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#23 Sebastian Purcell: Rootedness, Not Happiness — Aztec Wisdom for a Slippery World
15 Plays16 hours ago
In this episode, we speak with philosopher Sebastian Purcell about his new book The Outward Path: Lessons on Living from the Aztecs. Purcell shows that Aztec philosophy offers a strikingly different vision of the good life — one that rejects the modern obsession with happiness and invulnerability in favor of something deeper: rootedness.
We discuss what it means to live a rooted life in a world that feels increasingly unstable — from collective agency and humility to willpower, ritual, and the art of balance. Along the way, Purcell explains how Aztec ethics can help us rethink everything from self-discipline and courage to how we live with technology, social media, and each other.
Links:
Sebastian’s website
Sebastian’s articles on Medium
Sebastian’s book
For more info, visit ethicscircle.org.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to ATEC Podcast and Guest
00:00:17
Speaker
Hi everyone, and welcome to the ATEC podcast. Today, we are speaking with Sebastian Purcell. Sebastian Purcell is a philosopher at State University of New York at Cortland, where he researches ethics, Aztec philosophy, and mathematical logic.
00:00:34
Speaker
Today, we'll be in conversation about his recent book, The Outward Path, The Wisdom of the Aztecs. Sebastian, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the show. Hey, great to
Sebastian's Path to Aztec Philosophy
00:00:45
Speaker
be here.
00:00:45
Speaker
glad Glad to be on the show. All right. So, Sebastian, um you know you wrote a book on Aztec ethics, and it is great, by the way. and You should know that i've been've I've been sweeping every day this week in preparation for this interview. So I've learned the wisdom of the Aztecs.
00:01:06
Speaker
um But first, before we get into all that, I mean, how does one get into Aztec philosophy? i As I recall, when I was choosing graduate school, I don't remember finding people that were specialists in Aztec philosophy. So just kind of, you know, tell us about how you got into this.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think you still wouldn't be able to find specialists teaching the most grad programs in philosophy and Aztec philosophy. And that is in part, I don't know, an indictment of our discipline. ah But my way in was accidental.
00:01:41
Speaker
So um personal background, my grandmother, who during a lot of my childhood, I spent that like living back and forth between the United States and Guadalajara. And my grandmother used to speak to us in Spanish in Nahuatl, and that just kind of confused everyone. And my mother just said, ignore your grandmother on all of that stuff. Like, don't worry.
00:02:03
Speaker
um Later on in life, I actually was finishing up my PhD, and I got asked to teach a class on like Latin American philosophy, and I wanted to include a unit class.
00:02:16
Speaker
um ah this is This is the summertime, and I wanted to include a unit in that fall semester on just like anything pre-Colombian that I could find. So I went up to the library just to see what was out there, and I stumbled on a book, La Filosofía de los Nahuas.
00:02:32
Speaker
lafi luiffiia del lenawa but ah That's what it is by Miguel Leon Portilla. And he just kind of explained that there were these people that we call the Aztecs and probably better to call them the Nahuas because they spoke Nahuatl. Otherwise, it would be like calling these the greeks Olympians because they had myths about Olympus, right?
00:02:52
Speaker
Aztec comes from Aztlan, that's a myth. It's just an odd thing to do culturally. like If for no other reason, I find it difficult to understand the cultural like double standard there.
00:03:04
Speaker
So probably Nehwas is a better name. anyways So I read through that and I thought it was great and I decided to teach some of that. It was translated into English as Aztec thought and culture.
00:03:17
Speaker
Anyways, um the you know erasing the title. Also, the English edition is abridged relative to the Spanish edition, just as a note. But ah that's how I started into it, and I thought, well, this is fascinating. I will write about it after I get tenure.
Social-Centric Nature of Aztec Ethics
00:03:33
Speaker
Right? All the fun stuff has to get put off. Yeah. Yeah. they Nobody hires anyone who does Aztec philosophy. Like, that is not a thing. I can attest. They still don't hire anyone who does Aztec philosophy. You will get a job as an ethicist or a logician.
00:03:46
Speaker
That's what I got a job as, right? So ah that's what I did in graduate school. I decided at that point to pick up Nahuatl as ah sort of a dead language because there are contemporary speakers. Obviously, my grandmother spoke to us. and ah language.
00:03:59
Speaker
But it is classed as stage three Nahua, that is grammatically different from the stage two stuff that is written down in the texts just after Cortez, which is the period that I focus on. And then stage one would be pre-contact, which we don't really have written down anywhere.
00:04:16
Speaker
And so I focused my studies on that stage two stuff before the grammar changes significantly enough. And so other people who were historians and anthropologists and linguists came before me, i read their stuff, and they said, okay, language change is about 1640. So I focused on that, let's say 1535 is about the earliest recorded piece for us, which I translated into my first book was the translation of the Discourses of the Elders.
00:04:45
Speaker
Because nobody had translated that into English. I didn't want to become a translator. I just wanted to do philosophy. But I ended up translating that one because it didn't exist. And I began learning the language yeah about that point in graduate school. So I had about seven years to tinker around learning the language as a dead language, just like I learned Greek and Latin, you know.
00:05:05
Speaker
I got tenure writing on Aristotle and logic, the the typical things that philosophers get tenure on. And um then after that, I began to actually write on Aztec philosophy following the dominant tradition in Mexico from the UNAM.
00:05:20
Speaker
So that's kind of how I got into it. So what kind of, I guess what I'm wondering is like, um what pulled you in the direction of studying Aztec philosophy in the term in terms of like, what kind of questions or issues are you able to probe in that context, which maybe you're not necessarily probing or thinking about in I don't know, Aristotle or someone else. Yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so in part, it was just fascinating for me as a personal anecdotal level, like, oh, wow, my grandmother was saying something. and These people weren't like, this culture is, as far as anyone can tell, philosophical.
00:06:01
Speaker
Right. And that was just a thing I didn't know. And it was nice because, we use philosophy as an honorific. If a culture is designated as philosophical, it tends to be classed as a more developed culture. And it was wonderful to learn that you know ah bunch of my heritage was from a culture that was relatively advanced, and we just had 500 years of cultural misrecognition that was just wiping that off the slate.
00:06:28
Speaker
um So in part, that was the motivation. When I got into the philosophy, You can imagine i also found it to be more natural in some ways. There is um a scholar out of, she's in in one of the UCs, her name's Barbara Rogoff. You can find her TED Talks and they are fascinating.
00:06:47
Speaker
She does work a sociological work with Mexican heritage children, Guatemala heritage children, and compares what they do relative to European heritage children. Part of the stuff that she's found is they'll put them through exercises. These are like five-year-old kids, right?
00:07:01
Speaker
and they'll give a couple of them like a little task about navigating through a grocery store on a representation of a grocery store. And they have to do certain things. The Mexican heritage children will ah sort of talk a little bit and then just work together. They've described it as like four arms in one body or eight arms in one body or something like whatever limbs in one body.
00:07:22
Speaker
the European heritage children will collaborate too, but they have to stop, prompt each other, to say, you do this task, I'll do this task. They're just not the same. And they were able to put them through pace graphs.
00:07:35
Speaker
So literal ah you know minute by minute analysis to see what they're doing as they record the videos. And they found that Mexican heritage children exhibit what they call fluid synchrony.
00:07:47
Speaker
where they're just kind of working together spontaneously like a dancing partner couple, right? They're just doing stuff together. ah That they do at twice the rate of European heritage kids.
00:07:59
Speaker
And that just provides some sociological evidence to kind of back up my view in general, which is that the Aztecs had a more... socially-centered outlook on ethics than what you get in the West, than what you would get in somebody like Aristotle.
00:08:14
Speaker
And that becomes interesting philosophically. So my goal became ah one of articulating what that looks like, both for philosophers academically and, you know, everyone can act learn to act more collaboratively. It's not like European heritage children don't do fluid synchrony.
00:08:32
Speaker
They just don't do it to the same extent, right? As much. That's a cultural thing. Everyone can learn to do it and there might be benefits for it. So that's sort of what animated me in this direction. And I can, obviously I'll explain more of what I mean, but it does have those dual roles. One of them is theoretical and one of them is very practical for everyone to just live better.
Aztec Goal of Life Beyond Happiness
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess what'll we'll dive into, um, into both in that order. Let me see if I can just for for listeners, kind of, you know, say back to you some of what you said, and and maybe I'll kind of add a little bit and you can tell me if I'm wrong or right, having read your book.
00:09:09
Speaker
ah So I was thinking about how to explain this. I think we're all teachers here. So and we all think about this, I guess, but I'm, I was thinking that maybe we can say that there's a bunch of, and there's, there's, there is you know, what we might dub, you know, um ethics, ancient ethics, right? And these are like lifestyle philosophies, philosophy as a way of life, that kind of thing.
00:09:30
Speaker
And a lot of them focus on something called, um you know, we might translate it as flourishing, eudaimonia. What I'm hearing that you're saying right now is that the Aztecs, um had this kind of philosophy, which, you know, very practical um ah um benefits to to living.
00:09:48
Speaker
One of them being this capacity for, you called it fluid synchrony, right? um But in addition to that, it's not just ah this collective aspect to Aztec ethics.
00:10:00
Speaker
but it is also an ethics of ritual, and it's also an ethics of individual personal character like that of Aristotle. So am i am I getting that correct? It seems to be and ethics that aims at...
00:10:14
Speaker
ah a good, the highest good, right? And we'll we'll talk about what that is in a second. But it seems to have elements that you might recognize from, say, Confucianism, the rituals, right? Or from Aristotle, the character stuff, but also something very Mesoamerican, this collective agency stuff. Did I, how am I, did I do it?
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's that's exactly right. And so from the theoretical point of view, it becomes you can put them on a spectrum here where Aristotle, who's often classed as more social than someone like Kant or Mill, right?
00:10:47
Speaker
Aristotle on this spectrum is maybe the most individualist. Then you would have somebody in the middle, more like Confucian ah philosophy, which uses social rituals.
00:10:58
Speaker
to improve character. And then you have the Aztecs for whom social rituals enact the virtues. Because they had this idea of shared agency and just for the audience, shared agency is like a fancy term for a simple thing. I'm in New York, so people often think of like walking down the streets of New York. or and ah You're there on Broadway. If you happen to be walking by like somebody next to somebody, you're just walking.
00:11:25
Speaker
You're both just walking. But if you're going with somebody else in your group, you're taking a stroll with them. And somehow that's different. There are people around you going the same direction, but they're not walking with you.
00:11:38
Speaker
And shared agency is some like it's when you think of yourself as a we, like we're taking a stroll. That's how we perform on teams, like team sports, or we're playing the game or whatever.
00:11:52
Speaker
You're not doing the same thing. And it's different from even if you have somebody right next to you performing the same physical activity, it isn't actually the same activity in terms of agency.
00:12:03
Speaker
So the Aztecs had this sense that the virtues were that help you live well are things that you do with other people. And one of the key ways that you coordinate that activity with
Cultural Practices and Aztec Moderation
00:12:16
Speaker
other people is through ritual.
00:12:18
Speaker
So they're even more socially centered than Confucius. For Confucius, these virtues help you develop an individual character better. For the Aztecs, the rituals are helping you do the things, perform the virtues together.
00:12:34
Speaker
And to make this less abstract and more concrete for the ah audience, one way that you can think about this is this is what's at base called their outward path.
00:12:45
Speaker
So rather than try to improve yourself as an individual, if you're you know Aristotle or a Stoic, ah The idea is, okay, I'm going to learn to meditate if I'm a Buddhist, right? to meditate, still my mind, and then go outside. And a lot of stoicism is about that too, like catch your thoughts before they spiral out of control and learn to act rationally. Okay.
00:13:05
Speaker
The Aztecs are going to say your mind is chaos, ah lean on your family around you and your friends, and then go inward, right? So that's the outward path. For example, um I live in a neighborhood neighborhood.
00:13:17
Speaker
just my wife and I do since we're both philosophers and we live in this area. We never lived in like a traditional style neighborhood where people sit on their front porches, walk their dogs down the street and their children in strollers and say hi to each other and all of that stuff. It feels like it's out of the nineteen fifty s um So for Halloween, everyone comes by and does this little trick-or-treating thing.
00:13:39
Speaker
We asked, like so how much candy do we get? And they said, expect a lot. So we bought way too much Halloween candy, and then afterwards just left it on this big platter in our...
00:13:50
Speaker
living room, which you can't go by in my house without passing this platter. So every day i would pass this platter. I have no willpower to resist sweet things. And I just kept on eating the candy and I hated it.
00:14:02
Speaker
And I complained. was this whole Catholic background here. So whole cycle of like guilt and transgression that's going on. And I came home one day and the platter was empty.
00:14:13
Speaker
turned my wife and I said, well, what happened? And she said, oh, I just took it to the kids at the philosophy department. And Let them have it, your kiddos being other philosophy students. So ah with that, my whole cycle of guilt and transgression was over, and I started living better.
00:14:29
Speaker
But not because I developed more moderation. i don't have more individual character virtue. Instead, somebody else in my life who cares about me saw the problem and fixed it.
00:14:41
Speaker
And that's sort of emblematic of the outward path, right? You learn to lean on the people around you in a fulfilling way, and then you can avoid this whole mess of actually becoming better as an individual. You can become better as a group and hence live better as a result of that.
00:15:02
Speaker
So if i um maybe I can nutshell that for you. It sounds like you want to engineer your environment and your social relations so that you can be your best. yeah Yeah. So you can live the the best life that humans can live.
00:15:17
Speaker
Asics are kind of pessimists, you know but as best as a human can live, that's your that's your best shot. I do want to get into the pessimism stuff, but before before that, I just had one sort of comment here.
00:15:29
Speaker
um i i recall from probably one of Owen Flanagan's books, a very famous ah empirical philosopher, uses a lot of cultural psychology ah for the listeners, I'm sure.
00:15:42
Speaker
you all know ah Flanagan, but um in one of his books, I don't remember one he which one, he talks about how there's all these like differences in the mind between Westerners and Easterners such that um it's actually the case that Westerners are more prone to certain biases.
00:15:58
Speaker
ah they're They're more likely to, for example, overestimate that the reason for some you know action that someone takes is internal as opposed to a result of their environment.
00:16:10
Speaker
And so it sounds like um Asic ethics sort of trains you, maybe not consciously, but you know in ah in an implicit way, maybe you recognize that you have to kind of set everything up around you in the right way and so that ah certain outcomes are achieved. So is that, did I? Totally totally fair. yeah And there,
00:16:30
Speaker
Completely on board with a lot of the new research that's come out about sort of non-conscious influence on what we perceive to be a rational, deliberative thought. But you know when we're honest, by the time you sit down to deliberate over a problem, a lot of things have happened.
00:16:47
Speaker
Right? right? That if before you ever got there, and most things you decide on without even recognizing that you're making those decisions. And so that's sort of the Aztec complex moral psychology. we have a whole lot of different minds and that's why for them, it's not that you don't, by the way, they didn't have a notion of meditation, they called it Teomania,
00:17:07
Speaker
and So it's not that you don't do the things that the Buddhists and the and the Stoics say you should do. It's just that maybe you don't start there because it's going to take you 10 years in the Himalayan mountains to figure out how to still your mind. But you know what?
00:17:19
Speaker
If you learn to lean on your friends, you can live better tomorrow.
Primary Texts and Interpreting Aztec Literature
00:17:22
Speaker
So um it's that sort of approach. so So what about like, oh sorry, Roberto. was just going to say like, the I mean, it seems like the outward path also includes, uh,
00:17:37
Speaker
certain personal virtues, right? Like I'm just thinking like in order to to achieve that kind of group synchronization to move like in rhythm with others in certain ways, you know, there needs to be kind of trust among the actors, um trust that the other people are acting good faith.
00:17:56
Speaker
So it seems like, you know, some personal virtues of like honesty, Fidelity, reliability are going to be important to synchronization. I'm thinking too about humility, like openness to correction. That's super important when it comes to like really um yeah achieving a kind of group coordination. Anyway, so I'm just thinking that there are certain like personal virtues that are um seemingly necessary to
00:18:30
Speaker
get the benefits of the hour path. i don't know, is that- Yeah, yeah no, that's totally right. And I think that they're sort of conceived on a spectrum. In some ways, probably courage, which you know they called the- had a variety of terms for that, but it was the attribute of the eagles and jaguars, right?
00:18:47
Speaker
Who are the class of people they called the warriors, which is just a metaphorical way of calling them warriors. So it's ah it's a metonym, right? Courage. And sort of stands in for that. But that tends to be the most individualistic. Very few other people can help you be courageous. That one is sort of on your own. But you know the paradigm example of practical wisdom, which if you're a virtue ethicist, that informs everything. right So the paradigm example of practical wisdom is group deliberation.
00:19:16
Speaker
And that is definitely more socially centered. And that's where, yes, it requires supplementary virtues like humility in order to be open to being corrected. Because you can't deliberate in a group well unless you're also open to the fact that you might be wrong, right?
00:19:31
Speaker
And somebody else just flat out knows better about this topic than you do, and you're just willing to accept that. And it's important to say that this is what they thought of as the paradigm case.
00:19:43
Speaker
And Aristotle might have conceded like, yeah, of course, nobody is smart enough or knows enough things. So in regular life, you're going to have to go talk to other people. But it would be better if you were the lone smartest dude out there and just knew all the stuff and didn't have to do that.
00:20:00
Speaker
And the Aztec view, this is this is where it's just different in conception. They're going to say, well, no, no human is ever going to be in that position. So that just isn't a human ideal.
00:20:11
Speaker
What are you doing? The human ideal is good deliberation in a good group. This is ethics for humans, after all, not ethics for angels. So why would you even postulate the counterfactual as the goal?
00:20:26
Speaker
And that's the shift that's kind of implicit. And since you know practical wisdom sort of infuses all the other virtues, all the other virtues are in some sense infused with a social dimension that would be different from the individual characteristics that you find that are very similar, like courage.
00:20:42
Speaker
That would be very similar in Aristotle and the Aztecs. I think that's that's a really key case of overlap. It's hard to find differences there. Moderation, that one's also pretty close, although the Aztecs held that moderation should be balanced.
00:20:56
Speaker
So maybe, you know, you have a celebration and a wedding. This kind of goes to their pessimism thing, but you know, when life gives you something good, celebrate it right? So your job is to get drunk.
00:21:07
Speaker
You should do that. So moderation includes indulgence in a way that I don't really see mirrored in Aristotle or Confucius. Right. Yeah. So I, I, I'm thinking, I think of, um Not Alexander. Yeah, I think it is, I guess, Alexander's posse, right? The Macedonians or Macedonians, how you pronounce it? um they They would have, i do know a little bit about them. They would have festivals where you have to get drunk, but they never had that actual, like, now we have to fast.
00:21:37
Speaker
Now we have to and you know abstain, right? So they would have those, you know, so you don't you don't, even in places where you kind of do mandate getting super drunk, um ah the the Scythians, whatever, there's other groups that would do that.
00:21:49
Speaker
you don't also get that that you know more ascetic part of it to balance it. so Yeah, and that's for the Aztecs. that So their moderation is in part like, yeah, centers on willpower, but in part it centers on these social dynamics. So you get drunk at the wedding, but that should be followed up by, you know or at least preceded ideally by three days of fasting or something like that. right So it balances out, the indulgence is balanced out by the the fasting, and then you go back to a normal life.
00:22:16
Speaker
And so that is a way in which they're close. I translate one of their terms as moderation. They're close to Aristotle or the Stoics or Confucius, but then again, they're just different.
00:22:28
Speaker
And that's when you have to realize that the terms I'm using to describe similar virtues are artifacts produced by scholars us today, trying to do the work of ah saying like, it is like this, but it isn't like
Pessimism and Rooted Living in Aztec Philosophy
00:22:42
Speaker
this. And Yeah, but it's they're helpful terms of art, but you should get rid of them if they stop or interfere with your ability to understand the the idea behind it, I think.
00:22:54
Speaker
Can I ask really quick, just kind of ah more of a, i don't know what the word is, like practical framing question. like When it comes to the text that you're studying, are you mainly study like in terms of understanding Aztec philosophy, is it mainly the Florentine Codex?
00:23:08
Speaker
ah is that kind of I don't exactly know what the Florentine Codex is, but... I don't know, I'm just kind of curious, like just for people, like what texts are you you looking at so Yeah, so that one would have been, ah the first book there that was recorded is One of the Way with Tlatolles, so that's one of the Discourses the Elders that became Volume 6 of the Florentine Codex, and sure, that I believe was 1540. Yeah, also the Discourses of the Elders that I translated. A Discourse of the Elders is a genre in Aztec.
00:23:40
Speaker
written literature, a little bit like a dialogue is for Plato. So there just as each platonic dialogue covers different topics, so each discourse covers different topics. right so And you say it's kind of a unique disc but like genre, right? You say it's kind of like a distinctive genre. It's sort of like a dialogue, but it's not like the other party doesn't respond much.
00:24:01
Speaker
So it's like 90-10 dialogue, like monologue to dialogue ratio. It's like a late platonic dialogue. Yeah. Yeah, there's ah there's a lot of one speaker going on, the other person like replies a little bit, kind of contained afterwards.
00:24:16
Speaker
So I don't want to say that they are dialogues exactly. um Elaine Mason, my editor at Norton, was like, well, why not just call them dialogues? I was like, I just feel uncomfortable because I also don't feel like the purpose of them was to help The interlocutor elicit like some sort of forgotten knowledge or whatever Plato was doing with those things. was rather you know It's an older person directly communicating wisdom to a younger person, and that is the definitive framework. like
00:24:47
Speaker
I'm going to just sit you down and have plain talk. this is what you need to know. about life or whatever else that tends to be what we're looking at. So I'm looking at a few of those texts, yes, out of the Florentine Codex, this other separate, Huevo Tlatoli, and then a couple of these Xochiquicat texts, which are flower songs.
00:25:08
Speaker
Those um are incredibly difficult to interpret, but they tend to be important for metaphysical reasons. And then a few other cosmologies that are included in the Codex Cimal Popoca, which is actually two books just kind of combined into one.
00:25:22
Speaker
And that would be the principal sources for this study. And all of those would have been recorded in that period between, listeners can just think, after Cortez, so after 1519, but before 1640 when the language kind of definitely changed into stage three.
00:25:42
Speaker
And that's what I'm looking at. So they're sort of products of that really early colonial era, but you know So we don't know for sure how much of that that did they represent before you know the spaniards showed up. and The answer is, I don't know, some amount, but it's like peeling a raspberry. you know It's really hard to say after a certain point like how much of it is pre pre-contact and how much of it isn't.
00:26:06
Speaker
But it is the best stuff we have available to us, so that's what I look at. There are some pre-contact codices. or at least done in that tradition, about nine of them, but they're very, very difficult to interpret and they don't tend to say things that philosophers can readily extract as meaningful statements. So um that's, i think, what we're looking at.
00:26:27
Speaker
But it in short, it's not all oral. And then what I try to do is I try to coordinate this evidence like, okay, it looks like I'm doing this thing here. Let's find some contemporary sociology to make sure that I'm not just...
00:26:38
Speaker
reading stuff into the text because it's going to be holistic. like The interpretation has to be holistic. And ah yeah, so there's like an ongoing scholarly discussion between the philosophers and the historians the anthropologists, and we're all stepping on each other's toes. Like, you know, as we do academically, it's a really awkward, bad dance, but you know, as we try to do interdisciplinary work, but that's, it we have our different aims and we kind of approach it with our own holistic goals. So historians are like, why are you asking questions about this thing? So it's like,
00:27:09
Speaker
<unk>s no No regular Nahuatl would care. I'm like, well, but philosophers care about the good life. And so even if most commoners didn't articulate a view of that, I want to find those few texts that do talk about that thing.
00:27:23
Speaker
ah That's helpful. i appreciate that. That's good. Just getting that sense there. And I guess one thing, you know, so you talked a little bit about the outward path, kind of, you know, less of an emphasis in Aztec philosophy on self-sufficiently, more about engaging outwardly through family ritual and guess kind of art and other things like that.
00:27:47
Speaker
But you know isn't it the case that it's like the goal here isn't the outward path toward happiness? is in ah You kind of mentioned in your book that in Aztec philosophy, it seems like the goal of life is not happiness, actually. So can you elaborate on that? It's pretty cool.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah. So um I try to organize the book conceptually in a way, like if the Aztecs were alive today or something like that, as an interpreting them through this tradition, what would they say to us, especially in the Anglophone world?
00:28:24
Speaker
ah How would they organize their lessons for us? And that is the organization there. okay So the first lesson would probably be, you're not really after happiness, you just think you are. And I can prove it to you.
00:28:38
Speaker
yeah It turns out that most people aren't. So I started the book with ah the question, like the example of Odysseus, but I give my students in class a thought experiment to back that one up, which is something along the lines of like, yeah okay, your your grandfather passes, ah your kooky grandfather does. and You go to his estate and you know everyone, he's well off, so everyone receives something.
00:29:00
Speaker
You get nothing until the very end. And he says, I bequeath to you my most most valuable possession, a crystal ball. And you're like, thanks, Grandpa, you really lost it right at the end.
00:29:10
Speaker
Whatever, you get the crystal ball, you bring bring it back to your room, you decide to ask a question just for ah grins. And you ask it, for example, like, I don't know what cryptocurrency is going to make the most money tomorrow. And it gives you like some symbols and you need to decide, ah, screw it, I'll throw a few dollars in there and see what happens.
00:29:30
Speaker
And all of a sudden you are extremely wealthy. It is right. The crystal ball, in fact, it does tell you the truth about these things. And so um not long after that, you kind of like use the crystal ball to assess future options in your life.
00:29:45
Speaker
um One of them is, there's there's a few of these ways we could go through it. It tells you how to like save the honeybees and those sorts of things. But one of the items that it tells you about, by the way, this is from chapter two of the book, not not exactly chapter one, um is you fall in love with somebody.
00:30:03
Speaker
And you ask the crystal ball, well, will one of us die first? And it says, yes. and so Well, ah who, me or them?
00:30:15
Speaker
They will. By very much? Yes, they'll die much sooner than you do. And so you're stuck with this dilemma. Do you continue? ah in that relationship where you know that they'll die a lot sooner and you will have to grieve their passing or or not. And most students say, well, yeah, of course, if you you really love the person. like, yes, you do. It's a loving relationship. Okay.
00:30:34
Speaker
Well, yeah, duh. like Obviously, you continue in that path. it's like But you're setting yourself up for a lot of pain. Right. And, but people are like, yeah but that's just kind of what you do. And actually, if you think about it, that's like every relationship.
00:30:47
Speaker
You always set yourself up for that possibility. the The crystal ball gives you certainty about an outcome that is always possible. Um, so, okay. i you know people think it's worth doing.
00:31:00
Speaker
And that's just one, there's two things that that come out of that. One of them is that we do value some things above smiles. If by happiness you mean smiling a lot, we don't really care that much. And the other one is that the things that bring our life the most value tend to introduce fragility, right?
00:31:17
Speaker
our Our most loving relationships are fragile things and they can fail because the people on the other side fail. But that doesn't mean that they're not worth pursuing. That's super interesting. I don't know if you're familiar with, ah this just reminds me of the work of Hubert Dreyfus and his reading of Kierkegaard.
00:31:37
Speaker
um It kind of comes out in All Things Shining, I think. But basically, you know the idea is like there's a modern crisis of meaning. What's the reason for it? And you know his idea is like really the way to have a meaningful life, the most fun the key way is by having projects that are concrete, that include finite commitments, commitments to things that are finite, things that are vulnerable because they are finite. They are not, so, so like he would kind of like say, you know, better than have being an, you kind of use this character where it's like better than being someone who's, you know, fundamentally committed to, let's say abstract,
00:32:21
Speaker
moral norms in a sort of Kantian vein, for example. Better than that is like adding a dimension of like trust and commitment to something specific, particular, finite, like a person, for example.
00:32:37
Speaker
And a person is, of course, you know is fine is is going to die eventually. And so by being committed to them, you're you're making yourself vulnerable. Anyway, um I just feel like there's a lot of That is similar.
00:32:50
Speaker
and and And could you, I mean, you you bring up, for example, the contrast with other systems. like And it seems to me the one that jumps out to me as contrasting the most with what you're saying in terms of this like rooted commitment to something that's um vulnerable.
00:33:07
Speaker
To me, Buddhism kind of really stands in contrast to that because it seems like they're um They're saying the the like the source of suffering is your attachment to various… Yeah, anyway. so if you want yeah And in that sense, again, um man and i have some friends who are Buddhists and they are like, oh, well, it's much more subtle. So one of but one of my actual friends that I talk to on a regular basis, he a psychologist, but he went off to go study in
00:33:38
Speaker
you know monks for years. And I've learned from him that Buddhism is quite subtle. But yes, this is a core difference. Ultimately, it seems to me that Buddhism and Stoicism aim at this thing of if you learn these techniques, you will be invulnerable to the world's vicissitudes.
00:33:55
Speaker
And the key message from the Aztecs is, first of all, you don't care about the happiness that much in terms of smiles. Second, the things that you do care about, the things that make your life rich and whatever, are exactly the things that open you up to fragility. And you that's just the way it is. You can't detach. Detachment is not a practice that makes sense for them.
00:34:15
Speaker
and It's rather about attaching. And committing to things again that in the sense, it's been a while since I've read all things shining. I'm glad you brought that up. But ah in exactly that sort of sense to specific people and families and communities and neighborhoods and the natural environment, that's the whole goal. like The goal for the Aztecs is rootedness, which is a way of saying, like attach to things.
00:34:41
Speaker
specific things and people and communities and so forth, like you have to do it. That's ah the only way you can lead a valuable life as a human being. It's probably also the kind of prudentially the best way to ah not slide around and slip up on the earth, and not as much, but it's also the way to lead a valuable life. So but that is the Aztec pessimism that's introduced. There's just no way to be invulnerable.
00:35:07
Speaker
It's just sort of the character of cosmos, and the character of the human psyche, and just like the pervasiveness of moral luck that makes slipping up inevitable. So can you can you there's like two things that you you said right now that I think maybe you should expand on.
00:35:21
Speaker
ah But maybe you can begin with this idea, and I don't remember the word and in Nawa, but... um this like you're, you're at a mountaintop or there's, there's, there's, you know, falls on all sides. So tell us a little more about the, the, the, the philosophical pessimism.
Moral Failures and Ethical Complexities
00:35:37
Speaker
And, and in particular, you can also highlight that, um, uh,
00:35:41
Speaker
ah you know um why it is that the rootedness is the counter to that, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. So um they they have this parable of the—I translate it, and I just follow Dibble and Anderson in this—the parable of you know the the mountaintop, the abyss and the mountaintop.
00:36:03
Speaker
ah It turns out in Nahwat, there is no mountaintop. It's actually just the The parable of walking along sheer abysses. It's just here, life is like a father tells his daughter. Actually, we have another passage where a mother tells ah daughter too. So anyways, life is such that you're walking along this passage and here is an abyss off to the right and off to the left. There's and another abyss.
00:36:28
Speaker
ah You go too far one way or or the other and you fall in. And so that looks like an image of moderation. which is where Dibble and Anderson get it wrong. It actually isn't an image image of moderation exactly.
00:36:40
Speaker
It's an image of the mean. right And if you compare that to Confucius or Aristotle, the mean is actually a metaphor for right action.
00:36:53
Speaker
it's know Ultimately, for Aristotle, he gives you one formulation of between too much and too little excess and deficiency, but he goes on to give ah ah parameterized account. It's more like hitting the center of a bullseye or something, which is kind of what Confucius says. It's really about doing the right thing at the right time and the right respect with the right person, blah, blah, blah. blah blah Aptness, acting aptly in the world.
00:37:15
Speaker
And for the Aztecs, of course, that would include in the right social role in relation to the right people, you know with right virtue, that stuff. And so that is what you want to do. That's how you act well.
00:37:26
Speaker
Now, you have to do that with other people. And that's, like again, the best chance you have to avoid slipping up. There's another famous saying, the earth is slippery, slick.
00:37:37
Speaker
And you want to not slip up. But in those passages, they also give striking examples of, it just feels like the Bernard Williams. I actually use a kind of extended thought experiment there.
00:37:50
Speaker
If anything, Bernard Williams ripped them off. They almost give exactly his views of, like, um ah the way I work it up is, Suppose there's a ah guy who's driving a taxi and he gets drunk, and he's driving down the streets of Manhattan. An old man falls off the sidewalk because he's old into the street.
00:38:11
Speaker
But the taxi driver, because he's drunk, swerves into the oncoming lane. Luckily, nobody's there and misses the old man. So all is well and good. ah Nobody's harmed ah because he was drunk driving. like it it Was the driver right or wrong? Most students say wrong. The intention was wrong. Okay, good. Caught so far.
00:38:29
Speaker
ah next Next version of that scenario, no, no, he does hit the old man, but the old man is miraculously unharmed. Is that worse or better than A? i'm like i Same. Okay, fine.
00:38:40
Speaker
What if he does hit the old man and the old man is harmed? Surely that's better or that's worse than the first scenario when no one was harmed. And there are very few who will say, no, no, the intention was the same. The consequences don't matter at all.
00:38:55
Speaker
ah This man was harmed in one and not in the other. Few people are going to hold on to that. And this is sort of the problem about the relationship, whether or not externalities matter for the valuation of our actions. Okay.
00:39:08
Speaker
The Aztecs, a little bit like Aristotle, hold a mixed view. But their key idea with these sorts of thought experiments, they give another version of a man who falls down or hurts another man, ah is that that just happens in life.
00:39:21
Speaker
The real lesson about this is that such situations are pervasive, we don't like to think about them, but they happen everywhere. That is just a feature the human condition. Just as human beings think best in groups, human beings mess up, and they mess up not about trivial things, but important things too.
00:39:40
Speaker
An example that I give the book is of Trent Reznor back in 1999. He was, ah for the audience members who are not as old as me, he was an industrial rock star back at that period. He was on the cover of Spin Magazine, lots of followers, and he had an interview with most vital artists of the year.
00:40:00
Speaker
and the interviewer asked him, like why why do you try to commit suicide every day? And he said, well, it's, look, It's not about contentment. What if you got everything you ever wanted and it still sucked?
00:40:15
Speaker
And I find that to be a striking example of disillusionment. Disillusionment is failure by way of success. It is where you achieve your goals and fail because the goals were the wrong goals.
00:40:28
Speaker
It's a really interesting case of failure. And ah I think that underscores the Aztec point, which is not only can you fail to achieve your goals, you can get them. And that's also failure.
00:40:39
Speaker
ah This is just such a pervasive feature of the human condition. Now, um as a result of that, you are going to slip up. You're going to slip up around ah about things that matter, and this is kind of what anchors their pessimism.
00:40:54
Speaker
Roberta, that's what I think you're asking about is what what anchors their pessimism here is just this sort of view. They had a cosmological set of reasons for their pessimism about the fifth son is going to implode like the other previous four sons.
00:41:07
Speaker
Okay. ah But they had this view of our moral psychology as being extremely complicated, right? and that we can't really master that. You can help with other people, but you can't really ever master that.
00:41:18
Speaker
And then there's just the fact that moral luck is super pervasive in our lives, and as a result, you're going to slip up. And so that's the sense of their pessimism. So the goal is to be rooted But you measure the value of your life, not in the achievement necessarily, right but in the struggle against impossible odds.
00:41:36
Speaker
There's kind of beauty and value to be had in that struggle. And that's the sense of worth and meaning that comes out in a human life. so So this idea that like life is kind of precarious and prone to error and everyone slips up, would there be like a ah primary explanation in most cases? Like,
00:41:59
Speaker
ignorance is often the source or I'm just kind of curious. Is there, um, Yeah, I mean, or not. you know So yeah, they're not very Socratic in that sense, although ignorance is is a problem, right?
00:42:12
Speaker
And you know if you think of it, if your ideal case of making decisions is in groups, how often do you have to like organize your right group, make a decision with them? Just exigences of life tend to make the ideal case not available, so we live through the less ideal case more often than not.
00:42:30
Speaker
And that's just kind of what happens. you know People have sort of unstructured desires. They say, for example, that you're born with a seed of desires, a heart, but you don't have a seed of judgment, a face. um ah There's a passage in the Discourses that i translated where a father is talking to his infant son, and he says, oh, you have your heart, but you have yet to assume a face.
00:42:51
Speaker
Which he means, well, you're an infant, you have no judgment. You get that with life experience, right? but ah So that's something you have to build up over time. So the source of your errors then can be multiform, and it's also… And importantly, not something you can entirely do away with even in principle, which is what makes them pessimists in one sense, but it also organizes a lot of their spiritual practices in the Hadoian sense of spiritual exercise as like things that we can… you know okay You can't be perfect in life, but what can you do? it refoces The advantage of pessimism is that it focuses you more concretely on things that you can do.
00:43:30
Speaker
Since you're not out out there like you know ah searching after illusory goals, like life where i don't make mistakes in my judgment or where I don't have lapses in willpower or no, you're going to have lapses in willpower. Better to have somebody in your life like my wife who just takes the candy away.
00:43:47
Speaker
just That's the better option. So um I like a lot of things about your book. You brought up Trent Reznor, you brought a Sor Juana, several different people kind of help you illustrate your your ethical points.
00:44:03
Speaker
um I want to give you an opportunity here to also talk a little bit about the practices that you insert into into the book. ah for For background, i I've been doing this myself. I really like it. And I kind of pick a different school for different classes that I teach.
00:44:22
Speaker
For my intro class, I kind of use Pyranism and we actually try to, you know, sort of suspend judgment about a controversial position. For symbolic logic, it's very easy to bring in Stoicism. Obviously they were logicians.
00:44:35
Speaker
um So, you know, if I ever teach... ah course on Latin American philosophy, I would definitely include some of these. i kind of want to just let you tell us about it and maybe choose one or two that you found to be really insightful and kind of you know get people a feel for what it is like to in practice um live Aztec ethics.
00:44:55
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And so, I mean, one of the ones that I found most helpful and okay, maybe one step back I try to introduce a lot of historical figures because they're helpful, and it's also a way to engage with other discourses or disciplines. So I picked, for example, in the chapter on Courage, ah James Stockdale, who was also a Stoic.
00:45:18
Speaker
right um I won't go much into that in the book. It's totally worth reading. and There's a couple of ways to to see what Stockdale was doing, but I find it fascinating that he knew he couldn't resist torture, so he came up with other solutions as a result of that. So his practical wisdom um making up for a recognized deficiency.
00:45:38
Speaker
It's also a sobering case. If anyone's under illusions, most people can't resist torture. these That's just not a thing that most people can do. Worth... worth learning his stuff. right So another thing that I found quite helpful was the way in which the Aztecs talk about, or at least there's concrete practices in talking about moderation.
00:45:59
Speaker
Moderation has been, i don't know, the source. ah you know Psychologists have identified it as your ability to resist, delay you delay your satisfaction for a period of time or work hard at things. like It's the source of most of what we call achievements in life, even if we don't want to call them that happiness.
00:46:17
Speaker
And the Aztecs are really good about developing specific practices there, your willpower. If you want to call moderation the virtue of willpower, it breaks down into three things. Right?
00:46:27
Speaker
In the book, I give it different names. Conceptually, it's just different to will to do something. as opposed to willing to not do something, to resist something.
00:46:40
Speaker
So I am not great about resisting sweets. That's one thing. ah the This willing not to do something resistance. I'm not great, or I'm much better at willing to do things. Any of us who have PhDs willed to read a lot of philosophy and get through comps and write a dissertation and do all of that stuff.
00:47:02
Speaker
um But even that is different from high-intensity activities. So just a personal anecdote, I live in upstate New York, so Binghamton, New York. In our area, in our little neighborhood,
00:47:14
Speaker
don't apparently people had been using those wipes and were flushing them. And it caused a backup in the sewer system. And the result was that sewer water came out of... And the whole neighborhood, anyone who had a basement in the sink in the basement, the sewer water just came out in that basement up through the sink and started flooding everything.
00:47:31
Speaker
And when this started when this happened, i had the... deeply disagreeable task of running into the poo water to fetch my belongings and preserve as many of them as I could.
00:47:43
Speaker
Rancid, highly disagreeable affair. Lots of willpower needed to do that. High intensity, short term. That's very different from like, don't I hate doing squats, but i I want to be in relatively good shape, so I just have to do squats three times a week forever.
00:48:01
Speaker
It's disagreeable, but at a lower level. the difficulty, though, is doing it constantly. So, willing to do things breaks down into two different sets.
00:48:12
Speaker
And so, the Aztecs had different practices for each one of these kinds of willpower. So, if you realize you have a willpower deficiency, you can really break it down, right? So, one of them would be ah to get up early in the morning. They had their kids get up early in the morning, not because they liked to i don't know, teaching them while sleep deprived, which seems to be the practice here in the United States as far as I can tell. It's like, let's just teach a lot of sleep deprived children.
00:48:37
Speaker
But ah for them, it was, oh you you get up and you're practicing willpower. You're not teaching them, they're sweeping or doing things like that. and But it's effortful in a high-intensity sort of way to get up early.
00:48:50
Speaker
So you get to practice that and then you get to learn what it's like, reflect on it, and get better at doing those high-intensity things, um which would be different from longer-intensity thing ah that you just have to commit to.
00:49:04
Speaker
In fact, ah sweeping would be one of those because you you always have to keep rooms clean. It's not super disagreeable, but just a thing you got to do over time. So that would be ah ah one of those other type practices, both of which are very different from resisting.
00:49:20
Speaker
And so they had fasting as a regular ritual that the old and the young participated in in different ways. And usually it would be like a water fast for 24 hours or something like that before a feast.
00:49:32
Speaker
and So you fast before you feast, that sort of thing. But the fasting there actually becomes a practice by which you can sort of Assess what it's like to not eat the things in front of you when you're really hungry. Know how to deal with that and do better than I do around candy, I guess.
00:49:49
Speaker
But those are all different activities for different features of your willpower. And those would all be considered spiritual exercises in a sense that help you live a better life. Because that that was the goal ultimately of ethics is to live better, um not not they would have had this idea like, live your best life.
00:50:06
Speaker
I don't know. That's like bullshit for the Aztecs. It's just like a terrible idea. Like, don't even think about that, but just live better than you currently are. That's that's the right frame that you need. Right, right.
00:50:17
Speaker
i I should say that I did do the, I normally wake up early and to exercise. By the way, I hate exercising. I don't even just eat squats. I just, all of it.
00:50:28
Speaker
All of it. Really, anyway. So I was already doing that part. I added the sweeping, just I wanted to, you know, I'm a method podcaster, you know, so I just. We'll talk to you.
00:50:39
Speaker
But one thing, your your candy is my cheese. so I'm going to get out cheese for my wife to pick up and I'm not going to have any tonight. See if you can resist. Yeah.
00:50:51
Speaker
You'd be a better man than me then. What but do you think, Sam and Sebastian? So we we want to move into here and the last leg here into the technology bit of it.
00:51:02
Speaker
I think we have a firm handle or a semi-firm handle on on asset ethics. So maybe we can kind of a give you an open question in the beginning. you know So we we have some topics here we can discuss, but you know when when we propose this idea to you about you know applying ASIC ethics specifically to ah having a you know maybe freer relationship with technology, did anything immediately come to mind for you? Was there a topic where you said, this is where the ASICs are are good?
00:51:33
Speaker
just want to kind of give you an open question here. Well, I mean, i find it interesting that the Aztecs had this whole sense of right speech.
00:51:44
Speaker
So and I didn't really get to categorize the way in which they approach spiritual exercises, but some of the spiritual exercises are very external. We were just talking about getting up early and sweeping, and those are very external sorts of things.
00:51:56
Speaker
um They did have more internal ones. Now, they never go like I mean, they even had meditation, which i guess would be wholly internal, very much like Buddhism. but But kind of between those two, you have what might be classed as liminal practices, and right speech is one of those.
00:52:11
Speaker
So when you speak, your words are partly under your conscious control and partly not under your conscious control. They're right at the threshold between consciousness and non-consciousness, and they become ah an excellent way to consciously begin to shape what is not conscious in your life.
00:52:30
Speaker
And that's sort of the purpose of right speech monitoring. So their approach to right speech isn't like our sense of like, don't say something blasphemous or don't say bad words. they wouldn't care.
00:52:43
Speaker
It's rather that you don't want to say words that alter your non-conscious states in a way that wouldn't be aligned with your goals. So the example that I gave in the book was of Robert Cialdini, a psychologist who was asked to do ah talk at this health group, SMS Health, and they said, well, we're a non-violent organization, so when you come and give a speech, don't say bullet points, say talking points.
00:53:07
Speaker
Don't say beat the competition, say out-distance the competition. And he thought this was sort of absurd, but he got into the organization. They were extremely successful, and he realized that the idea was if words produce thoughts and actions, than words that are incongruent with the actions you want to take need to be monitored so you align that.
00:53:35
Speaker
ah You want alignment. And ultimately, he thought there was a a great deal of psychological evidence to support this approach. Now, ah the only thing that I found interesting about that, so the Aztecs would tell you to you know to to monitor your speech, don't gossip, tell the truth when possible, those sorts of things. And they were well aware that the principal purpose of
Addressing Contemporary Challenges with Aztec Ethics
00:53:55
Speaker
speaking was to connect, not so much to communicate truths.
00:53:59
Speaker
So like yes, you want to be honest, but you the key thing you want to do is connect with a person that you're talking to in the right way. like That's the purpose of speech.
00:54:10
Speaker
In short, in contemporary lingo, vibe. Vibe with a person. Secondarily communicate a truth. right And one of the interesting things is much of our online life is not actually speaking with people that are directly in front of us.
00:54:26
Speaker
It's to a lot of anonymous strangers in a weird way and or quasi-anonymous or pseudo-anonymous relationships that we have that is different from what the Aztecs would have ever envisioned, but it's a really pervasive feature of our lives.
00:54:41
Speaker
And you know it gives rise to sort of when people are in cars, how they get angry with others. They'll yell at them, but they would never yell at a person if you were just like standing next to each other on the street. like You wouldn't do that.
00:54:52
Speaker
um There's this, psychologists have called online disinhibition effect where people will melt down on each other online, but they would never do that in person. And um I think that in some ways the Aztecs would hold, well, the principles of right write speech are still there.
00:55:09
Speaker
If you wouldn't melt down on the person, if they were facing you, why are you doing it online? What is it that's missing there? And can you practice ah sort of a mindful approach that might be our contemporary language more effectively? So again, it's not so much about lying or saying bad things or whatever.
00:55:31
Speaker
It's rather about treating other people in a way that is aligned with your goals in life. And you need to remain consistent with it across text messages and online forums and emails. Because most of our communication is strangely not with people in front of us anymore, which would have been very different from them.
00:55:49
Speaker
But that is just like the top of mind for me was how different our speaking is from the Aztec view. It strikes me that even um the person who, okay, so obviously if you wouldn't, you know, freak out on someone face-to-face, and you you also shouldn't online.
00:56:08
Speaker
But I think the ethics, I guess, would also say that if you are the kind of person that does freak out with someone face-to-face, that is also not okay, right? Yeah. Not connectedness.
00:56:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're you're ah failing to... um I guess they would say, look, it's thoughtful speech. well One feature of right speech is truth when when when appropriate. like You want to be true as true as you can be with people, but another one is thoughtfulness. And that's actually the more important part, is being thoughtful about your speech, mindful.
00:56:40
Speaker
so they the discourses are so ah The discourses that the Aztecs wrote are really over-the-top in eloquence, and it took a great deal of practice to be able to communicate in that way.
00:56:52
Speaker
That made the speech extremely thoughtful. All of the words and the syntax is something that you had to practice and work on and the in a certain way. I almost think like rap artists trying to freestyle. this There's a lot of work that goes into doing that correctly.
00:57:09
Speaker
It would be similar for the discourses. But It makes you mindful of your words, and that's it the most important thing. So yeah, you don't want to freak out on people in front of you either. That would be seen as just not, why? why How is that going to help you or them?
00:57:25
Speaker
ah it might unburden you of an emotion that you have, but that's not a useful thing for anyone, so don't do it. and And notably, that's where Aztec obligations come from in ethics. like We've spoken a lot about ethics and I was like i haven't even mentioned obligations in almost an the hour of discussion here.
00:57:41
Speaker
Where do those derive? And the answer is, well, obligations are just the conditions that need to be fulfilled in order to do the other stuff. be a friend, observe your social role as a father or parent or child or student or professor.
00:57:55
Speaker
like There are just conditions that need to be in place for you to observe those social roles. Those social roles help you enact the virtues, which are the things that make you perform a better life. right So obligations do exist there, but they're kind of very secondary.
00:58:11
Speaker
to this other discussion. And there's a reason why they're secondary. It's because they just happen to be the conditions that fulfill the things in your specific social role situation with other people, etc. why should you speak well? Because you're trying to connect with people in the right way, ultimately.
00:58:29
Speaker
i Well, so many thoughts. I guess two things that you just said, um maybe our I just have follow-up questions on. um So I do love this this practice of examining how well you are performing your social role.
00:58:43
Speaker
And I love the, I guess we won't get into it here, but you know that the Aztec love advice. and Listeners should ah go get the book so they can learn how to love like an Aztec. But there's there' is this ah this this emphasis on on making sure you actually fulfill your social role.
00:59:02
Speaker
So what do you think about... um Something like using technology to help you fulfill your social role effectively. I'm thinking like if you lack a little bit of empathy, but that's part of what being a nurse or a teacher or whatever is, you can sort of, I don't know, feed it to chat GPT. Give me some ways. is that and What do what do you think about that?
00:59:23
Speaker
Yeah, like that might work ah for sure. That might certainly work. um Because, yeah, so there's there's a couple of things here. And just a preview on the like how to love like an Aztec.
00:59:36
Speaker
They had like three practices there that they broke down, very like ordinary practice. For them, the Aztecs were like, love is less an emotion and more things that you do. Because you know you go to sleep, what, do you stop loving somebody because you don't feel lot emotion while you're asleep? That's absurd, you need a more philosophically robust account. okay So what does it look like? It's a series of practices.
00:59:56
Speaker
You have intimacy practices by which is intended it' something like you you know deep deep dark secrets about the people that you love that you wouldn't talk about in public. okay That's ah that's like an intimacy practice. You have like ah romance practices, which are their own self-explanatory thing, but you also have daily practices, which is things like keeping the household going and scheduling for each other and doing that sort of stuff. And that goes right to the ChatGPT thing. like I don't know, I set my chat GPT bot up to do like a bunch of stuff for me, keeping my schedule on track, making sure that i show up to pick up my daughter on time from childcare and coordinate with my wife in the right way. And all of those are like ways in which it helps me, like facilitates.
01:00:39
Speaker
being a good father or partner or good student, etc. um Even just being a better colleague, I will do things like, ah, these things, this thing annoys me a whole lot. And I will just tell ChatGPT that.
01:00:53
Speaker
And I'm not going I'm too emotional about it. So I'm just going to swear, please write an appropriate email for me. And I'll just swear ChatGPT and all this stuff. And then you know, 10 seconds later, it's like, here's your your right email that you need to send for this. i'm like, oh, thanks. That's what I need to send because I can just unload the emotional like garbage into it for a second and then it'll turn it into something professional.
01:01:14
Speaker
That is a good Aztec use of it because It helps me. I know what I should be doing. You need to maintain kind of like a professional collegial environment. But at the same time, you do have emotions as a human being and just being cognizant of it. You can offload that in the right way.
01:01:29
Speaker
And then notice how my speech is thoughtful, even if I'm just using chat GPT to help me do that. Probably delete the M dashes before you send the email, though. know, I look insincere. Um, I am an avid user of M dashes for the record. So no one will tell. like That's just what Roberto does always. I actually add M dashes to my chat GPT.
01:01:50
Speaker
out It's impossible.
01:01:55
Speaker
i'm Because they're already all there. But I was just going to say, well, you know, um what do you think about, like, I guess, like, one you know, this ideal of a rooted life in Aztec philosophy, right?
01:02:08
Speaker
That to me brings up the idea of like the importance of maybe like local and ethnic kind of character, unique forms of life grounded in you know very specific histories, dialects, town rituals, you know that sort of thing. and and you know One thing that's obviously worrisome about technology, everyone knows, is is is the replacement of local character with sort of generic placeless culture.
01:02:37
Speaker
Right. um Yeah. Through different ways, you know, standardization of taste, algorithms, rewarding stuff that's more generic and scales more easily.
01:02:49
Speaker
Displacement of like local institutions by Amazon. And anyway, there's like a million things you can think of, but yeah. So I wonder like, Just a more rooted life ah is yeah harder to come by.
01:03:06
Speaker
yeah or or if it's a faced and with a new technology is a pretty good question. Because I just gave you an example of positive use of chat GPT. A lot of the generative AI, it's really interesting because the way that it works is by sort of normalizing over differences. right it's hard to get unique voices out of ChatGPT.
01:03:26
Speaker
right It tends to kind of squish them all together. i was working with so I have a team of people that help me in social media, right and this is over the summer. We were working with trying to build digital avatars, and the person on our team that ChatGPT could, or not ChatGPT, we're using Heijen and Midjourney.
01:03:46
Speaker
the The one that it could use the best just had And its symmetrical features worked best for building the avatar, not because like any human would notice the difference, but it's just the way that these AIs normalize over differences, especially when they're going to turn it into a video, that the people who are already a certain kind of look Basically, you upload them to these things and and they look the same. The rest of us, it turns out, like oh we we all the rest of us, are like we all have minor imperfections that you know AI highlights. are like ah
01:04:21
Speaker
Well, there it is. um So it's just an ongoing thing about the way technology works is that in order to generalize, you must kind of efface the local. The problem for that for the Aztecs is that we only really observe our relationships with other people through local interactions.
01:04:39
Speaker
ah So ah they might have an argument against what we call cultural appropriation, but it wouldn't be the kind of arguments that we have. It would be like, look, the reason you don't want to appropriate somebody else's culture is because you're not them.
01:04:53
Speaker
That is the thing that helps them and connect to each other. You can't just use that thing to connect. to like It's not going to be the same. It works for them in a specific way to do it that way.
01:05:05
Speaker
You can't just plop that into your life. and Like it'll disrupt... your attempt to synchronize with the people around you maybe yeah yeah it's so it's just not going to work for you the reason you don't want to do it is because it's a dumb idea it's like for you i kind of I like that because it's like it's not just a sort of like you should feel guilty about what you're doing to the other, but actually it's not going to work for you either. you know It doesn't help you connect in the right way. It's like just getting the wrong part to fix your car. It's like you need a different, like why did you think that car part would work? and no that's stupid.
Future Projects and Reflections on Aztec Ethics
01:05:37
Speaker
Like let them keep their car parts because those are their cars and that is what connects them to each other. You need to build your own and just exporting it is not going to work.
01:05:48
Speaker
um So it's a sort of like a different approach to that. and yes so Technology, I think, is ah sort would be, for the Aztecs, a pervasive thing that you need to be mindful of, work against in some ways, because it's going to have that, um I don't know, normalizing tendency.
01:06:10
Speaker
And that means that the differences that allow us to connect with each other are going to be erased unless we're really mindful of them. It sounds almost like ah it would be good to ritualize our our interactions with technology. Is that what I'm getting at? Yeah, you'd have to.
01:06:25
Speaker
yeah if you're going to be a good Aztec. yeah i also think I don't know how to like really express this well, but I just feel like the whole idea of being committed and rooted in something finite, particular, that makes you vulnerable. like just yeah i mean Obviously, you know when you think about on a philosophical level, that seems to contrast maybe with at least like the general caricature of Buddhism.
01:06:54
Speaker
And, but I, I really think that there's a way in which our everyday, you know, contemporary American mindset in subtle ways that we don't always always realize is very much like vulnerability averse. And I think somehow all these technological systems it's to make you know it's like to empower you but like the empowerment is really like a so secret way of or maybe not so secret but it's like it's basically a coding for like become less vulnerable less attached and i don't know i just i guess what i'm saying is that like i think
01:07:35
Speaker
you know, yeah, we could say, oh, that's, that's what you associate with, you know, Buddhism. But I also think it's, it's really built into our everyday world. And I somehow feel like technology is sort of supporting. Supporting.
01:07:48
Speaker
Well, yeah. So a really good, and it's technology and sort of commodification in general, but a really good example that affects my students. And I, of course, i I always tell them I have no dog in this race because I, I, I married my wife, I met her the old way, and i have never, ever used online dating apps. So I have no idea. like There's this huge chasm between their sense of romantic life and mine.
01:08:11
Speaker
That acknowledged. ah we i can i and I understand data. So I can look at data, and and the data says that actually women hate dating apps more than men, but they both hate them at extraordinarily high levels.
01:08:23
Speaker
And ah this goes to your vulnerability point. In a certain way, what dating apps allow you to do is not be vulnerable. like You put a little profile up of all of your best images and all of the best and most crafted words, and is what you're never like in person. You're never all of your best selfies.
01:08:40
Speaker
and and yeah And then you get to like swipe on people and then have sort of what it does is it takes away the feeling of rejection. like So it lessens it, and so there's like a lower level of vulnerability as a result. And you know what happens? People don't connect to each other because the things that tend to connect us are exactly the things that make us vulnerable.
01:09:00
Speaker
And so we end up with this like commodified system by which people are never vulnerable in front of each other. They're always putting their... like best foot forward. And it turns out humans don't connect at very high rates when they're doing that. We connect by being messy and broken and not our best foot forward sort of presentable selves.
01:09:20
Speaker
And the way in which modern technology tends to promote that You are not your Instagram profile, you just aren't. ah And if you tried to act that way in front of anyone else, like those aren't your friends.
01:09:34
Speaker
The friends are the ones who are good with you when you don't look Instagram-presentable. It's that sort of thing. And the the way in which technology tends Of course, technology prefers that because it's easier to promote a good image of whatever you look like.
01:09:49
Speaker
But that least vulnerable self is also the least self in a way, the the least who you are and the thing that people would actually connect to. So, yeah, again, I think, Roberto, that's a really good idea. You would need sort of technology practices, but probably a good technology like ritual is not in public, but, you know, practice being vulnerable around the right people and make sure you are because technology takes away fewer and fewer of those opportunities.
01:10:17
Speaker
or or more and more of them. So you have fewer and fewer of them.
01:10:21
Speaker
Well, Sebastian, you've given us a lot to think about. This is great. um Last question. what are you working on next? How how can people follow you? Yeah, so um I will be rewriting and starting my newsletter on Medium. People who can find me on Medium and I'll be posting more stuff there that tends to focus almost exclusively on social practices like ah spiritual exercises, connecting ah with a former student of mine who's a BookTok influencer, ah Austin DiValentini. He runs Reason and Religion, so you can find him on Instagram and TikTok.
01:10:54
Speaker
and um yeah i mean The thing that I'm working on right now is I'll leave you with the final story. You notice I tell a lot of stories. um when my so on my mother's side, they were all kind of musicians and street performers, that sort of thing. They played mariachi.
01:11:13
Speaker
My uncle, so my mother's brother, ah dropped out of school at the age of 11. so that he could perform with his family in the various jambas, the gigs that they got. And he played the harp.
01:11:25
Speaker
So he dropped out at 11, practiced for a year. At the age of 15, or maybe it was 16, they got a gig playing at somebody else's quinceañera. So they went to this big ranch ah for a well-to-do family, and he was up there playing the harp.
01:11:42
Speaker
Well, it turns out that the... At a certain point, the Federales came in to do something at the gig. Maybe it was to pay respects. Maybe it would be to, i don't know, mess things up.
01:11:54
Speaker
Who knows? So the existing people there that they were playing the gig for took all of their guns and all of their drugs and shoved it into the hole in the bottom of my uncle's harp.
01:12:08
Speaker
He had to continue playing while the rest of the you know officers went around and did stuff. Now, ah they didn't catch him or anything. and They left and everything turned out well.
01:12:20
Speaker
But and what should he have done in that scenario? And the answer is not said, hey, police officer, they shoved a bunch of drugs and guns in my heart.
01:12:33
Speaker
They're bad people. Like, no, you don't do that. you know Even if the police officers aren't corrupt. Okay. ah The drug dealers will kill you and your family, right?
01:12:44
Speaker
ah That's what it turned out. He didn't know that when they took the gig, but that's basically where they were playing at their gig. So you don't want to do that, and probably the police officers are corrupt anyway, so it's just a terrible idea. ah There's a line that Machiavelli has, which is in the prints, that good a holy good man amongst evil men will come to ruin.
01:13:05
Speaker
And what I think he's articulating in that line is a rule for morally burdened situations. That is, situations that are not tragic, but there's no way in which you can prudentially live through them with and to do the right thing.
01:13:22
Speaker
There is no right option. It's not like the two options are tragically bad, but there's also just no good option. The best thing you can do in those situations is be prudential about it. Don't be naive and think that like by speaking up and being the good noble soul, you're better off.
01:13:38
Speaker
I think that's wrong. And some of this obviously derives from the pessimistic strands of Aztec philosophy, but I'm generally fascinated by this, and I tend to find it in a lot of what I would call folk philosophy.
01:13:54
Speaker
It's not exactly professional philosophers, but people who lived really interesting lives and have philosophical outlooks. Malcolm X, for example, is one. If you read his autobiography, it's fascinating.
01:14:05
Speaker
And he lived a terrible life to begin with, almost certainly like ah sociopath at a certain point, like you wonder about that sort of thing, and then turned himself around. ah He had not the formal system of education, but a real awareness of these moral burdens that I don't find reflected in traditional philosophy.
01:14:25
Speaker
And so right now, the thing that I'm focusing on are specifically practices around moral burdens because I find these to be pervasive. People who work in environments where sexual harassment occurs, but they can't leave the job because they need the money. What do you do?
01:14:39
Speaker
It's a morally burdened circumstance. ah These are, and the the more you, and once you see it, you're like, this is everywhere, and moral philosophers are not talking about it. ah There's like a few, Lisa Tussman has a book on it. She tries to articulate it in one way, ah but like nobody else is, and yet it seems to be just such a implicit future of human life, that that is what I'm looking at. um And that's what I'll be writing my Medium articles on. I'll have like a newsletter on it.
01:15:06
Speaker
And ah yeah, you can find me on Instagram too. I'll be doing like book talk reviews on on things too. and you know As philosophers, we read a lot. I'm the only one without a bookshelf in the background, incidentally, which I had to move. It's strange because all my bookshelves are on the other side of the camera in this room.
01:15:23
Speaker
ah you know We believe you, Sebastian. Don't worry. Yeah. yeah this is how we This is how we do things, how we live. And um so, yeah, at LS Purcell on Twitter. Not that I use it that much anymore, but um mostly find Sebastian Purcell on Medium. That's where people can find my more interesting pieces.
01:15:40
Speaker
Right. And I'll link to all of that in the show notes. Sebastian Purcell, thanks for joining us. yeah Thank you both.