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S8 E2: Brandon Warmke: Why It's OK to Mind Your Own Business
5 Plays1 year ago
Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and the Spring 2024 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He is co-author of several books including Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk, Why it’s ok to mind your own business, and Conservatism, the basics, which will be published in 2024. We discuss his book, Why it’s ok to mind your own business, as well as the state of conservative academic and intellectual life.
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Transcript
Introduction and Focus of the Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
00:00:27
Speaker
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Faculty Fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Meet Brandon Warmke and His Work
00:00:35
Speaker
My guest today is Brandon Warmke. Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and the Spring 2024 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy here at the Benson Center. He is co-author of several
The State of Conservative Academic Life
00:00:50
Speaker
books, including Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk,
00:00:54
Speaker
Why it's okay to mind your own business and conservatism, the basics, which will be published in 2024. We discuss his book, why it's okay to mind your own business as well as the state of conservative academic and intellectual life. Brandon worm key.
Ordinary vs. Commencement Speech Morality
00:01:14
Speaker
Welcome to the free mind podcast, Matt. Thanks for having me. So you have a new book out called why it's okay to mind your own business.
00:01:24
Speaker
And by the way, before we get into the serious questions, I just wanna say that my wife absolutely loved the title and the premise of this book. That's cool.
00:01:36
Speaker
And I thought it was a really interesting read, too. So your book focuses on a comparison of what you call ordinary morality and what you call commencement speech morality. So just for starters, for our listeners, can you define those terms as simply as possible? Yeah. So if anyone's ever been to a commencement speech, they've probably heard a commencement speaker give advice to young people.
00:02:01
Speaker
And not every commencement speech, but a lot of them present a moral outlook to students and they encourage graduates to live a certain
Critique of Oversimplified Moral Life
00:02:10
Speaker
way, gives them a set of values and priorities and obligations. And the basic idea is something like this, like here's that sort of very distilled commencement speech morality spiel. Look, the world is full of injustices.
00:02:26
Speaker
that need addressed and people who need help. And it's clear what needs to be done. But way too many people don't care enough, but you care. And so you have to get out there and make a name for yourself and solve the biggest problems you can find and make the world a better place for everyone. So it's a kind of morality that tells people, look, moral life is pretty simple.
00:02:53
Speaker
The world's problems are your problems and you have to solve them. And the bigger way that you solve them, the better. And your good intentions make all the difference.
00:03:07
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And so that's a kind of moral advice that a lot of young people get, not just from commencement speeches, but from their professors and from social media influencers and the media. The problem, in our view, is that that way of thinking about morality distorts our moral vision.
Value of Everyday Activities
00:03:23
Speaker
It focuses on just one kind of valuable life, a kind of life of political engagement and saving the world.
00:03:30
Speaker
But there's another kind of outlook that we defend in the book, and as you point out, we call it ordinary morality, and it's not the view from behind the podium. It's the view that most of us actually take up once we leave graduation. It's the view from the local library, the backyard garden, and it takes a much wider perspective on what's important to life in life. It says that life isn't just about shaping the revolutions of your time or
00:03:58
Speaker
Saving the world. It's also about reading to your kids and Volunteering at the Kiwanis Club and coaching t-ball And so it's an alternative outlook to commencement speech morality And it's the one that we defend in the book. Yeah, really interesting. So let's dig into a couple of the different
00:04:17
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flavors of critique. Because you are a little bit nuanced in the book in that you say that it's not that we don't need any commencement speech morality in the world, it's that it's overemphasized and certain manifestations of that overemphasis become problematic. Is that right?
The Risk of Moralizing
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, so if you were to pick apart the features of commencement speech morality, if I was being maybe a little bit uncharitable, a lot of commencement speech morality is, I think, mistaken. So it says, moral life is simple, and the world's problems are yours, and your good intentions can make all the difference. I think those are all either false or highly misleading.
00:04:57
Speaker
You're right, though, that in the book we don't argue that it's wrong to do big things or to help save people. That's not wrong, necessarily. What we argue is that when you take on this kind of view, when you take on the feminist speech morality sort of outlook and let your life be led by it,
00:05:19
Speaker
There are two big dangers. One big danger is that it turns you into a moralizer. And so one of the chapters we talk about moralizing and the problem. So just for our listeners, what is a moralizer? Yeah. So a moralizer is someone who inappropriately enforces morality.
The Busybody Phenomenon
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So we're all kind of enforcers of morality.
00:05:37
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We go around blaming people, encouraging people, intervening in other people's lives to tell them what to do or what not to do, and that's important. It's important to enforce morality. But a moralizer oversteps important boundaries in how they enforce morality, and we can talk about some of those if you want.
00:05:55
Speaker
So one danger of commencement speech morality is it turns us into moralizers. We enforce morality and we really don't have any business doing so. And the other danger is that it turns us into busy bodies. So whereas the moralizer is the person who oversteps boundaries in enforcing morality, the busy body is the person who goes around overstepping important boundaries in helping behavior.
00:06:16
Speaker
So of course it's important to help people, but what the busy body does is oversteps legitimate boundaries of helping and tries to help when they really have no business doing so. And so those are the two main sort of drawbacks of commencement speech morality. And in the book, what we try to argue is that these are pretty significant costs and that we should be wary of adopting this moral outlook. So let me try to,
00:06:43
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break your critique apart into two types. The first type
Flawed Assumptions in Commencement Speeches
00:06:50
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I would consider mathematical. If commencement speech morality, even if it wasn't giving advice that's misguided by its own standards or by its own ends, as you argue persuasively it often does, saying that you should all try to live exceptional lives is mathematically self-contradictory. Exceptional lives, definitionally, are exceptional.
00:07:15
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So I guess maybe to bring it back to is the error like where's the error in that?
00:07:23
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mathematical contradiction in terms of commencement speeches. Is it come from the speaker where the speaker is literally saying, you should all be exceptional when that's not possible? Or is the error coming from the listener where the speaker's really saying is, you should all strive to do good things and some of you will succeed. And the listener is thinking, well, if I don't solve global poverty, then I'm a failure.
00:07:46
Speaker
So that's a good question. I think the errors on both the speaker and the young people who go out and try to act on this advice. I mean, of course, most college students, they don't follow this advice, but many of them do. So here's the error as I see it from the commencement speaker.
00:08:01
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There is a kind of encouragement to a very specific kind of life, one that aspires to, you know, to put it simply to save the world. Okay, so I think a lot of commencement speakers
00:08:19
Speaker
Think that or have this view that because they themselves are like usually exceptional They're usually like journalists and politicians and their CEOs and their entrepreneurs the billionaires often donors to the university They are themselves special. Otherwise, nobody would want to hear from them I mean no one wants to hear you know, come as a speech from you know, you're you're
00:08:39
Speaker
your local dentist or something like that's not usually all that interesting no offense to dentists listening i don't want to hurt the dentist uh clientele of your podcast here but uh so there is this advice that like everyone needs to be exceptional or like you coming from this you know elite
00:08:57
Speaker
College or university like you are the chosen one but you're the one that we've been waiting for and i think that's a lot of students up for failure because of course as you point out not everyone can be exceptional not everyone. I can be excellent in the sense of how living a life of excellence this defined by saving the world or doing big things there's lots of ways to be excellent but not all of them.
00:09:20
Speaker
involves saving the world. And so there's all this research now. There's like, why are young people so depressed? And there is some evidence that holding young people to extremely high moral standards
00:09:36
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of accomplishment is actually leading some young people to be depressed. Like, oh, if I can't save the world, if I can't stop inequality, if I can't make sure the right politicians are always elected, then I'm a failure. You can see why that would be really devastating to a lot of young people. Is this analogous to what Instagram does to young girls' body image?
00:10:01
Speaker
Right? So you only see pictures of everybody where they look their most perfect and they're airbrushed. And you think, how could I possibly compare myself to that? And then I'll just leave the convention speaker is saying, you know, it's your destiny to be exceptional and to change the world. And so therefore, if you don't, how do you measure up? Yeah, I think there's a lot of anxiety.
Impact of High Moral Standards on Youth
00:10:21
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You know, it's hard to know like what proportion of young people feel this way. But you know, among the strivers,
00:10:29
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I think there is a lot of anxiety about like, I think a lot of young people are told they need to do these big things. And yet a lot of them in their heart of hearts want to get married, settle down, have families, they want to live a quiet life. I think there is a lot of anxiety about like, am I doing enough? Am I doing enough to save the world?
00:10:48
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And I think that can be a good question for everyone to ask themselves. But if that's the frame with which you live your life, like, am I saving enough people? Am I doing enough good? Am I canvassing enough door to door to elect the right politicians? That, I think,
00:11:06
Speaker
is where a lot of the anxiety comes from and that's unhealthy. So let's put a pin in anxiety and I want to come back to it later because I think it relates to the Peter Singer argument that you talked about in the book a little bit.
00:11:20
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But I want to get to the second, what I would call the second category of critiques that you have about the commencement speech morality. And that is that it rests on faulty premises, and sometimes for that reason, fails at its own stated ends. So you talk about moralizing, you know, somebody who's moralizing is assuming that they have moral standing to moralize, as you say, and often that isn't the case.
00:11:44
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Write the you know how often is the person who's policing bigotry the most bigoted person in the organization right for example
00:11:51
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They interfere with rational public discussions, right? So if you insert highly charged moral claims in relation to empirical questions, then that can just muddy the waters in ways that are often unhelpful to solve the problems that carry the moral weight. You talk about how they make people cynical about morality and how that's analogous to drowning a cactus.
00:12:14
Speaker
And then, and then you
Moral Policing and Group Cohesion
00:12:16
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talk about how people, you know, use their emotions and their emotional displays as a substitute for, uh, maybe less glamorous, but more effective direct actions. Have I missed anything in terms of the, the, what you might call the substantive critique of the moralizer? Yeah, it's also just annoying. Um, I mean, I mean, think about like, so.
00:12:37
Speaker
One of the things we suggest in the book is like moral enforcement is important. It's good that we promote morality and try to get others to act morally and criticize bad people and so on. All that's good. But if that's all we did, moral life would be nothing more than just a series of like
00:13:01
Speaker
annoyances and public hectoring. And a lot of people think that moral enforcement, because it's often good, means that it's cost free. But, but moral enforcement has a cost, like you're intervening in people's lives, you're interrupting them, you're coercing them, you're telling them that you're better than them, at least in this respect. And so, you know, imagine a world in which all we did,
00:13:29
Speaker
even if we had the right moral views. So set aside, which we don't obviously, like a lot of us have bad moral views, myself included, and we just don't know it, but imagine that everyone had the right moral views and we were constantly enforcing the right morality on everyone. Life would be pretty unpleasant. And so for all the reasons that you mentioned, the sort of social costs of enforcing morality when we really don't have the place, it's not our place to do it,
00:13:57
Speaker
There's just the minor annoyances of life, which you might think, oh, those are minor, but they add up and they add up on a large scale. And, um, you know, I think as you, and I think you would agree, a lot of people, um, don't speak up and speak their minds because they're afraid of this sort of moral hectoring. And so let, yeah, this is a great segue actually back a little bit earlier than I planned, but it's a good segue back to the mental health point you made. Right. So. A couple of things on that first.
00:14:27
Speaker
If you ever take first aid, one of the first things they teach you is if it's not safe for you to intervene when somebody needs help, then you shouldn't always do it because you might be creating two people where you previously had one. Now, obviously there's nuances and there's limits and people still, you know, sometimes run into burning buildings and we're grateful to them.
00:14:49
Speaker
But I think this one way to think about, I think, what you're getting at is if a movement
The Self-Serving Nature of Moralizing
00:14:57
Speaker
of moral enforcement becomes so exhausting and so damaging to people's mental health, at some point it becomes unsustainable, even for the people who are actively engaged in it. Is that right?
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, that seems right. I mean, it seems right. And also, you know, sort of like a priori, it seems right. And it also seems right, sort of anecdotally, I mean, think about the people who were most like the most
00:15:23
Speaker
aggressive moral police officers, you know, you know, the people who are constantly policing other's behavior, you know, I get on Facebook and I have a charity and someone chimes in, oh, but this isn't the best charity, you really should be doing this. Someone interrupts me, I've been going about my day and like, oh, you know, I noticed that you're wearing a leather belt, you know, don't you care about the animals? Like imagine the people who like constantly go through their lives. These don't seem to be happy flourishing people.
00:15:50
Speaker
And so for lots of reasons that, you know, like even some of these ancient philosophers pointed out, like it looks like, you know, there is this thought that, you know, if you really care about morality and you really care about people being good and living virtuous lives, like focus on yourself first.
00:16:09
Speaker
You really think that you've got all of the right moral views? First of all, what a coincidence. Human history has been leading up to this moment where it's like you, and finally we've arrived at the person with all the correct moral and political views.
00:16:27
Speaker
what are the odds of that very really unlikely and then to abrogate yourself to like yeah to like the position of being the moral cop when often things aren't that important or you don't know enough or you just don't have standing or you'd be a hypocrite
00:16:43
Speaker
That is not, at least in my estimation, a recipe for sort of a happy flourishing life. So let me pick up another thing you said, which is that it's annoying. And I think that there is a deeper social psychological point there, and that is that one of the main social psychological functions of moral policing is group cohesion.
00:17:08
Speaker
and maintaining group solidarity but also maintaining group cooperation and policing violations of group cooperation. It's also the case that extreme moral policing undermines group cohesion and undermines group solidarity and therefore makes it harder for groups to accomplish things at scale or even to exist at scale. I think anecdotally my impression is that
00:17:32
Speaker
the more fundamentalist religious sects are, the more they both tend to be smaller in their number of followers, and the more they tend to have their morality enforced through negative, either negative stories, you know, if you don't do this, you're going to go to hell, or through negative direct, you know, punishment. Yeah, I think you're right. It's very hard to keep a coalition or a community together when you have shifting
00:18:01
Speaker
and expanding moral rules. So as we record this podcast right now, what is today? January 31st of 2024, evidently there's some like internecine dispute on the right in America about whether we should be fans of Taylor Swift. So this is like a big thing evidently right now. If you go back 2017,
00:18:30
Speaker
There was actually a dispute on the left about whether Taylor Swift was a white supremacist or not. And if your listeners don't believe me, Google this. Her lawyer agent actually had to come out and disavow Trump, because she hadn't spoken publicly about Trump. Right. She had the Michael Jordan approach to politics up to that point. Right. And people were saying, in fact, there's this amazing article that was written by some left
00:18:58
Speaker
like leftist west coast blogger that basically goes through all of her music videos and finds like all this like uh nazi imagery in them okay so you can go so it's like okay so now um you know so you know 2017 the left is divided about whether whether taylor
Shared Morality and Its Effects
00:19:15
Speaker
swift is a nazi and now the right is divided apparently who knows how much of this is actually legitimate like is just but
00:19:22
Speaker
Twitter thing, but but like now we have to have a discussion about our views on Taylor Swift And so one reason to keep a lot of you know our moral enforcement You know to keep it minimal and to and to stop the expanding sort of moral arms race of what counts as you know a good person in good standing in our community is Just to not bring these things into public square
00:19:50
Speaker
So especially in an extremely diverse pluralistic environment, like people just disagree about all kinds of stuff, like public breastfeeding, like should you wear leather? I mean, these are all things that people just disagree about, you know, setting aside religious disagreements. Like, are we really going to bring all of that in the public square? And are we really going to hash all of that out? Now, let me ask you something about that, actually, because
00:20:15
Speaker
It strikes me that maybe an unstated premise of that argument is that, that certainly is true for all your examples that you just talked about, is that the stakes aren't that high about the thing that we will be fighting about in the public square, right? So is Travis Kelsey a political prop, you know?
00:20:33
Speaker
Evidence, in my opinion, suggests he's not, right? But even if that was a legitimate question, the stakes don't seem high enough that it's worth fighting about. Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, had a good tweet about this in exactly this context. Okay, but what about if you think about the abolitionists in the 1800s?
00:20:54
Speaker
That was clearly an issue that bringing to the fore in the short term was divisive. It brought the country to a civil war. And yet, I think you would struggle to find anybody today who would argue against the idea that it was worth it because the injustice that that conflict brought to the fore and then ultimately resolved was so great that it was worth fighting over.
00:21:19
Speaker
So would you agree with that caveat? And if so, how do we decide what's a big enough stake that it's worth society-wide conflict? Yeah. So there are important moral questions and challenges that presumably like everyone has a stake in.
00:21:38
Speaker
We're not denying that. I mean, of course, it's true. There are massive social problems, and perhaps people should be more vocal about some of these problems. However, I have to say, it's really easy. And there's probably some great psychological explanation for this. It's really easy.
00:21:58
Speaker
to work yourself up into a ladder about things that objectively are not that important but are extremely important to you and so the question is like how do i know how do i know when something is important enough for me to make a big deal out of it publicly and i think i think that's much more difficult than a lot of people suggest so here's a heuristic.
00:22:23
Speaker
take it down 10, like take it down, take the, you know, take your rate of moral enforcement down 10%.
Reducing Moral Enforcement
00:22:30
Speaker
That's probably going to do a lot of good. So if like, you're really up in arms about lots of, lots of things that, you know, that you don't like in the world, you know, people do this or that or, you know, whatever. Take away in your own estimation, sort of like the bottom 10% of what you, of what you think is important and what you think it's good to call people out for or to blame people for.
00:22:54
Speaker
you're probably going to do a lot of good. That's still going to catch a lot of really important things. But the idea is that on the margin,
00:23:03
Speaker
Social morality will be improved by removing some things out of the public square that we don't have to that We don't have to discuss so you can ask your question like is this really important? Do I you know is this something that I can that I can you know? Make much of a difference for so a lot of people just you know I think we overestimate how effective we are like doing these like
00:23:24
Speaker
You know, if you're just an average person who works at a public library in rural Illinois and you homeschool your kids and like you volunteer at the Kiwanis Club and you coach T-ball or whatever, like it's, it's.
00:23:36
Speaker
I think it's likely that you are going to do much more good being faithful in those little things than trying to like change some large scale, you know, social, you know, affect some large scale social problem. Now, sometimes that very argument gets twisted in a way that I think you would still consider problematic moralizing. So for example, in the height of the 2020 social unrest, right?
00:24:05
Speaker
a common conversation that you would hear inside organizations is, why are you so focused on microaggressions in our department when there are women suffering under real oppression in Afghanistan? That's kind of one example. A common answer to that would be, I have no power to shape the lives of women in Afghanistan, but I do have the power to influence, especially in this moment where all the administrators are listening to me, I have the power to influence the department.
00:24:32
Speaker
And so my guess is you would still object to that sort of moralizing, and yet it does seem to use the very argument you just made in a way. Yeah, that's a nice thought. I mean, what I would say in response, if I had more time to think about it, I'd probably have something better to say. But one thing to say in response is just because something is small doesn't mean it's good. So, you know,
00:24:56
Speaker
to focus on, you know, to all, you know, so you think, look, yeah, I can't really affect whether women in, you know, Yemen are being oppressed. I can't really do much about that. Okay, that's probably true. Therefore, I'm going to police my colleague's speech and look for idiosyncratic and novel objections to how they use pronouns or, you know, whatever.
00:25:21
Speaker
So the question is, is, is like, okay, so the first part is probably right, but you pivoted to this other thing that again, it's a kind of issue of social moral enforcement. So it's not like, here are the things that I can do in my life that are actually good, right? That I preserve the good things around me.
00:25:40
Speaker
or I volunteer at Big Brother's Big Sisters. These are all things that are positive that don't involve going around policing people's behavior. The question I would have for someone like this is what is driving you to want to be a moral cop? Why is that the thing that you want to do most instead of these other things that presumably are going to do much greater good, or at least probably not
00:26:07
Speaker
do any less good than policing your colleagues microaggressions. Like what is the impetus to like play moral cop? This is one thing I've never understood about, you know, about a lot of academics. Like they, they really want to push people around. They really want to tell others how to, you know, what words to speak and how to advertise this event and how many speakers of this group you have to have. Um, and that becomes, you know, um, a large part of their, like,
00:26:36
Speaker
on the job time is spent policing others behavior. And I've just never really understood like, what's the argument for thinking this is how you're going to do good in the world? I've never heard a good reply to that, especially if you compare like the alternatives, like spending that hour volunteering at Big Brother's Big Sisters or coaching T-ball, like what do you really think in your heart of hearts is going to do more good?
00:27:04
Speaker
I don't know the answer to either. I have three guesses based on what I've seen others think and write about on this. One is that in some cases it's just status, right? Especially to see this with disciplinary differences, right? There's almost an inverse correlation between the amount of moralizing in a discipline and the amount of respect it gets outside of the academy. Yeah, this is a... And so maybe there's a...
00:27:30
Speaker
Pushing people around is maybe a status game for some people. I think that's one reason. My guess is that for some people, the various people like John McWhorter have talked about how there's an analogy to religious psychology, where people define a certain set of beliefs and behaviors as so central to their identity.
00:27:49
Speaker
violations of those norms become seen as threats to their group and their identity in the same way that people who are devout react sometimes to religious transgressions. And then I think that would be my second guess. And my third guess is the version of the saying, hurt people, hurt people. That in many cases, there's some kind of coincident
00:28:14
Speaker
lack of flourishing and or mental anguish that's being projected outwards. Those would be my guesses, but bad. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, so really what, you know, here's a way to reframe the question. Like, why are academics so bad at minding their own business?
Overconfidence in Moral Beliefs
00:28:31
Speaker
You know, it's like, why, you know, and when I think, I think you're right. You're certainly right about the overconfidence. I think,
00:28:38
Speaker
And this is again, this, this ties back to the commencement speech morality. I mean, very few commencement speakers tell like graduates like, Hey, you could be wrong about like no commencement speaker speaker at Oberlin or Yale is like standing up in front of these graduates and being like, you know,
00:28:55
Speaker
You could be wrong about almost everything you believe about politics. That is not the message. The message is like, you pretty much have the right framework, go out there and impose it on the world and make the world better. For some academics, it's maybe overconfidence, but it's maybe overconfidence that's counterintuitively driven, at least in part, by latent insecurity, right?
00:29:20
Speaker
Like if you were in a field, um, let's, I'm just going to remove your and my fields from the equation. So I'm going to talk about fields and neither of us are in, right? Oh, you can look, you should totally attack philosophy and I will join in if you do, but well, but I don't, I don't want this, this, I don't want this line of reasoning to be, uh, viewable as either self-deprecating or self-serving. So let's, let's just, uh, let's just take ourselves out of it. If you're a computer scientist, right? Or if you're an engineer.
00:29:49
Speaker
society values your skills, right? And so if you're, and because of that, your status in society in some ways is less dependent on your moral superiority.
00:30:05
Speaker
You could be somebody that's seen as morally flawed, and yet if you have these kinds of hard skills that are valued and useful to society in other ways, people are willing to give you a pass on it. Think about how many of the harshest critics of Elon Musk, who don't like his politics, still will often begrudgingly admit that he's done a lot of good for renewable energy, is kind of an example.
00:30:28
Speaker
Right. On the other hand, what if you're somebody in a discipline and we're not going to say philosophy, what are you somebody in a discipline that, you know, isn't
00:30:39
Speaker
whose currency is not empirical insight, whose currency is not building things, building machines that have clear functions, it's not building companies. If you don't have any, if society is not willing to grant you any kind of moral or aesthetic superiority, then at some level, what claim do you have
00:31:02
Speaker
to be part of the elite, which is what anybody in the Professoriate probably at least unconsciously imagines themselves to be. And my guess is that
00:31:14
Speaker
Certainly the types of fields I'm describing are the ones that have the highest fraction of moralizers in my experience. And I wonder if some of that is driven by a subconscious realization that moralizing might be one of their only claims to special status, special right to be listened to in society. What are your thoughts on that?
00:31:36
Speaker
as a philosopher. So that's interesting. So I'll say something, there's something I'm suspicious of, and then something I think is right. The thing that I'm skeptical about is I don't, if there is a kind of status anxiety, I don't think it's, I don't think it's a comparison to like people outside of academia. I don't think most academics
00:32:00
Speaker
when they're on their high horse about Trump or whatever, uh, it was COVID for awhile, you know, whatever it is. I don't think when they're on their high horse that they're moralizing
00:32:14
Speaker
is driven by a fear that their skills are not valued by society at large. That might be true of journalists or something who has a wider audience, but academics, most of them, I'll talk about philosophers, most philosophers are talking to other philosophers.
00:32:34
Speaker
And and so i'm not sure you know if they have this deep sort of deep seated unconscious. Anxiety about their earning their paycheck from the taxpayer or whatever i'm not sure how to assess if it's really sort of hidden in their motivation.
00:32:51
Speaker
I think here's my story and it's a story that we gave in our my co-author and I we gave it in our previous book on grandstanding here's what I think's going on also a really good book by the way thank you it's very yeah thank you here's the basic idea is that most people think of themselves as morally better than average and I suspect that if you I don't know if there's any empirical literature on
00:33:17
Speaker
There is a lot of literature showing that most people think they're better than average morally.
Moral Entrepreneurship in Academia
00:33:22
Speaker
I'd be shocked if there wasn't evidence that academics think that they're much better than average morally. So the priest is the analogy. Is that where you're going with this? The priest. That moralizing academics.
00:33:38
Speaker
see themselves as equivalent to what you would have thought of as the priest class, you know, 200 years ago, that could be that I think, yeah, there's probably something right. And it has to do with self selection, who ends up in the professor, it has to do with how they're educated, it has to do with something you and I care about is that they rarely come across someone intelligent.
00:33:58
Speaker
In academia, who has an opposing view, there's just not a lot of diversity in most fields. And so there's sort of a self-reinforcing dynamic. It's like, oh, all the smart people I know think like me. So of course, I must be sort of like, right here. So I think most academics probably think they're better than average morally, or at least have, they're more likely to have the morally right views.
00:34:20
Speaker
And then there's this psychological mechanism called social comparison. So like the way that we think of ourselves is largely influenced by
00:34:30
Speaker
how we compare to others. The example I often give is like, you know, you, you know, you think you're funny around, you know, some group of friends, like maybe your nerdy academic friends, and then you hang out with like your, your buddies from your, you know, poker night or whatever. And you're like, Oh man, I'm not funny compared to those guys. So often how we think of ourselves as determined by our group. Right. And then there's this, like, uh, there's this kind of like, sort of like, uh, a feedback effect. Yeah. It's like,
00:34:58
Speaker
Right. So if you run a bunch of people who, uh, who are very smart and are very, who think they're very moral, well, if you're going to, if you want to retain your position as like a morally enlightened person, you have to like outdo them. And so there is this built in incentive to constantly find things like there's a kind of moral entrepreneurship. It's an arms race device. That's right. It's an arms race.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And there's lots of examples of in social psychology research in many domains of this, this type of feedback. So if you segregate people politically, they, they don't just stay where they are. They become more extreme for the same reason. If I was, yeah, I'm used to being the liberal among my friends and now I'm all with a bunch of other liberals and I have to be really liberal to still be the liberal. Right. Okay. I want to make sure that we get through the rest of the big themes in your book so that we can come back to some, some deeper questions before we go into time.
00:35:48
Speaker
So we talked about the problems with the moralizer. Let's talk about the busy body. You know, the person that you describe as nosy, the person with the savior complex, the meddler. And you talk about how, just like how the moralizer presumes that they have the moral standing to police everybody, the busy body presumes that they deserve a position of oversight.
00:36:12
Speaker
And the busy body also, because they're meddling in other people's affairs or in affairs far away, they often overestimate the degree to which they understand the situation in ways that undermine their solutions. And there's lots of examples of where good intentions combined with naiveté have led to catastrophically bad outcomes. Communism maybe being the obvious example. You talk about examples of the latrine program in India or the play pump program
00:36:40
Speaker
I would argue that two recent examples of this that have been pretty catastrophic are long-term lockdowns and police defunding, which both were ostensibly done and pushed in service of the marginalized, and yet I think are maybe two of the most materially damaging things that have happened to the marginalized members of American society in decades. But so is there anything I missed there? No, that's right. Let me just add another example of standardized testing.
00:37:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, right. So this drive to like get away from standardized testing, this is going to crush an entire lower socioeconomic group is going to totally lock them out from from a good education. So yeah, so here's look, the basic idea of the busy body is someone who oversteps boundaries and tries to help people because either because you know,
00:37:34
Speaker
They're overconfident. They think their hearts in the right place. They know what's best. So it's, it's different than the moralizer. The moralizer, you can think of as like a critical
00:37:44
Speaker
person. They're, they're sort of enforcing morality. They're not so much trying to help you. They're just trying to enforce morality. The medaller, the moral busy body is, you know, um, they think they're on your side. They're on your side. Right. And you know, some of this behavior is just annoying, right? It's the guy who goes around the gym trying to help everyone with their weightlifting form. It's, you know,
00:38:07
Speaker
you walk up to a woman at the bus stop and you say, Oh, I think you're using the wrong shampoo for your hair type. You know, let me actually recommend. So that sort of stuff is annoying. But as you point out on a large scale, this sort of meddling can have disastrous consequences. So think about historically, um, a lot of government housing projects. Um, you might arguably the second Iraq war, a lot of humanitarian interventions are like this. They just,
00:38:36
Speaker
you know, cause all kinds of destruction. And so the idea is, look, perhaps counterintuitively to a lot of people, simply trying to help someone or a group of people with good
Consequences of Busybody Behavior
00:38:48
Speaker
intentions does not guarantee, and perhaps doesn't even make it more likely that you are going to have good outcomes. Now, for someone like you who's been trained in these sorts of issues, like this is like the most obvious thing in the world, of course, like setting out with good intentions doesn't guarantee
00:39:03
Speaker
Make it likely that you have good outcomes but i have to say you know even when we're writing this these chapters in the book like my co-author and i were like really are we sure we need to say this like that's true like we encounter all kinds of people who really do seem to think you know think about like the policing stuff that you mentioned i mean i you know like twenty twenty twenty one there are people serious academics.
00:39:25
Speaker
Like this guy, Jason Stanley at Yale, he's a philosopher and like seriously arguing that like we should like empty the prisons and like not have police. And I'm just like, what? Like it's because they care. Presumably it's because they care. I don't want to impugn his sort of compassion, but like, what do you really think is going to happen? And.
00:39:46
Speaker
And so the problem yeah, go ahead I would say yeah, there have been a couple examples like that that reminded me of This saying that I saw once on twitter, which was the worst thing that ever happened to academics Reputations on twitter was academics on
Academics on Social Media
00:40:00
Speaker
twitter. That's right Yeah, i'm kind of thankful for it I mean it's laid bare a lot of just really childish thinking about how the world works, which I think you know
00:40:09
Speaker
is bad in the short term, but I think long term, I think it's good for a lot of people to stop listening to academics. From people whose very value proposition is that they have sophisticated thinking about how the world works. That's right. And that's the thing that I think is going to be a huge challenge for trust in universities. We talked about why the commencement speech morality is flawed. Let's talk about the virtues of the ordinary morality.
00:40:37
Speaker
So you're talking about how putting down roots helps people develop place attachment, which can be important for mental health, gives you a stable background against other changes. It builds community in a way that community cohesion in a way that being in a bedroom community or moving around, if everyone moved around all the time, wouldn't think about how books like Bowling Alone that have talked about how the decline of bowling leagues and churches and other kinds of small scale local social organizations have had
00:41:07
Speaker
devastating impacts. You're talking about how good home life creates refuge, hospitality, gives you, there's virtuous and, trying to think of what's the right word, virtuous and self improving types of solitude. So what have I missed in terms of the virtues that you describe of the ordinary morality? Yeah, well, so the first half of the book, as you point out, is the dangers of minding others
00:41:36
Speaker
business. And the second half of the book is the virtues of minding your own.
Community Focus in Ordinary Morality
00:41:40
Speaker
And so, you know, the question then obviously is, well, what, what is your business? And, you know, the book is not called why it's okay to be a rugged individualist or why it's okay to be selfish, right? So the question is like, what does it mean to attend to your business? What, what is your business and, and committing yourself to a local community and putting down roots and creating a good home and solitude. So these are all ways that we think about,
00:42:06
Speaker
being what the sociologist Edward Chills called a maintainer. It's easy to think that what life is about as being an innovator or a founder or a mover and a shaker, an entrepreneur, an influencer, it's easy to think that's what life is about.
00:42:29
Speaker
Stuff deteriorates, like if things are not taken care of, if things are not loved and preserved and developed affections for,
00:42:43
Speaker
they will go away. Like if no one preserves these things, people aren't going to take care of them. And the two main things we talk about in the book are your habitat. So by, I don't mean literally like your environment. Um, and also your local institutions. So these are things that people for hundreds of years have invested their lives in building and preserving and caretaking, and they've handed them off to people like you and I.
00:43:08
Speaker
And when you and I listen to commencement speech morality and say, well, I need to go start something new or build something big or solve a huge problem. What we're saying is now there's one less person to maintain these good things out there. And that may be what you and I need to do is go be a founder or an innovator or something. But the world needs maintainers, lots of maintainers like public libraries and
00:43:32
Speaker
Kiwanis clubs and local parks and all these things. It's a bit quaint to even list these things. It sounds a bit silly. But by the way, as an economist, this is so obvious, right? We call this depreciation, capital depreciation, right? And anyone who owns a car would consider it obvious that you have to take your car in for regular maintenance. Right. And so basically, I think what you're saying is society and local institutions and family is the same thing.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah, in the book we call it social erosion. So just like you can have soil erosion where you literally like fields and farms are destroyed because of erosion and they're not taken care of and preserved. The soil is not preserved. You can have social erosion. And I think your listeners probably don't need many examples. I mean, just look around and you can see like
00:44:23
Speaker
You know, look, if things are not taken care of, they get destroyed. And so I think it's really, I mean, here's one really bad thing about commencement speech morality, is it derogates maintainers. It derogates this kind of lifestyle. It discourages young people from pursuing this kind of life. And it also kind of makes people think that that kind of life is somehow second best. Like if you're not out creating a new app,
00:44:53
Speaker
to recycle bottle caps or you're not figuring out how to build wells in Somalia or something, that this kind of life is second best. I think that's just really unfortunate because there are a lot of people who live incredibly noble,
The Significance of Ordinary Life
00:45:11
Speaker
generous lives
00:45:14
Speaker
who work at a local library, who raise their kids right, who teach them how to be kind and virtuous and loving and productive members of society, that no commencement speech is gonna celebrate. I mean, this is why I love this, there's this famous David Foster Wallace commencement speech. It's called This is Water. And the idea of that speech is sort of, in a way, is an inspiration for this book, which is that like,
00:45:40
Speaker
A lot of the things that are humdrum and monotonous and day to day, like that's the important stuff. And so that's the inspiration of the second half of the book is that there is a kind of life, a kind of maintainer life that's incredibly important.
00:45:53
Speaker
Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to try a couple of claims on you. And the first one I think is not going to be controversial either to you or your critics. And the second two will, I suspect be friendly to you and controversial to your critics, but let's, let's, let's try it. Okay. So the first one is I think, I think the evidence that you Marshall and the other related evidence that I'm aware of suggests that a well-functioning society needs to have
00:46:20
Speaker
a small number of people with a commencement speech type morality, or at least with ambitions for some kind of larger project than their local setting, but many, many more people who have ordinary morality. And those people serve just as an important of a function to society collectively
00:46:45
Speaker
maintaining the key institutions that undergird society, local communities, family, local institutions, et cetera, like you say. It may be that you need both, but you need many, many more people trying to be ordinary than trying to be extraordinary, which in a sense is mathematically obvious. What do you think about that claim?
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, that seems perfectly right to me. Um, yeah, I don't know how the numbers actually work out. So I think you need an incredible amount of people who, who preserve the good things. I actually think probably most people, like if you're like, ah, should I be a, you know, should I be an innovator or a founder or a maintainer? I think like you should be a maintainer. Like if, if it's unclear to you, then you should probably be a maintainer.
00:47:32
Speaker
My guess is there's a spectrum and some clever mathematician will one day come up with a scaling law. That's probably true. So for example, if you just take this simplified setting to think about this as governments.
00:47:46
Speaker
You could work out what are the number of city councilors in the country and the number of state representatives in the country and the number of senators in the country and the number of presidents in the country. And each of those have a scope of governance and a sphere of influence that is massively andversely proportional to the number of them that you need.
00:48:09
Speaker
And so probably you could describe that in some mathematical way and some model. Okay, so that's my first claim. Here's my second claim. It strikes me that ordinary morality is more politically conservative
00:48:27
Speaker
And commencement speech morality is more politically liberal, at least in some ways, at least in terms of how it maps on to what I understand the research says about psychology. So for example, in academia, there's a widespread misconception that conservatives are less altruistic than liberals. Whereas the research I'm aware of suggests that they're equally altruistic, but they're more parochial in their altruism.
00:48:50
Speaker
So a liberal might be more likely to go to a rally in support of victims in a war-torn country, but a conservative will be more likely to help their neighbor fix their car or something. At least that's my impression from the research I'm aware of. Do you agree or dispute that characterization, that the morality you're pushing is inherently more conservative?
00:49:12
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so there's two ways to answer this. One question is, the people who actually pursue commencement speech morality, do they tend to be more liberal or conservative? My guess is, for all kinds of mostly contingent reasons having to do with who goes to college and
00:49:35
Speaker
who speaks at commencements and so on. I suspect that as a contingent matter, most people who are sort of motivated by this kind of life vision tend to be probably more on the left. I think that's probably right. There's a different question, maybe a more interesting question, which is like, well, is there something inherently about commencement speech morality that's more liberal or conservative? I mean, change versus maintain, right, is another way to think about it, as you described it.
00:50:01
Speaker
Yeah, so I do think there is something striking about commencement speech morality that is discordant with how a lot of conservatives have thought about the social fabric. And so I listed earlier some features of commencement speech morality. Here are those again. Moral life is pretty simple.
00:50:27
Speaker
The world is your business. Solving problems is primary. Bigger is better. Good intentions make all the difference. There's nothing, I don't think anything essentially about any of those that is left or right. But I think what you're saying is correct, which is something like this. If your inclination is toward change or radical change,
00:50:57
Speaker
then you're going to be, I mean, set aside whether the left right division is even helpful at all. I'm not sure it's, but like use a cartoon version. It's going to be helpful for my next claim, which is why I'm using. Okay. So if you're really into change, like if, if your first impulse, when you see a problem is to like have big change, because conservatives aren't against change, like they're, they're, they're like, they're in favor of like small slow change and very rarely big quick change. Um,
00:51:26
Speaker
So, or if your impulse is to be like, well, let's wait and see, or let's make some small judgments and see if we get empirical research that suggests that we're actually getting the effect we want, and actually things are really complicated, society's extremely complex, and there's all these feedback loops, unintended consequences, and we should be careful to not destroy things, then I would say that person's more conservative. Now, about this sort of like commencement speech stuff, I do think
00:51:54
Speaker
that the life that we recommend in the second half of the book is a much more conservative life. Lowercase c, it's a life that a lot of people on the left can live consistently with their progressivism or whatever. But I think the problem is because of their sort of like more shiny parts of their progressivism, they do tend to derogate these sort of more commonplace pedestrian parts of life. Okay, so here's my third claim.
00:52:22
Speaker
And that, it sounds like you've said, okay, if you accept the following premises, I think this third claim follows. So one is that we've talked about the possibility that maybe the ordinary morality is more aligned with the conservative mindset on average. We've talked about how probably the optimal balance for society has many, many more people living the ordinary life and the conventional speech life.
00:52:48
Speaker
And I think implicitly we've talked about the idea that the commencement speech life and its virtues are vastly overrepresented and maybe even overstated in education system discourse. The obvious conclusion that I draw from that is, might it be that this is a direct consequence of the fact that there's so few conservatives in the education system?
00:53:11
Speaker
And what is the this thing that's the result of the fact that commencement speech morality is vastly overrepresented, maybe overvalued compared to ordinary morality? I think there's some truth to that. There are not a lot of openly conservative commencement speakers.
00:53:36
Speaker
and often the ones that do get invited there's a bunch of controversy if this happens on the left too so like Notre Dame invited Obama there was a big controversy they invited Mike Pence there was a big controversy it happens on both sides that's that's certainly true but I think given
00:53:56
Speaker
Given who gets invited, so it tends to be politicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, actors, celebrities, writers, it's going to, I mean, just the demographics of those groups are going to be more left leaning. But I'm not talking about commencement speeches specifically so much, right? The commencement speech morality sure comes out in commencement speeches, but it's also kind of a soup that we all swim in, certainly in higher ed, certainly in disciplines like mine that are, you know, environmental studies that are oriented around solving the problem.
00:54:26
Speaker
I guess that's what I'm saying. How much is that that being the soup that our education system seems to have us swim in have to do with the fact that there's almost no conservatives? Yeah, okay, good. So I'll put it this way. I think if the distribution of conservatives and liberals, let's just make it easy, was reversed in academia,
00:54:51
Speaker
we would all be swimming in a very different sea of moral advice to young people. I think that's right. Now, it's a much less interesting and exciting advice. I mean, this is maybe one confound, is that this book is not going to excite people. It's like, you know, live a quiet life, do your thing. That's not that exciting, and it's hard to get young people excited about that sort of thing.
00:55:20
Speaker
And so that might be a confound, but I, but I do think you're, you're probably right that if the ratio was reversed, um, many fewer young people would be told they need to go out there and change the world and sort of revolution. I think that's right. Okay. Two last quick questions to wrap up. The first is, it seems like you anticipated that some of your critics,
00:55:47
Speaker
would say you're promoting more of a selfish mindset and less of an altruistic other regarding mindset. And I actually think some of the threads of what your actual argument is are almost the exact opposite, right? And basically saying that the pathologies of the moralizing and busy body lives are a result of arrogance that may be in some cases exacerbated by narcissism.
00:56:14
Speaker
and the virtues of a quiet, ordinary life are partly undervalued because they're not grandiose, right? And so in some sense, it takes a more society-minded, less narcissistic person to live an ordinary life than to live a commencement speech life. Is that right? Yeah, that seems right. I think it's very hard
00:56:43
Speaker
to be okay living in obscurity. Especially if you're somebody who thinks of yourself as an elite or a proto elite. Right? Yeah, I think it's very difficult. So here's my last question. And it has to do with a topic that's been in the news a lot in the last couple of weeks. And that is, there's been some talk, a lot of talk over the last several years about low birth rates in developed countries.
00:57:09
Speaker
And there was an article, I think it was in the Financial Times that I saw a few days ago that pointed out that
00:57:17
Speaker
Although a lot of the proximate reasons that people give for not having more children are economic and therefore theoretically could be alleviated by money, right? We don't have enough. Child care is too expensive. It's too costly to raise a child, et cetera, et cetera. Past efforts by governments to raise birth rates through money have mostly failed or at best succeeded transiently. And so this article, and I'm
00:57:44
Speaker
I'm sorry to say I can't remember the author, the author's name, but her argument was basically that what if part of the story here is culture, that we're not valuing as a culture enough the amazing contribution somebody's making by raising a child and bringing a child into the world.
Cultural Attitudes and Birth Rates
00:58:03
Speaker
Am I wrong to be reminded of that issue when reading your book?
00:58:09
Speaker
Uh, no, I don't think so. Uh, I, I think a lot of things are cultural. I think this probably reveals sort of a little about how I think about the world. I think, um, I'm sure the economic explanation probably goes some way to explaining why some group is some, some people don't have kids, but like all the, a lot of the people that you and I know, especially in academia who are dinks, double income, no kids.
00:58:33
Speaker
They're not poor, right? They're often very well off. They could certainly have children and afford it. That's not why they're not having kids. I think there is, for various reasons, there is this meme about it's bad for the environment or how could you bring a kid into this world and so on. But I do think there is now a cultural taboo on having kids.
00:59:01
Speaker
And I think this is this goes back to this derogation of like home life and it gets coded as like right wing or something.
00:59:08
Speaker
But I've got this paper coming out in Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy where the title of the paper is, Saving the World Starts at Home. Basically, all these effective altruists want you to do all these grandiose things, and what I argue in the paper is here's a way to do a lot of good for the world very effectively, have kids, and raise them in a good home. Now again, that's not gonna excite many people, but I think that's one easy way to really make the world a better place.
00:59:36
Speaker
But I mean, just to put some economics behind that, I believe the state in the country with the highest upper mobility is Utah, partly for exactly that reason, that disproportionately they're raising kids in stable families. The types of local institutions that you talk about needing to maintain, there's lots of evidence that those institutions and the cohesion that they foster are essential to creating the political conditions where public goods can be provided.
01:00:05
Speaker
solving a lot of problems that progressives consider to be essential problems requires public goods to be provided and therefore probably requires local institutions maintained by a lot of people with ordinary morality. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think de-growth and having fewer people
01:00:23
Speaker
If I was gonna bet, like bet my life on like more kids, more good homes or fewer kids and de-growth, I'm betting every time on the first option. I just, I really have a hard time getting myself into the mind of someone who thinks that like, A, the world is horrible and we have always problems to solve. And B, the way to do it is to like create fewer people who can solve these problems. That doesn't seem to mean like a very good bet.
01:00:52
Speaker
I mean, the DGRO thing is complicated. I actually teach a course on this debate that doesn't take a position that just says, here are the arguments for and against. And we could do a whole other episode on this. But what I think is interesting and important about this debate is that the best arguments on one side are there are biophysical limits probably to how much economic activity we can have on the planet.
01:01:15
Speaker
And the best arguments on the other side are if we stop growing or grew in reverse, it would cause catastrophic suffering and societal breakdown. And my first, the thought that, the nagging thought that made me start studying this debate a few years ago is that those are not mutually exclusive arguments, right?
01:01:37
Speaker
It's possible. Now, personally, my guess is that if there is an upper limit to global GDP, we are not anywhere close to it yet. And we probably haven't surpassed it. But again, that's an empirical question that I don't think has been definitively answered.
01:01:56
Speaker
And it really is a question, you know, there's no, I think, I think it's easy to argue that current practices are environmentally unsustainable in various ways. And so the debate basically is, you know, is the, is the way out of that to decouple through growth or to, you know, to, to scale back. And I have a PhD student who's actually looking at the weight of evidence of this in different domains, getting a little bit off topic. But I, but, but I think that you're, I think where I, where I agree with you without reservation is the idea that a,
01:02:25
Speaker
society that functions well and where people flourish and are happy.
01:02:33
Speaker
is unlikely to be built on a foundation of fundamental pessimism about humanity. I think you need a little bit of realism about humanity to design institutions that provide guardrails against the darker sides of our nature. But if you have a movement that fundamentally sees humanity as a disease, right, or something analogous to it, I struggle to think of how you would build a thriving human society on that premise.
01:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, if you think that, you know, if you think that humans are a disease, I don't see how you could have a positive vision of the future. I mean, there are these philosophers, as I'm sure you know, who think that like, we should just make sure that we go extinct, you know, within a couple hundred years or half a cent, you know, half a century or something. And thankfully, they only talk to each other.
Role of Academics in Society
01:03:22
Speaker
As you said earlier, it's one of the benefits of being being like, you know, they insulate us from the rest of society. There's this great novel. Oh, what's that novel?
01:03:34
Speaker
Oh, Stoner by John Williams. It's an excellent academic novel written in the 20th century. And in it, three English professors are discussing the purpose of the university. And one of the protagonists, Stoner, his argument is that the reason why the university was created was to gather up all these weirdos who are bad for society and put them in one place, lock them in there, and make sure they talk to each other so they can't affect anybody else. But the internet's ruined all that now, because now we're all on Twitter talking to everybody.
01:04:04
Speaker
Well, on that note, I'll say that maybe it's time for these two weirdos to stop talking. That's right. But seriously, Brandon Wormke, thank you so much for being on the Free Mind podcast. I highly recommend your book, Why It's Okay to Mind Your Own Business. I also recommend your earlier book, Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Go check those out if you're listening, and we'll see you soon. Thanks, Matt.
01:04:31
Speaker
Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center.
01:04:57
Speaker
Our Instagram is at The Benson Center and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.