action i think it's unfair i
was just with dorian
abbott
dorian abbott
is a scientist at the university of
chicago
who published a piece in newsweek
magazine
in which he said that he thought
affirmative action and
racial balancing
was unethical
uh he was invited to give a lecture at
mit a very distinguished lecture in his
field based on planetary
science i don't know exactly what it is
um i'm not a scientist
uh but in any case
because he had said
that he didn't like affirmative action
and he thought affirmative action was
racist that's basically what he said why
are we looking at people based upon
their race and decide we should just do
it on the merit that was his position
now people protesting at the university
where he was invited mit
saying that he's a racist because he had
that opinion he gets disinvited
charles murray
um is a popular
social science writer
who is famous for his book about iq
the bell curve
one chapter of which
chronicles the racial differences
between black and white
in performance on mental ability tests
and speculates about the extent to which
such differences may be connected with
the genetic inheritance of these
racially distinct populations
now he could be wrong about everything
that he's saying
the southern poverty law center calls
him a white supremacist
because he
observes that there are racial
differences
in
measured intellectual ability
amongst americans of different racial
dissent
the i the you know he could be wrong let
me stipulate that he is wrong i mean i
don't want to argue about whether he's
right or about whether he's wrong
he's addressing himself to a factual
issue
and now the issue becomes instead of
grappling with the factual questions at
hand and demonstrating his rightness or
wrongness about those questions
the issue becomes his character
he's a racist
um
that's in my mind a lot like calling him
a witch
the use of that word now
i think has parallels
to accusing people of witchcraft
because they have views about
substantive questions that bear on
racial inequality or racial difference
that a person finds unacceptable or that
a person disagrees with and you think
you can shut somebody up
crime
in the cities of
chicago st louis baltimore philadelphia
washington dc is out of control some
person might say murder rate is high
who's committing those crimes they're
mostly black
young men who are doing the carjackings
and who are doing the shootings they're
killing each other they're making our
city unlivable
now
that's a hypothetical statement that i
offer
it might be correct
it might be incorrect it might be
appropriate it might be inappropriate it
may be true but something that we would
be better off if people didn't focus on
i don't know
responding to someone making that
statement have you seen what has
happened to my city it used to be that
you could go to north michigan avenue
and you could find one after another
after another high-end shop this is in
chicago my hometown
and uh tourists would come and they'd go
to the theater and there were
restaurants and they'd go out they don't
do it anymore you know what half of
those stores are boarded up now you know
why because when george floyd was killed
black people
mobbed in the city and they burnt and
they rioted and they looted and it
hasn't been the same ever since and i'm
moving to the suburbs i'll be damned if
i'm going to send my children to those
schools a person could say that
they might be right they might be wrong
to say it calling them a racist is
exactly not
a rebuttal of what they said it's a move
it's a move to try to take control of
the conversation
by accusing someone of having bad
character because they said something
that made you uncomfortable which you
can't deal with so you think you can
shut them up
by calling them a racist you might as
well be calling them a witch
you might as well be calling for their
head on a platter because they believe
that satan is lord
because that's the kind of
quote argument
close quote which is precisely not an
argument
that people who invoke that term are
using and here's what i have to say
about that
it's a fool's errand
to try to refute somebody
by calling them a witch likewise it's a
fool's errand
to try to rebut
the contrary forces in american politics
that are a reaction often
to real things that are going on on the
ground in black communities in the
cities across this country by calling
people a racist
you may shut them up
but you won't change their minds and you
know what at the end of the day they're
going to go to the ballot box and
they're going to vote
they're going to pick up their store and
they're going to move it to the other
side of town or to another town
altogether they're going to keep their
children away from places where they
think the influences are harmful to
those children
they may not even talk about it in
public you can believe that in private
that they're talking about it with each
other
you had better find a more effective way
of dealing with the conflicts in this
country that fall along racial fault
lines than calling people witches which
is what this
um
you know anti-racist you're a racist
because you think that uh the out of
wedlock birth rate amongst black
americans is seven babies out of ten are
born to a woman without a husband their
families are falling apart now no one
says that in public because they'd be
called a racist if they said it in
public but as a matter of fact the
families are falling apart
you didn't change that in the lease by
telling people to shut up about it
daniel patrick moynihan is called a
racist in the 1960s the late senator the
new york senator who was a
federal employee and an intellectual
writing reports and he writes a report
about the negro family he called it in
those years if i use the word negro now
they're going to call me a racist if i'm
a white person i can't even use the word
negro
which is a historically
legitimate reference to the descendants
of the slaves
enslaved people which we were as black
americans proud to use until yesterday
so all of this linguistic policing
is a sign of weakness
it's false black power
people will seat you the ground okay you
don't want me to use that word i won't
use that word anymore okay you don't
want me to talk about that in public all
right i won't talk about it in public
anymore i don't want to be called a
racist okay so i won't express my
opinion you haven't changed anybody's
mind
you know so
and you've also mentioned that
for that you haven't changed anybody's
mind but also for things like
in universities and institutions there's
diversity inclusion and equity kind of
meetings and education and so on
and i believe i've read somewhere i've
been i'm like i mentioned to you offline
big fan of your glenn show people should
listen to it
uh it's amazing um
there's also just interviews of you that
i've listened to i believe you mentioned
somewhere that even those kinds of
meetings people might sit through and
nod along
but that doesn't necessarily mean that's
making progress
that they may not
they may actually be bottling up a
frustration that's the fear is that
that's going to result in a
a pendulum pendulum
sort of push back towards this idea of
forced
uh
appreciation like forced anti-racism
kind of thing
uh i talk about this often in my pockets
that's the glen show you know and you
can find the glen show on my youtube
channel and also at sub stack
uh yeah you have a great sub stack you
you and your friend do you q and a's and
all that kind of stuff on patreon yeah
so
yeah so people should definitely follow
you it's brilliant
but yeah i mean one concern is that uh
the um
uh policing of the superficial policing
this is a part of political correctness
you know the insistence that you only
use certain words that you only talk in
a certain way
it's a phony kind of power because it
doesn't actually persuade people about
the issues that are at hand
instead it forces them underground in
their uh talk about these issues and and
that's
uh
that's problematic much better
that we have overt and explicit and
honest
disagreement to the extent that there
are disagreement
about things that are going on
than uh that we have a superficial kind
of um
uh
new you know uh conversation that is uh
purged of
any real
biting
um uh you know discomforting
confrontation with with the realities of
the situation at hand and for black
americans i think one big part of the
reality of the situation at hand
is violent crime
violent crime you know a police officer
is afraid when he stops a car because
it's an 18 year old driver in the
vehicle he's got dreadlocks he's a black
person the car doesn't have the right
license plate he's afraid to uh
deal with that person and one of the
reasons he's afraid to deal with them is
because a few who look like him are
behaving violently their violence is
usually perpetrated against others who
look like themselves but not always
and uh
that reality doesn't get changed by uh
you know uh telling a newspaper writer
who writes about it that they are a
racist or enforcing within a newsroom
you can't cover that story in that way
because to do so would be racist that
that i i think
it's a monumental mistake
to
enforce
a closure on public discussion
based upon a calculation that if we
allow people if twitter allows this kind
of post
if the washington post runs this kind of
story
etc
you end up with
a
superficial politeness
but
a subterranean seething resentment
that only makes matters worse
if i can get your comment maybe you have
ideas because it does seem that this
kind of attack
um works
of
being called a racist
being called um
maybe not sexist but somebody you know
like we're going through a johnny depp
trial now right
uh it's a defamation trial and the
reason
it's a defamation trial is because
all it took is a single accusation of
johnny depp being
somebody who
sexually and physically abused uh ever
heard and all it took is just a single
article
no proof was given
um
except the accusation itself and the
world believed it
so
it's effective
so how do you fight back
if it's so damn effective that you can
just call anybody racist
and it works
it's hard to wash off
it's it's a
uh you're
you know you're not proven in the court
of law or anything like that but
we we
get those articles we get that label
and then the world moves on and just
assumes that person is racist so how how
do you do you have any ideas how to
fight back
no i don't frankly
um
just highlighted roseanne barr who made
this statement about valerie jarrett she
made some kind of ape like reference to
whatever
her show got cancelled and and and she's
a racist
so first of all pointing it out i
suppose is one of the most powerful
things that this the uh the hypocrisy of
it
the you say it works i i guess you're
right it used to be that calling someone
a communist
yeah worked i mean going back to the
late 40s early 50s
red scare
mccarthyism
and whatnot and the person might have
belonged to a club that was pro-soviet
union in the 1930s when they were in
college they might have voted for the
socialist candidate henry wallace in the
presidential election of
they might belong to the communist party
they they might think karl marx was uh
right about a whole lot of stuff about
capitalism and whatnot and they got
called a communist or a marxist
and it could have ruined their career
could have ruined their lives um
you know and a lot of people shut up
about it and it took and it went on for
a long time
uh and in a way in a way it kind of
still is going on i mean you call
somebody your marxist if you can make
that stick
they're certainly not going to get
elected president of the united states
but i don't know about this um
i think
you know
i once read this book by
a german
political scientist called elizabeth
neula neumann
that was a
the writer's name elizabeth
noel neumann
the book was called the spiral of
silence
and the argument was
there can be some views some issues in
society that get
uh defined in such a way that it's
inappropriate to hold those views
and as a result people who don't want to
be shamed who don't want to be
ostracized
don't express those views and when they
don't express them anybody holding the
view because they don't hear it said by
others think that they're the only one
or one of the few who hold the view and
so they don't want to be the only one
out there saying something so they keep
it to themselves so now
this view this attitude in society
could be held by a large number of
people
but because of the
fear that if they were to express it
they'd be ostracized no one says it and
since no one is saying it the others who
hold the view don't know that they're
not alone
that they are not the only ones who hold
the view
and hence they keep silent that could be
an equilibrium it could be a
relatively stable situation in which the
emperor has no clothes everybody can see
that this dude is naked
okay but everybody thinks that you know
i don't want to be the only one to say
it and so we all kind of
collaborate in this charade
of keeping the view to ourselves
then along comes
uh
an event that
uh somebody decides to defy
the consensus
and to speak out
it could be a little kid who in the
story about the emperor has no clothes
doesn't realize that he's not supposed
to say that the emperor is naked
the thing about the kid in the story who
says that the emperor is naked it's not
that he's saying it
it's not even that other people hear him
saying it
it's that everybody knows that everybody
else heard him say it
okay
the kid who speaks out and says the
emperor has no clothes
creates a circumstance in which it's
common knowledge that the emperor has no
clothes now common knowledge does not
just mean knowledge it does not even
mean widespread knowledge
it means comprehensive knowledge of
other person's knowledge of the thing
okay
so the spiral of silence is a
equilibrium that is susceptible to being
undermined
by a process of of a kind of cumulative
process a snowballing process of
revelation that you're not the only one
who thinks this way
okay
it's fascinating to think that there's
an ocean of common knowledge
that we're waiting for the little kid to
wake us up to different little parts of
it that's correct and the little kid by
the way could be somebody like donald
trump only more effective than donald
trump
somebody who is smarter than donald
trump somebody who is shrewder
than donald trump
somebody who figures out that when colin
kaepernick takes a knee at a football
game
and says i'm not gonna stand for this
president allegiance that
a vast number of people are uh
very unhappy about that somebody who
understands that when a black lives
matter
activist stands up with his bald fist
and says burn this bitch down about a
city in the united states of america
that a lot of people are upset about
that a lot of them
a person a shrewd politician a a shrewd
manager of public image
could build on and create a circumstance
in which more and more people will feel
safe
to express that view and the more who
express it the safer those who have yet
to express it but who hold it
will feel in expressing it and to the
extent that the view is very widespread
but is kept under wraps
an explosion could happen and you can
look up tomorrow and have a very
different country than you had
today because the
conspiracy of silence the spiral of
silence
ends up getting um unraveled uh by
somebody who steps out away from the
consensus dares to take the slings and
arrows of exposing themselves as a
naysayer but taps into a sentiment
that's uh that's very widespread and i
fear that with respect to
many racial issues
this is uh the situation that we
actually confront that it could unravel
in a very ugly way
but it can also unravel in
in a beautiful way so it's the
depending there is a spiral of silence
you're saying and it could be because
speaking of children
uh charismatic children uh there's a guy
named elon musk
who might be a candidate for
such an unraveling
right you mentioned uh
the person that speaks up could be a
donald trump but in this current
uh situation that we live in like as
this week
uh elon has purchased twitter that's
what i hear
and it's pushing for
um in all kinds of ways the increase of
free speech on twitter
and speaking about some of the
issues that we've been speaking about
here
with you but maybe in broader strokes
about just
the fact that you have to
it's okay to point out that the emperor
wears no clothes and to do so
from all sides in a way that everybody's
a little bit pissed off but not too much
what do you think about this whole
effort of free speech
on in these public platforms um elon in
particular twitter your uh avid twitter
user
um but just public platforms for
discourse for us as a civilization
to figure stuff out
yeah well
the people on the left are very upset
about the possibility that elon musk
uh and twitter will be open to more open
to
uh provocative uh public speech that has
heretofore been banned or suppressed
and um
i think they might be right to be
concerned that that could happen
i don't know enough about the technology
and about the market to really yeah i
mean
social media and whatnot it seems like
it's a complicated uh system of
interactions between people and who the
users are and so forth and so on
um i do know that that uh new york post
uh story about hunter biden's laptop was
real news
and could have affected the outcome of
the election and it was suppressed
and that uh twitter had a role in
suppressing it
i do know
that the question of where the covet 19
virus originated and the role that a lab
leak account could have played in the
public processing of that event was real
news
and that it was suppressed by people who
were trying to control
misinformation disinformation russian
disinformation campaigns and whatnot
uh so twitter has users i'm one of them
and it has a lot of users it's not as
big as facebook i gather it's not
but um it's important the ability to
construct
counter
platforms where people moving around and
whatnot
it's a kind of network dynamic that
maybe i should understand it better than
i do being a social scientist but i
don't think anyone understands this yeah
even people include inside twitter
which is fascinating it's a monster
because of just the bandwidth of
messaging and you don't know who is a
bot and who is a human that's a
fascinating dynamic
and the whole and the viral nature of
negativity yeah
that all of those dynamics of course you
are probably the right person to
understand it from a
social scientist perspective from an
economics perspective but nobody really
understands and it's fascinating within
that domain
how do you
allow for free speech not allow for free
speech encourage free speech defend free
speech
and at the same time
manage
millions of ongoing conversations
from
just
becoming in insanely
uh chaotic
sort of from from twitter perspective
they want people to be
happy to grow
to actually have difficult critical
conversations
and they you know the problem with
humans is they think they know what that
is and they
um think they can label things as
misinformation as as counterproductive
for healthy conversations in quotes
and the problem is as we are learning
humans are not able to do that
effectively first of all power corrupts
there's something delicious about having
the power to label something as
misinformation you do that once
for something that might be obviously
misinformation and then you start
getting greedy you start getting excited
it feels good it feels good to label
something as
misinformation or disinformation that
you just don't like
and over time especially if there's a
culture inside of a company that
leans a certain political direction or
leads in all the groups that we talked
about leans a certain way
they'll start to
label labels misinformation things they
just don't like and there's
that power is delicious and it corrupts
you have to construct mechanisms like
the founding fathers did for somehow
preventing you
from allowing that power to get too
delicious
at least that's my perspective on what's
going on i'll just tell you personally
i'm excited about the prospect i'm glad
to see musk making the move that he's
making and we'll see what happens at
twitter and so forth
you look you're looking forward for the
uh what did he say let's make twitter
more fun
i'm looking forward to uh
uh to the fun
you've talked about you are at a
prestigious university
brown university brown university
uh
and you've mentioned that universities
might be in trouble i think it's with
jordan but everywhere else that
barbarians are at the gate
who are the barbarians
at the gate
of the university so first of all
what is to you beautiful
about the ideal of the university
in america
of academia
and what is a threat well you know
a university is dedicated to the pursuit
of truth
um and to
uh the education and nurturing of young
people as they enter into the pursuit of
truth
to doing research into teaching
in a
environment of
free inquiry
and
civil discourse
so free inquiry means you go wherever
the evidence and your imagination may
lead you
and civil discourse means that you
exchange arguments with people when you
don't agree with them on behalf of
trying to get to the bottom of things
um i think the university is a
magnificent institution it is a
relatively modern
uh institution i mean
last 500 years or so i mean there are
universities that are older than that
but
the great research universities of the
world and not only here in the united
states
uh are places where human ingenuity is
nurtured uh where new lot knowledge is
created
and where young people are
equipped to uh answer questions that are
open questions about uh our our
existence in the world that we live in
you can trace to the university much if
not most of the
advances in technology and
resourcefulness and our understanding of
the origins of the species of the nature
of the universe cosmology et cetera
science uh the pursuit of uh humanistic
understanding the
nurturing of uh traditions of
inquisitive so that's the university
barbarians at the gates
the people who are trying to shut down
open inquiry at the university on behalf
of their particular view about things
are a threat to what the university
stands for
and they should be resisted
so
if i'm
inquiring about the nature of human
intelligence
and i want to study differences between
human populations and their acquisition
of or their expression of
cognitive ability that's fair game it's
an open question if if i want to know
something about the nature of
gender
affiliation and identity and gender
dysphoria and whatnot
that's fair game to study in the
university you can't shut that down
you shouldn't be able to
by saying
i have a particular position here i'm a
member of a particular identity group
suppose i want to study the uh history
of colonialism
and there's a narrative
on the progressive
side which is colonialism is about
europeans dominating and stealing or
whatever whatever and i happen to think
well there's another aspect to the story
about colonialism too which is that it's
a mechanism for the diffusion
of the best in human civilization to
populations that were
significantly lagging behind with
respect to that it brought literacy
to the southern hemispheric populations
that were dominated in the process of
the colonizing thing it's complicated
i'm not taking that position by the way
i'm just saying somebody at a university
should be able
to take it up
and pursue it and engage in argument
with people about it i'm talking about
race and ethnicity but this extends to a
a wide range of things suppose we're
talking about climate
and one person says the earth is
endangered because carbon
in global warming et cetera et cetera
and another person says no wait no wait
look at where we stand in the 21st
century we're vastly richer than our
ancestors just 250 years ago we have
much more knowledge about that and so
forth and so on 250 years from now
human ingenuity will have devised in
ways that we cannot even begin to
anticipate
all manner of technological uh
means for managing the problem there's
no reason that we should shut down
industrial civilization today
because we fear the consequences of it
when in fact we are vastly richer than
our ancestors and those who come up two
centuries after us will be
vastly more effective at dealing with
problems than we are now
let's it's you know etc i'm not actually
making that argument i'm just saying
the tendency to try to say oh no that
person is a climate denier they can't
pursue that area of inquiry uh is
against the spirit
of the university
uh i think the barbarians at the gates
has to do with the people who think they
know what the right side of history is
and try to make the university stand on
the right side of history
my position is you don't know what the
right side of history is
and the purpose of a university is to
equip you to be able to think about
what is the right side of history what
is the solution to the dilemmas that
confront us
uh as human beings living um on this
planet with the billions that we are in
the condition that we are
so um the identitarians the ones who
want to make the university kowtow
to their particular understandings about
their own identity
um we now have at the at brown
university and various other places we
don't do columbus day anymore we do
indigenous people's day
when that day comes up in october
we don't talk about columbus they're
taking down statues of columbus all
across the country and so forth and so
on
i'm not arguing anything here other than
that
the
latter-day position
by pox
black indigenous and other people of
color the latter day position that the
university has to reflect a particular
sensibility about these identity
questions
i think it's a threat to the integrity
of the enterprise i don't think you're
overstating it i
i tend to be just for my limited
knowledge of
mit but perhaps it applies broadly
i think the beauty of the university
broadly speaking is the faculty and the
students
and
the problem arises
from the overreach
of a
overgrowing administration
that gives
again
thinks that it knows enough to make
rules and conclusions based on a set of
beliefs
and then based on that empowers a
certain small selection of students
to be the sort of voices of activism
of a particular idea
and not i think activism is beautiful
but not just activism but anybody that
disagrees is shut down
and that that i think the the the blame
lies with the administration so i think
the solution is in lessening just like
the solution with too big of a
government too big of a bureaucracy is
there needs to be
a
uh redistribution of power to what makes
universities beautiful which is the
old students and the young students old
students being
professors
so
the scholars the curious minds the
people that are in this whole thing
to explore the world to be curious about
it
on a salary that's probably way too low
for the thing they're doing that's
that's the that's the whole point and
then the administration
just gets in the way
and um
is the source of this kind of they i
would say that
in your beautiful phrasing i will say
the administration is the barbarians at
the gate so um the solution is
smaller bureaucracies smaller
administrations i have to on this point
you had this conversation you put on
yourself stack
with jordan uh jordan peterson
about cognitive inequality i think it's
titled wrestling with cognitive
inequality
this particular topic of
just iq differences between groups
why is this
why is it so dangerous to talk about
why this particular topic
well it's like you're calling black
people inferior it's like you're saying
they're genetically inferior that's what
people are saying it's like you're
rationalizing the disparity of outcomes
by reference to the
intrinsic inferiority of black people if
you if you say cognitive ability matters
for social outcomes if you say cognitive
ability exists
people really are different in terms of
their intellectual functioning and if
you say cognitive ability differences
are
are substantial between racially defined
populations
the sum of that there is cognitive
ability it matters and the difference by
race is the conclusion
that outcome differences by race are in
part due to natural differences between
the populations people find that to be
completely offensive and unacceptable so
that's what i think is going on
can you still man that case
that we should be careful doing that
kind of research
so
this has to do with research
it's like uh the nazis used
nietzsche
in their propaganda
right is you can use white supremacists
could use
conclusions
um cherry-pick conclusions of studies
to uh to push their uh to push their
agenda can you steal man the case that
we should be careful yeah i could do it
at three levels one is
what do we mean by cognitive ability so
there's many different kinds of
intelligence a person might say
how good are iq tests at measuring
other kinds of human capacities that are
pertinent to
success in life like temperament
like emotional intelligence and so on so
intelligence is not a one-dimensional
thing measured by g
the
cognitive psychologists talk about g the
general intelligence factor which is a
statistical construction
it's a factor analytic uh resolution of
the
correlation
across individuals in their performance
on a battery a different kind of test
and they
use that to
to define a general factor of
intelligence and a person could say
that is a very narrow view of what human
mental capacities actually are
and that uh it's much better to think
about
multi-dimensional measures of human
mental functioning rather than a single
cognitive ability measure so-called iq
which is a narrow
construction
that doesn't capture all of the
subtle nuance of human difference in
functioning functioning is not just the
ability to
recite backwards a sequence of numbers i
say eight seven nine five three two you
say two three five seven eight nine it's
not just that intelligence is
a
complex
uh management of many different
dimensions of human performance
including
uh things like being able to stick with
a task and and not give up
things like being able to discipline and
control your impulses so as to remain
focused and so forth
um that could be one dimension i could
start by questioning the very foundation
of the argument
for racial differences in
cognitive ability by saying that your
measure of cognitive ability is
flawed
i could go to a higher level i could say
what we're really interested in
is
social outcomes and the question of what
factors
influence social outcomes extends well
beyond mental ability to many other
things so here's an example
visual acuity
how well do you see
you're not wearing glasses i am
visual acuity
varies between human beings some people
see better than other people do
visual acuity can be measured
i can put you at the chart and you can
can you identify and read that bottom
line in small print or not so we can
measure visual acuity and it varies
between human beings
visual acuity is partly genetic
i think that's undoubtedly true
we inherit genes that influence whether
or not we are nearsighted or farsighted
or astigmatic or whatever
so visual acuity differs between people
and can be measured and is under genetic
control
on the other hand
corrective lenses
allow for us to level the playing field
between people who are differently
endowed in terms of visual acuity
likewise social outcomes are what we're
really interested in employment earnings
whether or not they're law abiding how
do they conduct themselves and their
families and so forth amongst
individuals
yes social outcomes are influenced by
so-called cognitive ability but they're
influenced by many other things as well
if they can if there are interventions
that can be undertaken in society that
level the playing field between people
who have different natural endowments
cognitive ability the fact that people
or groups differ in cognitive ability
becomes less significant just like it's
less significant that people differ with
respect to how well they see when
corrective lenses allow
for the leveling of that playing field
there are in fact interventions
educational interventions early
childhood interventions that have been
shown to level the playing field to
create better life outcomes for people
even if they
happen to be endowed with low
intelligence so a second level
of arguing against this whole program of
research on human differences and
intelligence is to observe that yes
human beings and perhaps racially
defined groups may differ on the average
in intellectual endowment but there well
may be social interventions that level
the playing field whether it's in
education or in other kinds of
programmatic interventions especially
for the poor
a final level of argument is the one
that you alluded to which is that if you
talk like this you're going to encourage
a kind of politics which is very ugly
and it's best
to frame the discussion
in ways that don't put emphasis on
uh racially defined natural differences
between populations
uh that's a argument that i am myself
personally
uh conflicted about
on the one hand i think
you know
those people are just stupid
it is uh racist okay
on the other hand i think
the calculation we shouldn't do this
kind of research suppose i'm at the
national science foundation a research
team submits a proposal the proposal
proposes to undertake a study the study
would explore the extent to which
people and racial groups differ with
respect to their intellectual
performance and how that's influenced by
their genetic and environmental
interaction and i decide not to fund the
study based on a political calculation
that the subject is too sensitive
and if you explore that subject you
might get the wrong answer and if you
get the wrong answer the white
supremacist will be encouraged
well
that is presuming before the research is
done
that i know the outcome of the research
and that i can calculate what the
political consequence of the research
outcome is going to be
that's that's assuming the thing before
you even know what the thing actually is
it's a kind of omniscience it presumes
that you as the master of the universe
can tell people what it is that people
are being treated like children what it
is that they're capable of knowing and
what it is that they're not capable of
knowing it would be like someone saying
to einstein
i don't know about that special
relativity theory you know it could well
lead to
the development of technologies that
would allow nuclear weapons and someone
saying that oppenheimer who is a
physicist overseeing the manhattan
project where the u.s developed a
nuclear weapons capacity
don't carry out that project
because
the results of acquiring that knowledge
may be more than we can
deal with or someone saying to someone
doing biomedical research who's
interested in exploring
uh the nature of the human genome don't
carry out that experiment that cloning
uh undertaking whatever because the
consequences could be
uh deleterious well the consequences
could be deleterious the consequences
could also be the cure of cancer the
consequences could also be being able to
generate electric power without
producing carbon effluent uh so
who are you to tell me who you being the
person in the political position to
control the research
what the consequence of doing the
research is i i think
i don't want to cede
that kind of power to politicians
over the course of of human inquiry so
yes i would want there to be regulations
governing the use of
biologically sensitive and potentially
dangerous
pathogens in a lab in wuhan
or anyplace else i would i would not
want to simply leave that to laissez
faire
on the other hand i think that the
tendency to try to shut down inquiry
on behalf of supposed adverse political
consequences is the road to ignorance
and uh impoverishment at the end of the
day for humankind denying ourselves the
potential benefits of that kind of
inquiry i think we need to take our
chances with inquiry rather than to try
to control it and i feel that way about
the exploration of human intelligence
as much as anything else so you've asked
me to steel man the case against
research on iq of the sort that charles
murray is famous for popularizing and
i've said hey
your measure of intelligence is single
dimensional and it ought to be
multi-dimensional
i've said b
the consequences of people's differing
in intelligence depends not only on the
natural endowments of the people but
also on the
environment and the potential for
intervening in that environment
environment through one or another kind
of instrument as the metaphorical
example of the use of corrective lenses
to level the playing field between
people with different visual acuity
indicates but finally i've said
yes
research on racial differences in iq can
foster
political beliefs that we would regard
to be
um
obnoxious
on the other hand
to presume that what we don't know yet
and might find out from the research is
going to be harmful is to assume a kind
of
presumption or of knowing what the
outcome of unknown processes might be
which we ought to be very slow to
embrace
because if we had done so in the past we
wouldn't have nuclear power uh there's a
lot of things that we wouldn't know i
mean what were people saying about
darwin and uh exploration of the
evolution and origin of the species they
were afraid that it was gonna in effect
disprove the uh religious based accounts
of you know
what were they saying about copernicus
and et cetera et cetera so you know
that was a masterful
layering of uh quote wrestling with the
cognitive inequality he dragged in
nuclear research
uh uh copernicus darwin biomedical
research with genetics even covet and
and um
uh the lab leak i mean this that was
that's
that was just fun to listen to okay okay
let me ask you about your politics uh so
you've recently said that you're a
conservative leaning
i mean maybe that's a day-to-day thing
um maybe you can push back but
uh so you have somebody like your friend
john mcwhorter yeah uh who we could say
is uh on your left yeah to the left of
you and then you have somebody like um
uh
thomas sold who
maybe is un
to the right of you yeah probably uh and
yet there's a lot of overlap between the
three of you right so to what degree
does politics affect
your view on race
in america
and maybe to what degree does your
uh view on race affect your politics
okay and that for people who don't know
has shifted over time
you've been on quite a roller coaster
as anybody who thinks about the world
should be
well
let's begin with the fact that i
was trained as an economist
in a tradition of
what many people would call
neoliberalism i was trained at mit which
was not
a right-wing place by any means
but it was a place
where
you learned about markets
and about the benefits of
capitalism as a way of organizing
society
the virtues of free enterprise
the fact that the pursuit of profit was
not necessarily a bad thing but it well
might be
the road to prosperity and to economic
growth the idea that private property
and individuals seeking to acquire and
succeeding in acquiring wealth
did create inequality but it also
created opportunity and it also expanded
our knowledge and our control over of
the physical environment which were
embedded in etc
um
so we were not marxist
at mit although we did read marks i mean
those of us who are intellectually
curious you read marx marx was an
important
figure in the history of the west and i
think mark should be read and capital
three volumes etc
uh alienation of labor uh and whatnot
the implications of modernization of the
advent of industrial capitalism et
cetera that that kind of dynamic
uh deserves to be studied and to come at
it in a critical way
uh
informed by the intellectual inheritance
of marx and marxism i think that's a
part of a full education in social
philosophy and and uh economic analysis
that a open-minded person ought to
acquaint themselves with but at the end
of the day i think that the
uh
i think that the free marketeers have
the better of it
i think the story of the 20th century as
far as economic development is concerned
reflects that i think that the
experiments where
centralized control over economic
decisions
was the order of the day
failed
i think that the
fact of the 21st century rise of china
as a force
has a lot to do with the spread of in
effect
capitalist oriented modes of entering
economic exchange freeing up prices
markets property uh and so forth
although obviously it's a complicated
political economic system i'm talking
about china
um but uh i think that the uh story of
the 20th century and the hope for the
21st century is that
prosperity is enhanced through
the
free exchange of goods and the pursuit
and acquisition of property
uh by people in a more or less
capitalist oriented
uh
a system that that's you know that's the
view that i hold i guess that makes me a
conservative i don't know i want to say
that's not to the exclusion
of a social safety net i'm not saying
that old people
in an ideal social system would be left
to their own devices regardless of
whether or not they had saved for their
retirement i'm not saying that
uh the ideal
of extending decent
access to health care to all people
regardless of whether or not they can
afford it
decent access to education to people
regardless of whether or not they can
afford it is standing in the way of
prosperity i don't believe that i think
the mixed economies that we see in
northern europe and in north america
uh are
a balancing
of the virtues of free enterprise
property and the pursuit of wealth on
the one hand
against the
the needs to have a decent society in
which people who fall between the cracks
nevertheless are
bolstered through a sense of social
solidarity that is accommodated by our
common membership within a single
nation state which is why i think
nationalism is important and it's why i
think borders are important because
without a coherent
polity
who can
uh see themselves as in a common
situation and
agree through their politics to support
each other to some extent you can't
sustain a safety net you cannot you
cannot have a social safety net for a
global population you can only have a
social safety net for a bounded
population who have a sense of common
membership
in
an ongoing political enterprise which
they pay their dues through their taxes
in order to sustain it there's a
balancing that has to go on so that's
the first thing that i would say about
my politics
i'm a neo-liberal economist i believe in
markets i believe in prices i believe in
profit
corporations are not an incarnation of
evil
corporations are a legal nexus through
which
production gets organized in which you
solicit the cooperation of workers of
people who provide capital of people who
provide raw materials and input of
customers uh and so on and that
functionality
allows for the production of goods and
their distribution
and the earning of income and its
distribution which at the end of the day
is the foundation of our prosperity
corporations are people too mitt romney
got in trouble for saying that in 2012
but corporations are nothing but illegal
fiction the corporation is not a person
as such
but the nexus of contracts and
relationships amongst the stakeholders
who intersect in the
context of the corporation is the way in
which we organize the massively complex
set of activities that are necessary in
order to produce
economic
benefits in order to feed people in
order to
have everybody with a cell phone in
their pocket in order to be able to
travel from one side of a continent to
another on a device that is with almost
absolute certainty going to safely take
off
in land and in order to be able to build
cities and it's etc but do the markets
the ideal of the market collide with the
ideal of all men are created equal
the identity the struggle that we've
been talking about of
of what it means to sort of empower
humans that make up this great country
do they collide and where do they
collide well markets are going to
produce inequality
and
all men being equal is a statement about
the intrinsic worth of people
not about the situation that will come
about when people interact with each
other through markets because people are
actually different
uh and because there are factors that
are beyond anybody's control called luck
and chance that you know i you and i
both invest
uh it looked our priority like your
investment and my investment were
equally likely to succeed but as a
matter of fact ex post facto your
investment succeeds my investment
doesn't succeed
i don't have wealth and you have wealth
that is an inevitable consequence of a
environment in which both of us are free
to make our investment choices
and where the consequences of investment
depend in part upon
random circumstances of which no one has
control
but you asked me about my politics and i
was just trying to lay down a foundation
by saying i begin
as an economist
in the tradition of uh liberalism adam
smith and so forth john maynard keynes
for that matter and so forth
uh that um
milton friedman and so forth that uh
paul samuelson bob solo
uh james tobin uh
and so forth uh thomas soul yes
uh that appreciates property
the virtues of free
enterprise uh the
set of institutions that allow for
a security of contract a rule of law
things of this kind
so that's one thing to say about my
politics
another thing to say about my politics
and you're right i've moved around
is that you know i began south side of
chicago black kid i was a liberal
democrat
um
i
encountered uh the economic curriculum
at the mit and i i became trained in
economics in the tradition that i've
just described
and i encountered uh also
the reagan revolution this is the late
70s and early 80s
these are big debates about
economic policy and so on
um and uh i found a lot to admire uh in
the supply ciders
uh the people were saying you know let's
get the government out of the way the
people who are worried about national
debt which is a lot more now than it was
then
the people were worried that the welfare
state could be too big that the
incentives of transfer programs could be
counterproductive that you had a war on
poverty and we did have a war on poverty
and poverty won and there's a lot of
evidence that the war on poverty was
lost by the people who were trying to
quote unquote eradicate poverty in our
time
um
that
incentives really do matter and that the
state
which is driven by politics is often
unresponsive to the dictates of
incentives whereas markets
eliminate people who are inefficient who
are not cognizant of the consequences of
incentives because they can't cover
their bottom line and they won't persist
for very long if they can't cover their
bottom line they're forced to respond to
the realities of differences in costs
and benefits and so forth in a way that
governments can cover because they have
their hand in our pocket they can cover
their losses and they can make accounts
balance notwithstanding their mistakes
because they can take my property by
fiat
by the power of the state the tax
collector comes if i don't pay he seizes
my holdings and
they can carry on in that way they need
the corrective influence of markets in
order to be responsive to the realities
of life i mean i may not like it
that uh prices are
telling me that something that i want to
do is infeasible i may not like it but
what the prices are telling me is that
the costs of doing it
exceed the benefits to be derived from
doing it and if i persist in doing it
notwithstanding that i'm going to run
losses and those losses will accumulate
and the net effect of that over an
entire society
is stagnation
and ultimate attenuation of the economic
benefits that might be available with
people again i think if you look at the
developing world
in the post-colonial period the second
half of the 20th century that's exactly
what you see
planning doesn't work centralized
control over resource allocation doesn't
work okay so i became more conservative
in that respect but i also and this has
to do with race
lost the faith
in
the
posture
that uh beca what became of the civil
rights movement i mean the civil rights
movement you quote king 1963 the civil
rights movement starts out as
um
we want equal membership in the polity
um but it becomes
uh
a a a
a
systematized
a cover
i'm going to argue
for deficiencies that are uh
discernible within black american
society which only we could correct
that's a very controversial statement
uh i i make it with trepidation i i
don't take any pleasure in saying it
but here's what i'm talking about
so i'm talking about the family
so the family
is a matter
internal
to the community about how men and women
relate to each other
and engage in social reproduction child
bearing
uh the standing up of households
the context within which children are
developed are maturing and so forth and
so on so the african-american family
is in trouble i think i can demonstrate
that by reference to
high rates of marital dissolution
uh
by high rates of birth to uh out of
wedlock and so forth
um
you can't even say that the
african-american family is in trouble
violence
homicide is the order of magnitude more
prevalent amongst african americans than
it is in the society as a whole
this is behavior it's behavior of our
people i speak of black people of course
we're not the only people in society for
whom violence is an issue it's an order
of magnitude
more prevalent
uh in our communities i'm talking about
schooling and school failure
so we have affirmative action as a cover
it's a band-aid
on differences in the development of
intellectual performance which is only
partly a consequence of the natural
intelligence of people and largely a
consequence of how people spend their
time what they value
how they discipline themselves what they
do with their
opportunities how parents raise their
children what peer groups value and
things of this kind the asian students
who are scoring off the charts on these
exams
are doing it not because they're
intrinsically more intelligent to other
people but because they work harder
because their parents are more insistent
on focusing on their intellectual
performance because they're disciplined
uh because of the way that they devote
their time and their resources to
uh equipping their children to function
in the 21st century this is what i
believe i think it's demonstrably the
case
and it is a factor in racial disparity
the way that the civil rights movement
has evolved under the wing of the
democratic party
into an organized appalachia
uh of for the failures of african
americans to seize the opportunities
that exist for us now in the 21st
century but did not exist
in the first half of the 20th century
the way in which the civil rights
movement has become
an avoidance mechanism
for us not taking we african-americans
responsibly this is glenn lowry not
everybody's going to agree with it
uh is part of what makes me
a conservative i am tired of the
bellyaching i'm tired of the excuse me
white supremacy
uh it is in my mind
a joke uh i lament the fact that that
kind of rhetoric
is so seductively
attractive to african americans and so
widely adopted by others
and
as i am fond of saying at the end of the
day nobody is coming to save us
i mean
higher education
mit caltech stanford
the where the future is happening
that is about mastery over the
achievements of human civilization
such as they manifest themselves in the
21st century there's no substitute for
actually acquiring mastery
over the material there's no substitute
for that
to be
uh patronized
to have the standards lower they want to
get rid of the test
they want to tell african americans uh
pat us on the head
uh we're gonna have a separate program
for you we're gonna give you a side door
that you can come into that doesn't make
us any smarter
it doesn't make us any more creative
um and it doesn't make us any more fit
for the actual competition that's
unfolding before us now
you want to be 10 of the population
that's carried along for the next 100
years you want to be
uh
a ward of the state in the late 21st
century you go ahead because the chinese
are coming
you're not going to hold them back the
world is being remade every decade by
new ways of seeing and new ways of doing
if you don't get on board with the
dynamic advancement of the civilization
in which we are embedded you're going to
end up being dependent on other people
to look kindly upon you in this story
that you've got this uh bellyache
this excuse my ancestors were slaves
it's only gonna
work
for so long
so that's that makes me i suppose a kind
of conservatives i hate
affirmative action i don't just disagree
with it i don't just think it's against
the 14th amendment i hate it
the hatred comes from an understanding
that it is a band-aid that is a
substitute for the actual development
over the capacities of our people to
compete
i'd much rather be in the position
of having them try to keep me out
because i'm so damn good like they're
doing with the asians
then having them have to beg the supreme
court to allow for a special
dispensation on my behalf because they
need
diversity and inclusion and belonging
it's not just diversity it's not just
diversity and inclusion there's
diversity and inclusion and belonging
i'm whining because i feel like i don't
belong
that's a position of weakness it's
pathetic
uh and it's only political correctness
that keeps people who can see this and
believe me a lot of people can see it
from saying so out loud
so you want
the black american community to
represent strength
correct and i want us to deal with what
it is that we have to deal with in order
to be able to
project strength
uh in in an increasingly competitive
world
let me ask you
i know you said you're angry
um
or dislike affirmative action let me ask
you
about something that even to my ear cut
wrong um now i'm relatively apolitical
so
president biden when he was running for
president gave a campaign
promise that he will nominate a black
woman to the u.s supreme court saying
quote
the person i will nominate will be
someone with extraordinary
qualifications character experience and
integrity
first sentence second sentence and that
person will be the first black woman
ever nominated to the united states
supreme court
do you wish he only said the first
sentence and not the second
yes i wish that he had only said the
first sentence
even if his intention was to do what he
said he was going to do in the second
sentence yes in other words i wish that
he had simply said
if i have the opportunity to nominate
someone to the supreme court it's going
to be a superbly qualified person to
carry out that position and he might
have kept to himself his intention
to name an african-american woman to
that position and then gone ahead and
named an african-american woman to that
position and i'm sure that katanji
brown jackson
i don't doubt that she's exceptionally
qualified she has a distinguished career
she served as a judge on the d.c circuit
court of appeals she's a graduate at
harvard law school she has a background
you do not have to be
a
world-class constitutional legal scholar
to get onto the united states supreme
court a lot of members of the united
states supreme court have had different
kinds of
legal careers before they were elevated
to that position
earl warren of the famed warren court of
the 1950s and 60s was a politician
as well as a leading jurors and whatnot
i mean many kind of people in the u.s
supreme court i have no doubt
that judge
katanji brown jackson is a qualified
member to be on the supreme court
i wish that biden had not done what he
did
he could have just appointed a black
woman
by saying that he was limiting his
considerations to black women and what
are black women as a percentage of all
potential appointees to the supreme
court
three percent
four percent i don't know we could look
the number up
uh the
by saying that he puts an asterisk on
the appointment but it's worse than that
because she will live down the asterisk
if a person is inclined to to do that
she will have the opportunity to show
through her performance uh exactly what
kind of juror she is just as justice
clarence thomas has shown through his
performance
that he was qualified and more than
qualified to be on the
united states supreme court
what i disliked was the pandering
he was seeking votes from black people
by pandering to us
and he's treating us like children
why should i care what color the person
is who's on the united states supreme
court what i should care about is what
kind of
opinions they're going to write when
they're on the united do i suppose that
being a black woman means that you're
going to write different kind of
opinions on others well
perhaps
that kind of identity politics at the
highest level of american legal
uh establishment
is something that rubs me very much the
wrong way
uh what i should care about is
uh the nature and the future of the law
i mean i'm actually struck by this
because
uh the court is conservative
it has six conservative members on it
and it has three liberal members on it
um
and uh if i were and i'm not a liberal
democrat the highest concern that i
would have about an appointment to the
supreme court is
is this a person
who is going to be effective in
advocating my liberal views within the
highest council of american law
now the fact that that person is a woman
or as a black person is way down the
list
of the things that i would think are
important
to
the kinds of opinions that they're going
to write
so i mean i think uh joe biden
this is just a piece of a larger
political strategy
to cobble together a coalition that'll
be successful at the polls
in sustaining democrats uh jim crow 2.0
this whole characterization of the uh
conflict
in the states about election security
and voting rights is another part
of that strategy he is pandering
to black voters he is
trying to frighten us
thinking that if the republicans win our
rights will be taken away
uh and uh
i i think it
is a
infantilization of african-american
politics i i think
black people are not to be as concerned
about the color of the skin of a person
who is serving in government as they are
about the content of their character
and the
focus of their of their political and
ideological orientation
which for me
would be center or even center right
but that's me
and it should not have a significant
impact nevertheless he said she can
overcome the asterisks but to me it was
deeply disrespectful that
um anyone would give an extra asterisk
stuff to overcome he didn't have to say
it all he had to do was do it if he
wanted to put a black woman on the court
they could just go ahead and done it the
reason he said it is because he wanted
black people to vote for him by saying
it
and i'm saying that treats us like we're
children uh you know it's not a
political statement i just thought as a
leader that was
not
um those that was kind of disgusting
um let me ask you about thomas solo you
mentioned him he's
a colleague and somebody who's an
influence
what
uh in the space of ideas
so what broadly
what impact has he had
on your ideas
and um how do you think he shaped the
landscape of ideas in our culture in
general i think thomas soule is in his
90s now he's been around for a long time
he's still got it he's still going at it
he's still going at the books continue
to come out i think he's a great man
um i think thomas soule
regardless of his race he's black
is one of the
most significant economists of the 20th
century
he has chosen as his subject a
substantial part of his subject subject
to investigate
the deep causes and consequences of
racial disparity of one kind or another
he's written
fundamental books about that
many of them he's a social philosopher
he is a economic historian
he is a
combatant in the conflict of ideas
around how to think about society and
this beyond racial differences although
race has been a big part of what he's
written about he's been critical of
affirmative action and he didn't just
stand back and wag his finger he got
busy looking at the consequences of
affirmative action in societies all
around the world and he's written books
about that
he's been critical of the
narrative about civil rights and racial
inequality he believes in small
government he doesn't think
that efforts to redistribute income have
proved to be the solution to the problem
of
racial disparity
tom has not been honored by the
committee that hands out nobel
recognition in economic science and
probably won't be because he's
controversial and i reckon that that
committee
would be low to encourage the blowback
that they would be sure to receive if
they were to take a
controversial and politically
uh uh
focused and expressive black
conservative and honor in that way so i
think another reason is that tom as a
methodological methodological matter
is not especially quantitative he pays
attention to data but he doesn't do
statistical analysis and he doesn't do
modeling
so from a methodological point of view
he's not a cutting edge kind of
mathematically sophisticated kind of
quantitatively
statistically oriented but he does
descriptive stuff he writes in a style
that is much more like a social
historian than it is like a like a
mathematically trained analytical
economist on the other hand he is an
economist in the chicago school with
milton friedman and george stickler
prominent amongst his teachers who
takes price theory
which is the
analysis of the interplay of market
forces
uh mindful of incentives
and so on uh to you know
uh implement the basic insights from uh
economic science you know there is no
free lunch i mean there's always going
to be a cost anything that you do and so
on people respond to incentives demand
curve slope downward um you know
competition tends to work best when
people are free to enter and not and
so on i mean uh that kind of thing but
tom is also a social historian and
uh philosopher in the tradition of a
friedrich phone hayek
uh one of tom's books i deeply admire
knowledge and decisions is an extension
of the haiki and arguments uh about uh
the
limits of central planning and
whatnot
so
i think tom seoul thomas soule
african-american
born as i understand it in louisiana
raised in new york city
uh graduate of harvard college
a military veteran
um a phd in economics from the
university of chicago
um a black conservative social scientist
of a very high stature i think he's a
great man and one of the great
intellectuals of the 20th century and
you're saying
implicitly uh deserves a nobel prize
yeah
i i do think so i mean
uh hayek was awarded by the committee uh
gunnar maridol uh the swedish uh
economist wrote about economic
development wrote a famous
two-volume work an american dilemma
about the status of blackstone i mean i
think tom
could be
uh you know put in that company very
easily without any difficulty i agree
daniel kahneman
them so it doesn't have to be new
psychologists he's not an economist yeah
um uh eleanor ostrom uh the political
scientist who was honored in a joint
prize given to her and oliver williamson
uh 15 years ago or so
uh he he could be put in that company
really quite easily
let me ask you you mentioned obama in
this
in the very beginning that we were
talking about
how did it feel
uh that seems like forever ago that in
2008 barack obama became president now
at that time
perhaps you
identify as conservative already
uh but how did so politics aside
just in general um
how did it feel
that in 150 years where this country has
come along
well yeah i i didn't identify in 2008 as
a conservative to the same extent that i
do today
uh i was i was kind of in transition yet
again
i was excited by the obama candidacy
at first i was skeptical
because after all he's not black
the man's father is a kenyan and the
man's mother
is a white uh american and uh he
identifies as black
i find it interesting that the first
black president of the united states and
i could have put inverted commas around
black and the first black vice president
of the united states
neither of them descend from american
slaves
kamala harris's father is of african
ancestry in part
he's a jamaican immigrant and her mother
is an indian
immigrant she was kamala harris
raised up largely in
canada
though born in the united states
um
barack obama is
as i've said
of mixed ancestry and neither of his
parents
are the descendants of uh
of uh american descendants of african
slaves but
blackness is
flexible it's it's it's uh
something that you can put on or you can
take off to a certain degree for some
people and
so be it
i was excited
our time has come
hope and change
we are the ones we've been waiting for
these are slogans from 2008.
i can't believe i bought that crap
oh interesting let me push back here
you talked about it's i mean to me a jew
is a jew
skin color
is skin color yeah
i mean
he
barack obama is black
okay when it matters
when you're talking to a white
supremacist yeah when you're talking to
when you
if you're a slave owner he's black just
like you said
when hitler comes around
a jew is a jew it doesn't matter how you
identify it doesn't matter what
so in that sense
don't you think that
barack obama is black in the most
powerful of ways
which is designating how far
the mlk the dr king vision
oh sure and look i i said it a little
bit tongue-in-cheek yes yes of course
but i think obama
has been very careful about
manufacturing a kind of public persona
that is intended to
um
position him in the most effective way
you mean like every politician yeah like
every politician sure and that the
racial identity piece is an aspect of
that
i mean
anything i say here would only be
speculation because i have no facts
about the personal history of barack
obama and i accept barack hussein obama
as hillary clinton once said i take him
at his word
uh about uh
whatever she was talking about
uh well was he a christian i think is
what the the question was and uh you
know there was some right-wing attack on
obama for
you know having been raised in for some
years in the philippines and um all of
that or indonesia i beg your pardon in
indonesia and
his stepfather and all of that but uh
she took him at his word and i take him
at his word
about his racial identity no but you
were captivated by the power of his
words and you regret to the degree you
were captivated well i mean i think in
retrospect that whole campaign looks
like a pie in the sky kind of
uh
fairy tale
we are the ones we've been waiting for
i can't quote exactly that speech that
he gave in grant park in chicago when he
was announced as the winner of the
election
but
today is the day that the rise of the
ocean stopper words to this effect i
mean
uh those who doubted that uh we could do
it that tonight is your answer this was
going to be a new day it was going to be
a new regime well it wasn't a new day
and it wasn't a new regime it was
american politics more or less as usual
barack obama turns out not to be the
messiah maybe there should be no
surprise in that
race relations got set back during
obama's tenure
my beef with obama
is that
you okay you're black you say you're
black you're black
you got elected now we have a black
president
a black president
you can do stuff that nobody else could
do
you're a black president
you could tell the people burning down
the city
to get their butts back in their houses
and to stop it
you know you could tell the race
hustlers
the al sharptons of the world
not only has our time come for those who
supported my my campaign your time is
over for those who want to uh carry on
uh
a advocacy
rooted in racial grievance
the election of myself to this highest
office proves that the institution of
the state are legitimate and open
to all comers
i think
barack obama when the s-h-i-t hit the
fan
if i had a son he looked like trayvon i
deeply regret that he said that he's
president of the united states the color
of his skin and the color of trayvon's
skin
the correlation between those two things
if i had a son he looked like trayvon
now he says
when he said it
he only meant to sympathize with the
parents
but in fact when he said it from the
highest office in the land
and then sent his attorney general eric
holder out to enforce this narrative
he doubled down on a racial narrative
that i think is actually false
i think the
story that systemic racism in america as
reflected in policing that terrorizes
black people because of the color of the
skin
is demonstrably false
i think that the central threat
to black lives
is violent crime
perpetrated largely by black people
against other black people i think there
is such a thing as police brutality and
i think there are reasons to have
regulations of police but i think it is
a second order issue
in terms of the
quality of life
of african americans i think obama could
have told the people who after freddie
gray died in police custody in a van in
baltimore and who
undertook to burn that city down
to get their asses off the street and go
back to their apartments to stop it i
think he could have said in the
aftermath of michael brown being shot
dead by darren wilson in ferguson
missouri and there was a
grand jury deliberation that elected not
to indict officer wilson and people took
the streets in that city and stood on
top of vehicles and so forth and so on
he could have told them
we don't mob around courthouses in this
country we respect the rule of law
get your butts off the streets
and back into your apartments he didn't
do that
uh so
to push back a little bit yeah good push
back
i think you're asking
barack obama the first
black president of the united states to
do the thing that
i think should be done by the second
black president of the united states i
think his very example given the color
of his skin
uh was the most powerful thing
and um actually
doing some of these hard thomas soul
type of glen lowry type of
strong words about race
it may be too much to ask given the
nature of modern day politics
he is a politician he is a politician he
needs to get elected he needed to get
re-elected
yeah um it was in his second term where
most of what i'm talking about happened
so he wasn't facing further election but
obama was what 46 or 47 when he was
inaugurated he served for eight years so
he's in his mid 50s he's got another
half century or 40 years of life god
willing
his post-presidency
i think was what was primarily on his
mind not getting elected to anything but
being enshrined in a certain way and the
the persona
that he is now embodying
uh which depends upon
um a racial narrative that i and thomas
soul and others object to
i think was very much in the forefront
of his mind when he made decisions as
the chief executive officer of the
country
uh that we've all now uh
have to live with yeah but the fact is
he opened the door in a way that hasn't
been done in the history
of of of this the united states
that
i don't see there being a
uh even a significant discussion when an
uh
an african-american a black man or a
black woman runs for president maybe a
black man let's say because there still
hasn't been a woman president i just see
that that
broke open the possibility of that
that's not even a discussion
and that that example by itself i mean
to me
the role of the president isn't just
policy it's to inspire it's to do the
um yeah
it's to do the dr king thing which is i
have a dream and
barack obama is an example of somebody
that could give one hell of a speech it
got you
to believe
obama is a smooth operator without any
question he's a master of his craft he
you know he did the impossible i mean he
beat hillary clinton in that primary
fight
um and uh he beat john mccain in that
general election
and hats off to him and moreover he
remains a a
iconic figure in american culture i
don't think there's any doubt about that
uh let me just mention
clarence thomas is also black
clarence thomas has a story
that is vivid and inspiring
just like obama's story he overcome
obstacles just like obama did i mean
extreme poverty and so forth and so on
clarence thomas has served
longer than any other
member of the united states supreme
court he is
one of nine justices
and it's three equal branches of
government so clarence thomas by my
arithmetic personifies 127th
of the american state
uh he is an
iconic figure
his example
should be an inspiration to americans of
all races but especially of black
american youngsters he happens to be
conservative
he's very conservative
so fucking what
he he too deserves to be in that
pantheon he is not
by the custodians of american education
clarence thomas's name is not on that
many schools barack obama's name will be
on many of them i'm not equating them
they're different people the offices are
very different
but the same logic that you just used to
extol the significance of barack obama's
ascendancy
could and should be applied to clarence
thomas in my opinion
yes but you know it's
the office but also
uh
there is a resume and there's
accomplishments but then there is
oratory and charisma and the number of
twitter followers
uh so there's ability to captivate a
large number of people
and that's a skill
that's a skill that
correlates but is not directly connected
to
with how impressive your resume is i
agree and moreover the judicial function
the judge doesn't go out and give
speeches of that sort because it's
exactly antithetical to what he's doing
he's a
custodian of the law and that's not a
popular uh
feature figure in american policy he
doesn't stand for election and it's a
good thing too
so i i take that point here i want to
say something else though that's
provocative the next black president you
say the first black president shouldn't
have been the one to do that the second
one should
is more likely than not going to be a
republican i'm not i don't have a
particular person in mind i'm just
saying i agree
i agree
and that's why it's going to be super
fun
uh let me ask you
to put put on your wise sage hat and
give advice to young people
so if you're talking to somebody who's
in high school in college what advice
would you give them about their career
about
life in general how to live a life they
can be proud of
well i'd say
the world is your oyster i mean first
order business you're not a victim i
don't care what color you are i don't
care you're male female you're gay
straight whatever the world is your
oyster
you are so privileged you sit here in
the united states of america a free
country a rich country everything is
possible for you believe me you can do
anything okay uh secondly i would say
uh mastery
over
the medium in which we're embedded
is the key to the future
so get educated focus
work hard uh you know
invest in your future
by acquiring the skills that you need to
be able to navigate the 21st century
i would say
the chinese are coming and i don't mean
anything against china i just mean to
say the world's a small place and it's
getting smaller
uh and uh
you know
you better get moving and you better get
moving quickly
i'd say your identity your coloration
your your orientation your your your
category uh is not the most important
thing about you that
uh you know so uh the the temptation to
limit yourself i mean i give this speech
to my my kids i say
um
i i quote james joyce
uh
he has a a passage in um
portrait of an artist as a young man
in which he says uh
do you know what ireland is
ireland is an old sow
that eats her pharaoh
this is
joyce
he says
uh stephen daedalus is the character
that he has in mind in this uh chronicle
he says
uh
your ethnic inheritance he's talking
about irish nationalism
are like nets holding you back
that your challenge is to learn how to
turn those nets into wings
and thereby to fly
okay flying into the open skies
of modern society
don't be your
grandfather don't be your father
don't wear your thing so heavily that it
keeps you from being open to everything
that's new in the world
wear it lightly
yes everybody comes from somewhere but
it doesn't have to be where you end up
uh so you're you're not your father
you're not your grandfather
you you are this uh wonderfully blessed
uh human being in the middle of going
into the middle of the 21st century
um and uh
don't miss it
don't don't don't live blinkeredly
don't live small
live big
uh
live big and uh wear
your history
lightly yeah
everybody's got a mother tongue
everybody's got a story everybody has a
people
but the world is a small place
i love that you're quoting
an irishman
one of the greatest writers of the 20th
century a profound one
um but an irishman nevertheless the the
the levels of humor within that
is not lost on me let me just mention
the great ralph ellison the
african-american writer invisible man is
his uh masterpiece
uh embodied
this spirit okay we black americans we
do come from somewhere that come from
somewhere from slavery in america that's
our
ancestral heritage
but that's not
what we are skin and bone
these are
superficial things the spirit and if i
were a more religious person i could
give a whole
disposition about that but it's the
spirit it's that light that's inside
that's that's who we are and our
challenge is to live in the fullness of
it uh as opposed to this
blinkered thing where we don't look left
we don't look right we're just fitting
within this template that we inherit uh
that is a
travesty really
glenn you've lived an incredible life
a productive one but just representing
um
some powerful ideas some powerful ideals
but life comes to an end
yeah
do you think about your death
are you afraid of it
well
it is a
really interesting coincidence that
you'd posed me that question
because i'm coming from a funeral
uh
today is sunday on the proceeding
tuesday five days ago
i was at the funeral of eugene wesley
smith
who was my brother-in-law
he was my sister's husband
my sister leonette
passed away in august
of 2021
her husband has died at the age of 68
in
april
of 2022 and i was at his funeral
he died suddenly of a heart attack that
came completely out of the blue he
seemed to be in perfect health
he was a magnificent human being i could
go into the details but you know
take my word for it he was a businessman
a steel trader metals trader he would
buy and sell
he worked mostly from his home office he
had clients
counterparties people he did business
with all over the world
um
he had three sons
one of whom is uh in his early 30s two
of whom are in their late 30s these are
my sisters
children she's deceased now he's
deceased
the older two sons are severely
developmentally disabled and although
they're
in their late 30s
they're not independently viable they
don't function effective they have to be
cared for that responsibility has now
fallen to the family
but mainly to the surviving son
who lives and with his wife and his two
young children
and has assumed the responsibility
they've carried at home my sister and
her husband wesley eugene wesley smith
cared for their disabled sons at home
they didn't want to see them
institutionalized they had some help
from programs at the state and social
worker and so on but they mainly
took on the burden of caring for them at
home
anyway i go on at length here and you
know i don't know how much of this you
will choose to make use of it it doesn't
matter really i'm just trying to respond
to your question i was asked
to offer some remarks at the funeral
and i offered them
and i you know
i i spoke well of this great man he was
a great man he had a straight back
he was a stand-up guy he could be
counted on his word was his bond he had
broad shoulders he carried a lot of
people
with him business associates family
members and so forth and so on
he had a huge heart he was a giving and
kind person he had a great mind he was
an intellectual even though as a
businessman
much of his day was taken up with the
you know minutia of
contracts and you know the details of
the order being delivered and not being
delivered of the quality of the product
of the financing and so forth there was
still a powerful mind there yeah it was
a powerful mind and he uh studied he
read books he was interested in music
and art he was
uh he's a spiritual seeker
uh had been ordained as a child minister
in his youth and
while he remained
uh a master
of the christian canon
he also explored uh eastern religion and
other spiritual paths and
kind of stood above any particular
tradition as a man who believed in god
but thought that god manifests himself
in many ways to human beings and that
there was much to learn
from other religious traditions as well
this is wesley we called him wesley by
his middle name eugene wesley smith may
rest in peace
68 that's five years younger than i am
right now he dropped dead without
any warning i could too
so
how does that make you
feel what were the thoughts in your mind
leading up to it having to give that
speech in the days that followed first
of all i wondered what would i say what
would i say and you know there was no
way to prepare and i decided you know i
i rehearsed in my mind this
you know he has straight back he had
broad shoulders he had a big heart he
had a great mind you know he had a
capacious spirit
and whatnot and i used that as a
template for making my remarks but my
main thought was my god life is precious
and life is fleeting
and death is a part of life
my death is a part of my life
and i thought you know well i want to
take better care of myself than i do you
know etc etc but i also thought a lot of
this is not in my hands at all
i thought one should have his affairs in
order
my brother did not have all of his
affairs in order in the sense that there
is a lot of
you know things are going to probate
there was no will there's you know this
it's kind of unsettled i i don't want
that to happen to my
uh surviving family members i i want to
have my affairs
such that should heaven forbid i fall
over one day and don't get up again
um people don't have to scramble about
how to how to take care of things from
from that point forward but as a human
are you afraid
i'm afraid now i i read this wonderful
book called the swerve
uh it's it's about lucretius it's about
uh the nature of things which is this
great classical work from the roman
period
uh by this uh guy lucretius
and i'm trying to think of the name of
the author but you could look it up the
swerve it's the book and one like a
national book award or a pulitzer prize
is and it's the history of the recovery
of this book
uh
by uh one of these italian renaissance
italian
uh people who would go into the
monasteries in central europe
uh and uh look through the scrolls and
they discovered these classical works
from antiquity which had been lost
through the dark ages and they re re-uh
uh publish and and read these works and
lucretius's great work
on the nature of things was one of these
books poggio
uh bacclini i come i don't remember the
italian guy's name but this all could be
looked up
uh yeah pogio broccolini yeah 15th
century
uh 15th century and the name of
the
author is a stephen greenblatt yeah
stephen greenblack a magnificent book
and a terrific story
anyway
one of lucretius's points he was an
atheist
i mean he was a roman i mean he was
he he didn't believe in mysticism
and he and and he argued it's irrational
to be afraid of death
why should i fear death
death is coming to all of us
the point of being afraid i mean i'm
wasting my time fearing something that i
have no
ultimate control over it's irrational to
be afraid of death
uh yeah because it uh you can't predict
when it happens
you only know that it happens
so why be afraid how's that and
therefore live every day fully live
every day purposefully
um
you know
and so on but these are all just words
you know i i don't want to die
uh i want to live forever i'm not going
to live forever
i don't want to i don't want to suffer
i i see people suffering i saw my late
wife
linda dacha lowry dr linda
thatcher lowry professor of economics at
tufts university whom i met in graduate
school at mit
black woman from baltimore
we married we raised two sons together
she died at the age of 59
from metastatic breast cancer and i
watched her suffer and i watched her die
and it took a while
and we care for her at home right up
until the very end she died in our bed
with our sons on either side of her
and the dog curled up by the
by the door the porch door in the
bedroom and she expired
and i watched her suffer and i watched
her die and i don't want to suffer who
does
i don't want to die i am likely to
suffer before i die
uh i am likely to see my death coming
and to lament it
um
there is a book by richard john newhouse
the theologian called as i light as i
lay dying
as i lay dying richard john newhouse
uh he had stomach cancer and
he thought he was dying and he wrote
this book as he lay dying
and then he recovered he had uh he went
when it went into remission and he had
another couple of years he thought he
was dying and he had another couple
years
and i can remember meeting him
at a bookstore in suburban boston when
he was on a tour
he was this was a friend of mine
a theologian and a public intellectual
he founded the institute on religion and
public life in new york city which still
exists
uh richard john newhouse
and he's contemplating his own death
from the point of view of a christian
minister he was a first a lutheran
pastor and then he
converted to catholicism or as he would
have put it on return to the church
because he you know thought the
renaissance was over i mean i'm sorry
the reformation
richard thought was over he says there's
only one church you know it's
etc
get into theology stuff here um but
i'm saying all that to say i read that
book aloud to my wife linda as she lay
dying in that bed i read that book
and it was filled with hope i mean it
first
acknowledged the dread
yes
i lie
dying i don't want to die i'm a
christian minister christ was raised
from the dead i'm supposed to believe in
everlasting life but the fact of the
matter is this is me and i'm lying here
and i'm dying
this is the end of me
how are you going to do anything other
than dread the end of me so let's
acknowledge that i don't want to die
okay i'm just going to tell you that up
front
but
that is not the end of
my death is not the end of life
i have lived well and fully
i will go and do my best right up until
the end
uh i will accept what is inevitable
uh and i will hold out this belief and
he's a christian minister so he holds
out this belief and he knows he knows
that the belief is not rational it's not
a reasoned deductive scientific
conclusion
it's spiritual in the most fundamental
way
it is something that people hold on to
and they have hope and he had hope
uh i don't know if i have that hope i
used to be
but i'm no longer
um
a christian and i'm no longer a theist
really i i
i'm with lucretius there i mean there's
no nothing
there's no magic that's going on here
there's no you know unseen hand behind
the scene that's arranging things
what i believe is that when i look at
the natural world i see i see the
evolution of the species i see the
organic development of the of the
planets i mean the earth is going to not
exist in
a finite number of years i think with a
very high probability the sun
is going to die it's going to you know
implode it's going to go supernova
whatever is going to happen and there's
not going to be
any there there
what's the meaning of life glenn larry
that's the meaning of life yeah
let's go let's go
what's the why
or is that something economists
and social scientists and mathematicians
are not equipped to answer
surely you know
i think we live we try to live well and
meaningfully within our time uh we bond
we reproduce
we try to pass on and we accept our
limitations and our
mortality we try to
contribute
um
and
that's through our children and
through our work
and we're in this together we're not in
this alone uh we we are
connected to other people
um
i get a lot of gratitude out of teaching
i'm a teacher
my students are gonna outlive me they're
going to have students
i'm a writer
my writing is going to outlive me i
don't want to be
you know self-important or pretentious
here i doubt that i'm going to be the
james joyce of the 21st century
they may not be reading my stuff in a
hundred years as people will certainly
be reading
uh
ulysses in a hundred years
but i try to have a impact on my on on
the world that i'm a part of and and try
to leave a legacy that's dignified
uh you know i mean i could give some
flowery words to truth-seeking and
whatnot
what about love
love
what what what what what role does love
play in this uh
in this life
around i mean without love i mean what
have we got i mean we don't have
uh
we we don't have family and and uh
you know
we we certainly have missed out if love
is not a central part of our of our
existence but stop asking me questions
like that
thank you for doing everything you do
for thinking the way you do for being
fearless and bold
um
in in the glenn show in your writing and
in your work and just being who you are
thank you for being you and thank you
for giving me the huge honor of spending
your extremely valuable time with me
today this is awesome it's been my
pleasure lex i mean really and it has
been like four hours man i mean you
wearing me out for me
i love it
thanks for listening to this
conversation with glenn lowery to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description and now
let me leave you with some words from dr
martin luther king jr
if you can't fly then run
if you can't run then walk
if you can't walk then crawl
but whatever you do
you have to keep moving forward
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you