Hey everybody, welcome back to the new Thinkery. You're not David. Yeah, when you hear my voice, you know somebody's not here. That's somebody who's David Barr.
Right? David Barr is a busy hawking furniture right now. He's selling furniture as he gets prepared for a big life transition. Right?
It's going to be homeless. Greg, see something. I hear a lot of background noise. Is that him getting rid of furniture?
That's my wife. She's doing the dishes. That's what makes this podcast possible. Right?
Are you doing the dishes? Yeah, I heard doing the dishes. Otherwise I can do dishes. Oh, I see.
Oh, I see. Anyway, we have a guest with us tonight. Our guest is Paul Jordan D'Duke. Michael Jordan?
No. Oh. He was named after Jordan Peterson, which is strange because he was born. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson was quite young. But I'm not a hard guy. Paul is my colleague at the Herx program at the University of Colorado Boulder. And he's currently my interim director.
Nice. Yeah, where are you? Paul and I went to Swamman in the Pacific Ocean together and listener Tim McRainer texted me. By the way, David knows him.
So David not be here. Oh, well, at the Institute of World Politics, Tim McRainer texted me and said he really admired my moderation and restraint in not telling every part of that story. So Paul, you'll be happy to know that some of the senior parts of that story, the folks who are going to have to subscribe to the Do Think or Patreon account if they want to sell this call to Patreon. That's it.
That's it. Okay. Welcome, Paul. Hi guys.
Thanks for having me. It's great. I'm glad that story can inspire respect for moderation. That's great.
Well, yeah. Which is also mentioned Paul. I've been to Paul. I've been to Paul, I guess, now eight years and I met him at that.
I think that's where we met was at that ACTC back in 2014. The favorite conference I go to is to get to hang out with people like you and Sam Stone and Alex for you. And it's weird to have sort of these friends that you've mostly met that you only see them once or twice a year at a handful of conferences and then exchanging emails and stuff like that. So, great to have you on Paul.
Let me study for today's episode. Yeah. I want to have Paul on because Paul, yeah, I'm trying to get raised. Great to be here.
But yeah. One of Paul's sort of hobby horses or main interest is ancient critiques of technology. We've talked about this on the show a couple of times, but one of the interesting things about sort of ancient and modernist distinction or conversations that the moderns in their critique of the ancient, some are more direct than others, but there's a sort of question of whether the models have taken into account all the objections or points that the ancient would make. And to what degree is there really this difference?
And Paul has done a lot of work more with anybody I'm aware of at least in trying to articulate the sort of ancient position on technology. And so I think he's brought, he's able to bring, see and present on various aspects of this and there are a number of times, but he able to bring this difference out of it. But this is also something you teach a lot, right, Paul? Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. Since starting at the Herbs Program in 2014, I've been spending more and more time, I mean, because we teach engineers, I've been spending more and more time thinking about technology, the problems of technology. But in fact, I actually inherited a course from Wayne Ambler called Engineering Science and Society, and that was sort of the platform for exploring these issues. I've since modified the course on, but yeah, since then I've become very interested in the problems of technology, especially the ancient position.
Yeah, so maybe we could talk, I mean, maybe we don't talk too much about this, but maybe we talk a little bit about how, maybe not directly with our students, but in a way, how this, what we're doing at the Herbs Program, what they do in similar programs where they have humanities courses geared towards engineers. I mean, there's a kind of practical issue in the education of young sort of scientifically and mechanically minded students. There's a sort of question embedded in their education about, okay, they're going to be learning how to develop new technologies, right, but they also have to be sort of citizens in a larger community, and there's this other concern of the common good. I think we'll get this from the selections we go through.
One of the things that we have to ask is what is the relationship between this sort of scientific power and political power, right, which should be primary, and what are the sort of problems that arise between them? Absolutely. One of the things that I've noticed over the years is just how sort of naively optimistic our students are about technological progress. Yes, they've all read their Hunger Games and they're familiar with the typical dystopian tropes, but when it comes down to it, they really do believe that technological progress should be unfettered, that the regime's purpose, right, the mission of the United States to get us to Mars or to advance technology or to develop research for cures or intelligence systems, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's just assumed as a default that dystopian qualifications decide that all of this is to be a part of the world. Right. Now, almost as if the cultivation of technology is good in itself, you know, a source of future promise and progress, and it's just not questioned. And if you interrogate it directly, the students are surprised.
They're really taken aback because it's such a cherished opinion and it's so ingrained. These are really, I would say, my own experience with the push for STEM and this kind of thing. You guys aren't getting slouches. You're not getting the David Barz, I mean, the engineers.
I mean, I think that most impressive young people, I wonder if I should add, I wonder if there's a gender distinction here, but are getting pushed to do engineering. I mean, this is sort of, if you're smart and good at math and scientific kind of things, that's where we push folks. I guess maybe also medicine. So you guys are getting some of the smartest kids and they're putting their horsepower of minds into these, into these, in divers, in these inquiries.
But yeah, I think you're right, Paul, that a lot of folks just assumed the goodness of these kinds of endeavors. Yeah, and it's a problem in its own right, but it's also in some sense a problem for the study of precisely the concept books that would open them up to think more broadly and critically about what they're doing. I think that this kind of technological optimism, you know, what we could call like a default state or default technological optimism makes them at least at first resistant to reading old books. They just, you know, they just not sure why.
Sure. Yeah, if we made progress, why the heck, what in the world could I possibly learn from somebody who wrote 2500 years ago? Exactly. We never use a microsto, but I possibly learned from Aristotle.
What I possibly learned from Plato. Right. Right. And for them, you know, and this is not unreasonable either, but for them, the latest is the best because in some sense that's right.
The latest in the cultivation of technique or a device machine, the latest versions are often the best versions. And so I had, I had drinks the other night with three, four colleagues, three of whom were science professors. And they all sort of, well, one thing I think they all seem to have been to this belief in scientific progress. I mean, at one point, when I'm sitting on this ridiculous, we've clearly advanced in scientific understandings and aerosols.
And I sort of jokingly, partly to see what they would say. I said, why? And this is partly true though. I'm not so sure.
I think we make great advances in understanding material and effectual causality of things, but a great purchase for others. And then even then, like, we made progress at that progress, comes with a comparison with the concomitant threats and bads. But one of the things that most of this probably takes too far, I feel, but one of the things that confirmed, I confirmed to myself in speaking to these guys was that science, modern science proceeds on the basis of hypotheses or assumptions about the world that it doesn't examine. And what I sort of, to my own amusement, I saw at least two of the scientists, I think, in the third, maybe even also, this sort of, they got sort of angry at my pointing this out, which I took to be confirmation that there was this angry, beginning point, a sort of decisive, beginning point behind modern science.
It doesn't proceed from a scientific principle from the beginning that science itself is a sort of decision or choice. But it was kind of fun, but that was also kind of probably playing a little in ways that I shouldn't have. But all these various ways, this isn't so much relevant for the engineers, but still the bit of modern, it is part of the idea that science proceeds in this way. We're making progress.
We understand the world better now than we did 25 years ago. That's very clear. And all these things that we readers of old books, maybe a little less sure of. Now.
Ed Flye, Ashland. Yeah. Maybe a good, this is a good point. I mean, one of the things that you're reading spring out and that I think you've pointed out before is that this assumption, right, that was scientific progress comes like social and moral and political progress, like everything's just getting better.
This isn't even the opinion of bacon, right? Bacon is, I think it's coming more from Descartes, but bacon is way more critical and way more attentive to the difficulty of restraining or channeling or sort of regulating politically in some way, these scientific progress. And in this sense, this is to get back to the ancients and moderns question, but in this sense, he's actually quite similar to the ancients. And so we're going to discuss a few passages.
First, the myth of the booth and famivos from Littis Phaedrus, then the discussion of Hippodomus in Book Two, Chapter Eight of Aristotle's Politics, and finally, the myth of Daedalus from bacon and his interpretation of it in bacon's wisdom of the ancients. So we thought it might be a good place to start, maybe just to read briefly the parable about the booth and famivos, and then maybe you can draw out of that, Paul, what you think is relevant or interest to the current mode. So he talks about one of the old gods in Egypt's name, and he said, he first found number and calculation of geometry and astronomy and further drafts, which is kind of like chess game and games of dice, and then indeed written letters. Now furthermore, at that time, the king of all Egypt was famivos in the upper regions great city, which the Greeks call Egyptian thieves, and they call the god, Ammon.
Coming to him, the booth displayed his arts and said they must be given out to the other Egyptians. He asked what benefit each art had, that is demos, as this, and as the other went through them, he expressed blame on the one hand, praise on the other, for what in his opinion the other spoke beautifully or not beautifully. Many things then about each art, in both senses, it is said that demos reveal to the booth, to go through which would make a long speech. And when it came to written letters, this knowledge, King, said, booth will make the Egyptians wiser and provide them with better memory, where it has been found as a drug for memory and wisdom.
And the other, that was said, most artful booth, one person is able to bring forth the things of art, another to judge what allotment of harm and benefit they have for those who are going to use them. And now you, being the father of written letters, have an account of good will, said the opposite of what they could do. But this will provide forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, though through neglect of memory, seeing that, through trust in writing, they recollect from outside with alien markings, not reminding themselves from inside by themselves. You have therefore found a drug not from memory, but for reminding.
You are supplying the opinion of wisdom to the students, not truth. For you'll see that, having become hearers of much without teaching, they will seem to be sensible judges in much, while being for the most part senseless and hard to be with, as they become wise in their own opinion, instead of wise. So that's the end of the sort of parable. Which one are you reading from there?
That's the addition of the translation. The Nichols translation, Cornell. The Cornell translation. Yeah.
So I think the first thing, or a good place to start, would be just to identify the differences between the perspective on the arts or tech nay and then tamas, right? Because they both have a different way of judging the goodness of tech nay. And I think that's a good place for us to latch in. Should we say something about what tech nay is?
Yeah. So, yeah. So, tech nay is, I think it has an Indo-European, Rutek, T-E-K. We've seen that as the translaration.
That just means any sort of patterned approach to the manipulation of a substance or thing, right? So, the technique, right, comes from tech nay or technology. Typically, it's translated as art or craft. That's the solution.
Skill. Yeah, skill. So, here we see the inventor, Thuth, present a number of novel marvels to the camos, who's the king. And Thuth here really embodies what we could call the maker's perspective or, you know, the judgment of technique from the maker's point of view.
And what we see here is that he's sort of bubbling over with enthusiasm for these novel devices. He's really excited. Look at what I've done, look at what I've made. You have to take these on and have to incorporate them into the regime.
Why? Because they're so clearly useful as prosthetics or things that might expand our power. That's really how Thuth judges the good of these innovations. They seem to expand our power.
That I think is the core of his, we could say, optimism. He's very uncritical. He thinks that what he's produced is so obviously good that the technological novelties need no defense or argument. That most, by contrast, sort of puts the brakes on Thuth's enthusiasm and takes up each offering on its own terms and tries to make some assessment of its goodness, not from the maker's perspective, but from the user's perspective.
And that's really where the core difference lies, right? So what are Thuth's criteria for assessing these devices? Well, it seems that he's bringing to bear a number of notions. I think he's worried about the downstream or we could say the ecological effects of introducing technological novelty into the regime.
But he's also, and this is very important, he's worried about the hidden price of the good effect, right? And this comes out especially in the comments on writing, which is, you know, and this always takes my students aback. Why technique could be more obviously good than writing? Like, we just take it for granted as good in itself.
It's just so obviously good it needs no defense. We teach it to kids. We, you know, everyone is compelled to learn a written language. But here we have, that was interrogating the goodness of this technology and show us that actually writing will come at a price.
Yes, it's great for us to be able to encode our thoughts, right, into some external source or repository. But there's a price to having a mental prosthetic, right? We'll, we'll, we'll seem as though we're wiser than we are. We'll be tempted to believe that we're wiser than we are.
We'll help ourselves to books or recording scrolls, et cetera. Presumptively assuming that we, you know, by possessing these external things, we somehow also embody their wisdom. That is to say, mental prosthetics will be also a, a, a, a kind of, you know, a, a, a, a accelerant of, of, of mental vanity or intellectual vanity. But also you'll, your memory will degrade, right?
I mean, like, exactly. But I remember one time this was somewhat related, but I only, we're left and we moved into the GPS world. But one time I was at DC and I helped a friend move or go get some furniture from Baltimore and I hopped in the truck. I picked up truck and I was started to Baltimore to go pick up some furniture for me.
I was like, well, what are you doing? I'm going to turn on the GPS. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you know, how do you know where you're going?
I was like, we're going to Baltimore. And he's like, we need the address versus like, well, Baltimore is north of DC. So I'm just going to get on the interstate and go north. And I get just the idea that, and I noticed this man, okay, so that's a complex story, but like I don't memorize phone numbers like I used to.
And I am now that I have GPS, I am worse with directions actually. I don't have the virtue of looking at Colorado like you guys always know where West is. Yeah, it's appeared for a week. I remember on that trip, right?
I got lost for a long time. So I think one thing that you brought out that's really interesting to me about Futh is, is eagerness to give it out to the other Egyptians. And there's a sort of inherent blindness maybe to inventing, right? That when you, when you sort of come up with an idea, you get at something that seems to be operating in nature, there's kind of an immediate captivation with the sort of beauty or impressiveness of the power of the thing that you've developed specifically with writing that quickly and in its beauty really blinds you to the ramifications of it.
And so there seems to be a sort of deeper psychological problem that's being spelled out in between BAMOS and which obviously there's political implications because you've got a ruler and an inventor, right? But I think there's also personal implications because the idea here is also that if you give it to the Egyptians, they'll be captivated with it and not see it. So there's an immense attraction on the part of the adventure, but also in a way on the part of the user. And so in a way, what BAMOS sort of signifies is the sort of skeptical user slash prudent ruler, right?
Who recognizes this inherent susceptibility we have to be attractive, attracted to the power, right? And therefore forgetting our own good, right? Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, one would like to know how BAMOS ever achieved this perspective to begin with.
But you're absolutely right. He sees the cost. He sees the tradeoffs of technological novelty in a way that is not. And as he presumes, most of the Egyptians want.
This is a really, really important point. I stress this to my students all the time that every device comes with tradeoffs and often those tradeoffs are hidden. We can talk about this as the multivalence of technology. But BAMOS shows us that as we incorporate or adopt a new device, the dependence that will have its dependence will come at some price.
And it's not clear that we'll really see that. We'll really have clarity on the price we're paying as we develop habits of dependence. How do you say hi to listeners? Hi listeners.
So, Paul, how do you know if your students think they're a limiting principle? So when is technology too much? When is it just right? How do they navigate it?
Yeah, that's a hard question. What could serve as the ultimate limiting principle? We consider different possibilities. One thing that I like to show them is that Aristotle has some fairly clear things to say about this, that the optimal conditions for political life require certain limits.
Those limits ought to govern the economy. And so there should be limits to growth. And so any kind of economic enterprise that promotes technological innovation needs to pay attention to a set of principles that are higher than growth itself. So in the case of the politics, it's very clear the household needs to at least seem to be to be complete.
And so in economy, this is why Aristotle sets limits to something like usury or making money through finance, as we would say. These things are inimical to the kinds of conditions key things are optimal for political well-being. Does that make sense to you? Absolutely.
Thank you. I just wonder what extent that, I'm sorry, this might take too far field, but I just wonder to what extent those things are controllable in the modern world. In other words, I've done some work on this myself. I'm a huge resource to tell you, but I do wonder to what extent some of his political teachings are applicable in the modern world without some serious revision.
We don't live in cities anymore. We don't live in pulleys. And so in the modern world to set such limits, maybe there are some small states that could do this, but the United States of America could most western democracies. Maybe some Scandinavian countries could set some limits because they're smaller, ethically homogeneous, that kind of thing.
But it just seems like the modern state is such a different animal that it's difficult to import some of these things. And so I think that the idea of the grand fully-eyed greasy that they're obviously problems with the idea of unlimited economic growth. You can import it to the familial sphere, can you? The personal one approximated?
Yeah, you can still take the advice. That seems right. Yeah, that seems right. Yeah, but this is where, maybe we should move on to the...
Sorry, I didn't move. But no, no, no, I think it's an important question to have on the table. And I think the difficulty is that the family is obviously informed by the regime. And if the regime is not cultivating that education, with those desires and citizens, it's going to be left up to hoping that there's conscientious parents and every household.
Right? And I mean, present experience makes you think that's not going to happen. Right? So one of the things...
So through the thumbnails, you see this sort of attractiveness and the tendency of the inventor and even the user to become enamored with it. I like your idea of trade-offs. And there's a sense in which, and even your language of prosthetics, right? Because you really are taking a self-regulating being or more self-regulating than it is after the technology, right?
Who's managing his or her desires and sort of living as he thinks is good. And instead, you're making them dependent on these outward sort of appendages, right? And one of the ways you sort of you get sort of spelling out of what's happening is in the discussion of hippodomists, right? Specifically that good rule requires habituation and specific habituation to obedience to traditional law, right?
And even though tradition is not always best, it is better to have those habits than not, right? So maybe you could just walk through yourself, sorry. Yeah, actually, this is related to Dave's question. However, Aristotle is criticizing the suggestions or proposals of Hippodemists, of Myletus, who was according to Aristotle, the first political scientist.
The first, that is to bring the standard of nature to bear on the organizing of cities, urban planning, and the study of politics. And as a rationalist, Hippodemists believes that traditions ought to be scrutinized for their cogency and for their goodness. And if traditions are found wanting, they should be jettisoned, right? And should be the standard, the rational, how perception of the good should be the standard, and if tradition is irrational or not conducive to what reason dictates as the good, it should be jettisoned or issued.
Aristotle is sympathetic to this position. He grants that the traditions we inherit might have had their origins in ignorance. The four bears might have been less wise or less attuned to present circumstances. There's any number of reasons why a tradition should be modified in light of current experience.
But Aristotle says, and this is, I think, in some of the crucial point, that the idea that a regime should actively promote innovation is actually inimical to the conditions that allow for its stability and its persistence. Aristotle is very clear that what we might call progress in technique, progress in the arts operates according to a very different kind of principle than progress in law or progress in tradition. And that political stability doesn't depend on the rational understanding of the principles of the long, with the principles of the Constitution. It depends, in fact, on habit or a set of attachments or some deep psychological substrate.
And that substrate wants to hold onto something stable, something it inherits and attaches to, not something that is in a state of tumult or renewal. Aristotle thinks that promoting innovation, whether it's innovation in the law or innovation in economy or the arts, all of that disruption, what we today sort of euphemistically and celebrate is disruption. It's a source of new economic possibility. Aristotle would say is sort of foolish.
The kinds of habits that we need to stabilize a regime are buttressed by continuity over time. And regimes sort of don't really, because of this fact, they don't tolerate well constant innovation and disruption. One thing I'll add, the personal experience of teaching this paragraph, as well as the critiques of innovation in the Republic, British Republic, it really exposes the depth of this commitment to scientific progress is good. They literally cannot think of the word innovation as not good.
It brings it out. You just say, no, no, that was a bad word not too long ago. Yeah. A political philosopher, the name is not a nice thing to be called.
The Socrates was killed for innovation. But this idea that innovation, they literally look at this like, how can innovation not be good? And it really exposes this commitment as a real prejudice, right? I mean, prejudice in a strong sense where you're not even aware of it, right?
You're not even sort of just assessing it on any terms, right? You just simply cannot conceive of a sort of counter-argument in the sense. It's kind of shocking to see it and troubling, right? Especially since you're sympathetic to aerosols, or you're just, you know, it just signals bad things, right?
Right. Yeah. It's amazing how this default belief in technological progress, you know, when it's confronted head on and often reading the section is an occasion for that. It just reveals almost like a belief in, I don't know, historical problems of some kind.
The belief that, you know, so long as we're building up technological powers, all of this tumult and they'll grant that there will be disruption will somehow resolve itself for the good. And the naiveté that I think is really set in nice relief against aerosol. No. No.
Well, the people that, sorry, I don't need to be too far from the text. But the people that may say this point, at best they're seen as old fuddy duddies or naive. But at worst, they're seen as kind of dangerous to the regime because they're holding back a forward momentum and all the good things that the relatives that has supposedly come from this project. There are, I mean, I feel like there's a little easier to see when I'm older than you guys, but you know, the cold war sort of made this somewhat vivid for me, right?
Like the fact that I lived in Berlin and then we moved to Colorado, right? Two places that have been wiped off the map immediately had to be a nuclear holocaust. I thought you had the piece of niggias when you talked about that. But you know, this is alive in America on the left, right?
There's something serious about an environmentalist who hold this view, but also on the right. So there are some, there is some, I mean, probably like getting this in the engineers at the university Colorado, but just outside of Boulder, you're probably going to get all kinds of hippies who think technology is bad, right? Or no? Yeah, that's interesting.
I think there is, there is a primitivism or there's a primitivist fashion in the green movement in the environmental movement, but I would say most of the liberal environmentalists believe that technology will be this sort of self-ific for here, that we can't abandon technology because we need to innovate new tools to clean up the mess. Right. Yeah. But you're different from your hero, Ted Kaczynski.
Greg, you have a different tack, I think. But he's taking facial hair cues for that. I use these. I mean, it's interesting.
You bring that up. We had a speaker come to Colorado and he was talking about, well, what happens if we blow ourselves up or everything falls apart? And he was a strange kind of, it was just strange. If technology destroys the world, he was trying to create or come up with, you remember this ball, it kind of got about how to get science started again, but greener?
And it was this crazy kind of historical revisionism and like, can I just get a second chance guys right on the side of this? And though there wouldn't be this sort of primitivistic reversion, right, or religious sort of revival, right? And the basis, now, maybe on this point that you were touching on, you know, we can dismiss Aristotle and Plato sort of all funny days in the rain, 2500 years ago. But what about arguably one of the greatest critics, Francis Bacon, right, who invented the notion of an experiment and who tried to articulate as clearly as possible, how sound scientific reasoning, inductive reasoning, right, just about the mechanics of the world could possibly make us more powerful and happier, right?
That even he, right, had a sort of critical posture. And you bring out, I think it brings us out really well in the myth of dataless, where this is from the Wizard of the Agents where Bacon retails all these stories. Should I just read it? I think you want to talk about it?
Do you want to preface it in some way? No, I think that's great. Yeah, I would just say that it's always striking to my students when they read, when we finally get around to read Bacon, how much Bacon agrees with the Agents on the problems of technology and how this worry or the set of concerns informs his vision for the ideal scientific society and that vision turns out to be rather illiberal. And it's surprising for them.
Anyway, go ahead. So it's called, Vatilis or the Mechanic and Bacon structures it like this. He tells the story and then he interprets it. I'll read the story part and then Paul can go through what Bacon brings out from it.
So he says, under the person of Vatilis, a man of the greatest genius but a very bad character, the ancient through a picture of mechanical skill and industry together with its unlawful artifices and depraved applications. Daedalus had been banished for murdering a fellow people in rival, yet found favor in his banishment with kings and states. Many in excellent works as well in honor of the gods as for the adornment and ennobling of cities and public places have been built and modeled by him. But it is for unlawful inventions that his name is most famous for he it was who supplied the machine which enabled Pasifé to satisfy her passion for the bill.
Bull. So that the unhappy and infamous birth of the monstrous Minutaurus which devoured the ingenious youth was owing to the wicked industry and pernicious genius of this man. Then to conceal the first mischief he added another and for the security of this past devised and constructed the labyrinth, a work wicked in his end and destination but in respect of art and contrived its excellent and admirable. Afterwards again that his fame might not rest on bad arts only and that he might be sought to for remedies as well as instruments of evil.
He became the author likewise of that ingenious device of the clue by which the mazes of the labyrinth should be retraced. This data list was persecuted with great severity and diligence and inquisitioned by meters. He was always found both, he always found both means of escape and places of refuge. Last of all he taught us on Icarus how to fly who being a novice and ostentatious of his art fell from the sky into the water.
Very nice. Yeah so he usually organizes big points here around three problems and I can just call them the daedalus problem, the minutore problem and the minutore problem. The daedalus problem is sort of self-explanatory to a degree. It's really the problem of the rogue scientist or the fact that you can be a genius in mechanical engineering and still have a really bad character.
As Bacon says he's not just a bad guy, he's a really bad guy. We know this because he killed one of his rivals but also he has no qualms about fulfilling passifades request. Thankfully for passifade Daedalus shows up in Crete and she's succumbed to this unnatural lust. She needs an inter-species sex machine and who of course of course.
That was not David's nickname. What he used to do with the stack films. Literal stacks. I guess your wheelhouse but Paul was making a good point here.
Sorry Paul. The biodynamics of human bull intercourse are potentially fail and Daedalus is there to- How are you doing this with his straight face? Sorry. The biomechanics.
Okay. I have a dynamic. I have a dynamic. Sorry.
Excuse me. Right. So Daedalus is there to solve an engineering problem. Notice for Daedalus this is just an engineering problem.
It's like I need this machine. He comes back at passifade on Monday with three different blueprints and they contract up. It's just an engineering problem. He's not repulsed in the least.
The serious example of this would be when I was a kid we went to Dachau. Somebody had to make the ovens to cook people in. That was just an engineer. Yes.
And the gas chambers or whatever. Yes. Yeah. There's actually an interesting book about Nazi.
There's several interesting books about Nazi science. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of work that went into the building of that equipment anyway.
Right. Yeah. There used to be mobile units. Like little vans that would blow up.
Yeah. I never thought I'd say this. Let's get back to the bull. I'll just believe that out please.
Hey Paul. So when you're sorry, go on. We want to explicate this more. One question just in the back of my mind is when you and Alex teach this, how do you make real or make this role, but poetic philosophic language to students who are probably more hard-nosed and just mechanical by nature, how do they feel the impact of what they're reading?
I think at first they feel it lightly. And I think the force of it really comes out in class discussion and in explication. I think this is especially true with texts like Vadris or Daedalus where they get it. They latch into some degree, but they don't really feel the force of what's being presented to them.
It needs to be articulated. Yeah. Because I was just thinking of the way that technology that I feel, it's the slow accretion of technological innovations. Sometimes you have leaps and you can behold the moonshot in the 60s.
And the other times this happens slowly or behind the scenes that you don't kind of feel the degradation on one soul as immediately as you do other things. Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
Yeah. That's interesting. What I've been asking them, my students to do is just pay more attention to how much screen time they take on day to day. And we talk about what we're reading, Phaedris, we talk about the phone as a mental prosthetic and what it means to be so dependent on your phone.
Right? So it's already a critique of writing with a book would apply 10,000 to the phone. So how much does having Google in your pocket enhance your sense of your own mental powers? Or delude you about your own mental powers?
What you know, what's really just on the computer in your pocket. So that's one way to bring the issue home to them. And I find that they're really receptive to it. Does that help you?
No, no, that's very good. It's always a bad meaning to ask Alex this question. Yeah. So maybe we can get back there.
We got derailed a bit. So we have the daily problem, the minotaur problem and the meaner is probably right. So daily problem is he treats sex with a bull not as disgusting, but as a sort of interesting problem to solve. That's right.
He's right. So bestiality is not a limit for him. He's willing to innovate across these limits. And that's in some sense what makes Daedalus great as an innovator because he's unfettered, but it also makes him a liability.
He's willing to indulge unnatural desire in the promotion of technological innovation. And this generates unforeseen consequences, right? Monstress consequences. That's really what the minotaur represents.
This unintended consequence of the unnatural application of technology. Before we move to the minotaur problem, I just want to stress that I say this to my engineers all the time, but there's nothing in their own education that is making them better human beings, right? There's nothing in learning the technical principles of let's say, I don't know, thermodynamics or material science, chemistry, et cetera, that makes them better human beings. They're used to the evil genius archetype, but they haven't really thought about the fact that the learning of these technical sciences has no bearing on their moral character.
And that's really, really important for them to sit with. And I think it's really a broad home with Daedalus. So yeah, so the minotaur problem is really the problem of unintended consequences, but it's more than that because once the minotaur comes into being, its containment requires further technological innovation. So what Bacon is describing here is the cascade effect of this kind of compound problem, right?
So the minotaur comes into being, now Daedalus has to innovate again. He creates the labyrinth. The labyrinth also has a price, right? It creates an encumbrance for my knows.
This is your example about people who are worried about the environments and thinking that technology can be a thing that will just get away from the environmental problem that we have, right? Right. Exactly. In some ways, I don't know what you guys think of the climate, so go climate crisis, but for many of my students, the climate crisis is a natural fit here for a minotaur problem.
In some ways, if you take it seriously, the climate crisis could be an ultimate minotaur problem. That is to say, it's not clear that tech may will be able to innovate sufficiently to catch up with the cascade effect, right? It's not clear that we'll be able to create a labyrinth that can contain these unintended consequences. And so for many of my students, that's a very troubling.
We've gotten ourselves into a position just like mine, where we're now dependent on the technicians to innovate. We have to give them a certain free reign to innovate. Otherwise, we're sort of constrained by this conditional necessity that we've generated. And that's a real problem.
We spend an enormous amount of resources trying to manage the unintended consequences of technological innovation. If you just take a minute and think about how many products and things are, and just efforts in parts of culture, are sort of band-aids on this problem. It's kind of unfathomable, right? I just read something, this is an extreme example, about Jack Dorsey going on retreats where he eats one meal a day and doesn't talk or make eye contact for weeks.
And I'm like, what kind of a person needs to seek a kind of refresher before they go back to the corporates or technological sphere at that high level, right? And then you think about the way that the economy works, right? People sell you stuff to binge watch and they make you sort of addicted to these 15-second videos on TikTok or something like that. Glasses for your screens, right?
Yeah. To throughout the lights. Yeah. And then you get sort of addicted to this and then you need to sort of take medication because you have a short attention span or you have anxiety because of social media.
And so you're basically indulging in these parts of the economy and then medicating yourself back to a sort of, you know, semi-lockrum, right, a pale semi-lockrum of normality. I mean, that's the situation your soul is in it. And then when you try to mention, well, what would a healthy human-like look like, then you start to see how much of that falls away and what it would look like to actually have a sort of, to have this technological project that is limited in accordance with, you know, good civic virtue and well-adjusted people. That's it.
It seems almost impossible to build a fence around one's self or one's family. You have kids. I think about this all the time. The kids.
And I've talked to friends who are orthodox Jews who worry, who have similar worries, even though that they're in a better position to turn off from technology. It's just, it impinges in a sinuous way. It's very, very difficult. Yeah.
It's, it's a, it's an extremely difficult problem. And in some ways we've, you know, with the advent of the home computer, the personal computer and now the smartphone, we've really abandoned, you know, sort of the last guardrails around the family. I mean, it's, it's very difficult for families to control the flow of information. I think it was postman who said that, you know, a family, they can't control the flow of information really ceases to be a family in the, in the traditional sense.
And I think, you know, to, to one of the greats earlier points, it's not clear that, you know, I would say it's probably obvious that we can't restore Aristotelian standards here. I mean, this would be a concession to that track. What about the B. Coney and Stander, so, right?
You, you are bringing out these sort of skepticism and, you know, obviously there's a sort of a fabulous not, not sort of a practiceable, but it's instructive as a sort of example of a kind of fabulous vision of the place of science in political life in his New Atlanta. So which we did an episode on, but I think you've got some pretty good insights here about the relationship between scientific innovation and politics. And maybe, maybe as you're laying down, can you maybe draw some connection to what that might have looked like in a practiceable form and what the risks were in Bacon's final vision? Sure.
Yeah, that's, yeah. I'm going to try. The one thing that I want to note though, because it's on top of mind and we're leaving behind that list is one of the differences between Bacon's articulation of his worries about technology versus Plato's is that Bacon doesn't really worry too, too much about the hidden trade-offs for the individual. Unlike Socrates, who articulates this myth, having Samos point to the hidden costs of technological dependence for the individual, right, with the Sussanabe brought up in his questions, Bacon does not.
That's a big difference. And I don't want to go down that path just now, but it's worth knowing that in passing. So I teach data lists before I turn to the New Atlantis because I think that it's important for students not only to learn these concerns about technology per se, but because they really help make sense of the oddities of the New Orleans, which is, as you guys know, as you listeners know, is a very strange tale. And the regime that Bacon presents is strange for many reasons.
That's the most obvious is that its primary research and development laboratory also presents itself as the principal religious institution. Solomon's house is normally a biblical institute making reference to King Solomon and according to the narrator, or at least the Ben-Salemites, somehow capturing his spirit of inquiry, right? Solomon did natural science and that's what they're doing, too, and they're uncovering the created order to the greater glory of God. That's their public persona.
That's how they present themselves to the Ben-Salemites. Once you have a Daedalus in mind, however, this sort of convergence of science, religion, starts to make sense because the hierarchy of scientific investigators, they're governed fairly strictly by this religious morality. A lot of their research and development is done in secret and the scientists sort of act behave like a holy brotherhood. And that would help constrain the Daedalus problem for one thing, but it also gives the institution maximal control over why technologies it chooses to trickle out into the regime.
So in many ways, Solomon's house captures or reflects or expresses the wisdom of themos. Solomon's house can function like a geekkeeping mechanism, keeping in reserve all of the technologies, you know, it develops freely, it builds up its powers, but it chooses to trickle out the technologies that it thinks the regime best suits the needs of the regime. And it seems as though its criteria for introducing novelties is stability, right? I take bacon to be conceding that that most is right, that regime stability needs to be the primary criteria because, you know, in some sense without stability, you have nothing.
And so the house of Solomon does not produce new technologies without first somehow making sure that they work with the moral limits or the ambient morality of the regime. You know, furthermore, the citizens of Ben Salem have no idea how much technology the regime really has and they don't have any expectations for like, you know, some new iPhone every you know, financial year or whatever. Like there's no sense that the regime should produce for them greater and greater technological marvels. There's no economic pressure to make public these sorts of innovations.
There's no ideological pressure. The regime gets to decide what gets trickled out and what stays secret. And I think for bacon, that would be the optimal condition for the cultivation of a technological science. Yeah.
So one thing to, you know, to connect us back to Booth and Famos, right? In in Ben Salem, they have this hall of great inventors and you're honored by your peers in the way, right? So there's a sort of, you take delight in the power and in understanding the machinations of nature. And if you've come up with something pretty interesting, you get your place in the hall of inventors and knowers and that's the sort of honor that you get.
And so it has that sort of outlet to it. One question I have, this maybe is taking us kind of off that track, but I was thinking about the data list, Smith. And in that myth, it struck me just reading in this time that data list is already around, right? And bacon is kind of in the perspective of meanos, right?
What am I going to do? And so I wonder, do you think bacon's proposals are trying to wrestle with the sort of emerging phenomenon of the scientist? Like, right, that this is happening around him, right? You can see this, like they're starting to discover that there are these little things happening below the eye that you can kind of start to understand and manipulate.
And this is giving rise to a certain type of person, a data list type that is so enamored with this that whoever's going to sort of envision this has to envision it within a sort of political project, perhaps some of the issues that arise from bacon's project, right? These vast powers unleashed and sort of unregulated. Though bacon was trying to pump the brakes on it, right? That he was trying to control maybe a force that was already there.
Do you get that sense from his project ahead? Or consider this what seems like it? Yeah, he exhibits an awareness of new developments, let's say in Renaissance metallurgy, for example, that were already challenging Aristotelianism. I think the book is called Metalerjica.
And there's some really interesting, seemingly spontaneous movements in mining technology and metallurgy that challenged the hegemony of the Aristotelian taxonomy and understanding material science. So yeah, there were forces of foot. But bacon also is very clear that technological innovation won't be steady and it certainly won't grow exponentially unless it's tethered to a method. And I'm not sure that he was deeply worried about the practical sciences slipping to leash.
I think he was more worried about what his science would do if it slipped its own leash. But it's to say, what would a methodically laid out technological science look like that wasn't constrained by the kinds of guardrails he proposes in New Atlantis? But yeah, you're right, Alice. I agree.
I think there were forces, extant forces that he was aware of and things were already challenging. There's a challenge in Germany. Yeah, and you bring up the method. This is always a point that I still haven't quite worked out.
But the difference, obviously the thing that's missing from Bacon's vision, at least the scientific part of it is mathematical physics, right? It's very mechanistic, right? In that sense. But he's not Descartes, right?
Who envisions and even puts into play sort of mathematical physics and solving these physical problems through equations and the like, right? Who was recognizable? I mean, when you look at what the conning science would look like, it's like making all these lists of examples of things and trying to sort them into how these instances sort of fit together and then try to get a general definition out of this. And it's very much not familiar to us.
Descartes is much more familiar. And as a result of his method, he becomes much more populist in his understanding of science, right? But from our open, that even advises at the end of the discourse on the method that results of scientific inquiries just to be sort of published and handed one to the other, right? Across country lines, even, and sort of freely distributed for anyone to read, which is the exact opposite attention of what Bacon, as you described, lays out in the New Atlantis.
So one question I always have is if Bacon had understood this proper method that Descartes envisioned, right? Would he have had, would he have still promoted the science, right? If Descartes' method is an inevitable necessary tool to real advancement of the kind that Bacon hopes for anticipates in the end of the New Atlantis, including massive weapons, right? If that's a necessary tool, it seems like he was inevitable that it would slip the leash, as you said.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. I mean, one thing that I just want to know is that Bacon does promote the application of mathematics to the scientific method. This is clear in the New Oregon on in book two. Bacon is often criticized for not seeing the importance of mathematics, but I don't think that that's right.
He did not innovate himself a refined set of mathematical tools like Descartes' advancements in algebra and geometry, but he does recognize the importance of mathematics, especially for the precise articulation of experimental results. And that's absolutely consistent with what we know today. Anyway, whether or not it was inevitable, I'm not sure that Bacon sees it that way. I think the fact that someone of Descartes' stature had to cultivate these innovations in some sense shows that it wasn't inevitable, at least in the sort of slow organic sense.
But you're absolutely right that Descartes seemed to have wanted to modify scholasticism within the preexisting university framework, whereas Bacon did not want science taught in the university, or at least this is not how his followers understood him. That is to say, people like Boyle, very important in the next generation of Baconians, right? You might know Boyle from Boyle's Law of Gases. Boyle founded the Invisible College.
That's Boyle's Law of Gases. I think it bars law of Gases. It usually involves eating a lot of chipotle. Boyle and others worked in a sort of clandestine way to promote the objects of science, and this was ultimately formalized into the royal society.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, and they had worked a little bit on the encyclopedic of botanica, didn't they? I'm sorry, first I don't mean the certain that didn't ever mind. But I knew exactly what you were talking about.
Okay, I'm sorry for that. No, that's fine. My point here is that the royal society was not supposed to function like a university, right? You couldn't just show up and say, hey, I want to get a grant to do some research.
The idea was to keep science relatively secret. Yes, you would transmit findings between sort of circles of amateur researchers and gentlemen and others who were sort of brought in and supported the cause. But it was very much unlike the formalized instruction that you would find at Cambridge or Oxford, right? Bacon is very explicit and does not want science to be taught in the university.
This is a huge, huge difference between how the way we've set up our sciences today and the vision of the first generation of Biconians who founded the royal society. It's enormous difference. I mean, yeah, talk about slipping leisure. It literally got into the systems of moral and sort of political education, right?
In England and in the US, obviously, this is a beginner. The reason why people like Paul are disappearing. I think we're sort of getting over an hour here and maybe if you have any parting thoughts, but if not, maybe we could pivot to our sort of close-up show routine, which follows Greg's delightful questions. That sounds great.
Do you have any parting thoughts? I just want to get Paul to choose for a last one. Oh, yeah. I have a parting question, people.
Yeah, please go ahead. Maybe this could be the final thought. I always wondered why we return to the ancients in early moderns for advice on how to navigate our current technological movement. Something happened in the history of political philosophy where a modern philosopher has blessed a few hundred years or so, somehow lost sight of the fundamental problems with science or why is the return so far back?
Why is that necessary? Well, I think the return helps to supply contrast, right? So one of the things that my students really appreciate is when they learn that Aristotle actually had a well-articulated approach to science, that there was this alternative way of doing science and even organizing politics and science. This is something that really comes out in Plutox Life with Marcelis with the description of Mark Amides.
There was a culture of relation between the scientists and the man of action, the political man. And so my students are really impressed with the coherence of this other way of structuring science and the interests of politics. And when they see that, they realize that the progress of technology and science hasn't been this ratchet-like phenomenon of each generation improving on the next and so on and so forth. But that what really happened at the onset of modernity was a deliberate rejection of this alternative way, whether it's from Machiavelli or Bacon or Descartes.
There was a deliberate set of intentions to push aside the Aristotelian paradigm and replace it with something new. And so that's that I think is why it's so valuable to return to the origins of modernity, to see the contrast and to try to understand the intentions behind the shift. Does that make sense? No, no, this is precisely the note I wanted to end on.
I think some of our listeners will have, they'll have this question. They'll say, why not just look to modern physics or something like this? Right. I mean, that's not the thing you shouldn't read contemporaries on science technology.
There's actually a lot of good thinking going on right now on the problems of technology. That should be taken into account. Yeah. I just think of my parents gave me a, it was a hockey and it's a brief history of time.
He begins where he says science is outpaced to the philosophy or something. I think he names Aristotle, but by name. And I remember reading it and thinking it's like a clear shot across the bow. It's clearly what they think.
Oh, yeah. I mean, many, I think academic philosophers, so-called philosophers would say that science is just philosophy becomes successful. And so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Physics today is what ancient natural science ispired to, but failed to achieve. And what remains in philosophy is just this sort of, almost like, yeah, sort of like locking in work of intellectual under labor, where you're doing the work of ground clearing or, you know, making certain concepts more coherent, et cetera. Yeah. Which knows scientists ask for.
That's right. Yeah. It's completely like, I mean, look, I mean, from that perspective, it makes building a bull machine look like a bull in 10 minutes. So it's so, so.
Or knows I've tried. So maybe on that note, we can introduce the OG of B.C.I.I.D. Greg McBryon. Nope.
All a serious question I'm just going to ignore what our friend had to say. Maybe you can just tell us how did you get interested in football philosophy? What turned you on to this crazy little game we're all involved in? You know, I had some, I met some great friends and had some great teachers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta.
And by chance, by- Yeah, I think, oh, yeah, by chance. I used to hang out at this cafe called Sugar Bowl in Edmonton. And I thought I was doing something serious reading existentialism or something like this. And I just, I met some people who put me in my place and showed me how foolish and ignorant I was and thankfully steered me to classes where I could continue to learn, you know, just on a different plane.
And I met teachers like Heidi Studer and Leon Craig, who were really just outstanding teachers. Studer, I should mention is, you know, she's really helped me see into the problem of technology. And Craig taught a class on science and almost like a Strausian approach to the history of science. And Studer has done marvelous work on bacon and great work on daedalus.
Right. So anyway, she listens to the show, at least, I mean, I don't know how regularly, but she sent me a note once saying, you know, how can I download them and et cetera. But yeah, she's lovely lady. Yeah, actually.
Her, her, she worked with a guy named Nathan Pinkoski on a translation of the Wizard of the Ancient. So that's, I just talked to Nathan not too long ago and he said that's coming out soon. Very nice. Yep.
All right, Paul, we're going to lightning round now. Okay. Fast. Who's your favorite philosopher?
Plato. Favorite work of philosophy. Republic. Favorite non philosopher writer.
Oh my God. God, that's a pretty good one. That's Bible. Bible.
Bible. He just says the gospel. Most of us have enough discount. Favorite work of literature.
Probably brothers K. Yeah. Yeah, man. Favorite place you've ever visited.
I'll see you there in a week. You're always up there. Rome is up. It is up there.
Good. We're going to be here and we're going to try and meet up just next week. We're going to be standing up with our friend. Oh, the professor?
What's your name? I'm in podcasts. Sorry, what is his name? Oh, Wayne.
Yeah. Wayne. Yeah. Wayne.
We are not. Actually, the course that I'm teaching is part of Wayne's legacy. He created a culture wars in Rome and that's what I'll be doing next week and fabulous. Yeah.
It's great. Yeah. Whoever's interested in Rome, she's listening to Wayne's podcast. Absolutely.
Absolutely. What's it called? Get ready for Rome, right? Yeah.
Let's get ready for Rome. All right. What was your first car? My first car, I drove my parents minivan for a while, but I think the first car I bought was a Kia.
It was a white Kia Rio. Nice. It was such a tin can. Oh, yeah.
Those things are dangerous, Paul. Yeah. Kind of small. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Greg says nice.
I'm like, this is Greg's BS. Affability. I drove a B.F. Kia.
That end danger. Every time I pick it up. Yeah. Hey, listen.
My first car was Fred Blintstone special. Yes, sir. She is. I don't know.
That's a tough one. Sorry. I mean, for a long time I was very interested in film. Okay.
Oh, that's our first answer with film. That's good. That is good. All right.