The Daily Stoic - Tamler Sommers On the Urgency of Honor

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks to professor Tamler Sommers about the obligation to spread philosophy in the modern age, the timeless dilemma of monetizing philosophy, the critical distinction between pride and honor, and more. Tamler Sommers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. He has written several books, including 2018’s Why Honor Matters. He is the co-host of the philosophy and science podcast Very Bad Wizards.This episode is brought to you by LMNT, the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Right now you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. Get your FREE Sample Pack now. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.This episode is also brought to you by FitTrack, the best way to calculate your body’s composition accurately, reliably, and consistently. Every FitTrack smart scale uses advanced algorithms to offer insights into 17 different metrics indicative of bodily health. Go to getfittrack.com/stoic to take 50% off your order, plus for a limited time you’ll also save an additional 10%. This episode is also brought to you by Talkspace, the online and mobile therapy company. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.This episode is also brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Tamler Sommers:Homepage: https://www.tamlersommers.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tamler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/verybadwizardsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here, on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. And we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare

for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stove Podcast,

a very long time ago, before we had this podcast, when we just started Daily Stove, we would do interviews over email. And we'd just, like I'd read a book that I liked, or there'd be someone in my network or a friend that I thought at an interesting perspective. I wasn't quite ready to do a podcast, so I'd just email them over some questions

and they'd answer, and we'd post that on the site. Sometimes I'd do, you know, the Daily Stoke emails around some of the answers. So actually one of the early people I interviewed was Tamler Somers. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, but he wrote a fantastic book that I'd read in life called Why Honor Matters.

As you know, honor is a sort of a key stoke concept. You know, Kato would rather die than experience the dishonor of receiving Caesar's mercy and living in a corrupted Rome under someone who destroyed the Republic. So I'm fascinated with this concept of honor. And I think it pertains, as you'll see in our conversation,

to where we are today. I mean, look, honor cultures where people are fighting duels and all of that. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the honor of self-respect, honor of integrity, the honor of knowing right from wrong. And again, rather face or endure anything than that wrong. And I think the deficiency of that is obviously explains a lot of the problems we're having

as a society and as a world these days. So Tamler and I have a great discussion. I think you're really going to like this one. If you haven't read his book or heard of it, why Honor Matters, please check it out. It's a great book. He also has a very popular podcast called Very Bad Wizards, which talks about science and philosophy and all of that.

It's great. I think you'll like the podcast as well. If you're looking for another listen. And yeah, I can't wait for you to check out this interview. It's a good one. We went even a little longer than I was expecting, but I very much enjoyed it. I think you will as well. So check this out, Tamler Somers, and myself talking about philosophy, the applicableness of philosophy,

as I say in lives of the Stokes, the only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person. I think Tamler's work helps you do that, and I hope the Stokes, I hope you do that as well. I hope you do that as well. I hope you do that as well. Are you in Texas?

Yeah, I'm in Houston. Beautiful day here. It's not bad. It's been cold there. It's been freezing in Austin the last couple of weeks. And consistently, which is not typical for us. Yeah. We've had some really cold days and nights,

but it's, you know, we always have a little bit of the from the coast, the humidity and so I don't know, it's kind of, it's been kind of perfect recently. I kind of like the cold-um from Boston originally. So while I'm totally spoiled now and probably couldn't go back and live somewhere where it's, you know, I still like that kind of bracing feeling that we don't get too often. You probably get a little bit more, because it's drier there. Yeah, and I'm also the sort of cliche text that came here from California, so I'm spoiled the other way.

It's beautiful out there, too. We've done some traveling this year in Texas. I went with my daughter to out west, Big Ben State Park and around there and then, but then also to the hill country. And then it's great out there. It's the best. Well, let's, let's get into it. I was, I was fascinated with your piece about public philosophy. Specifically that you said, don't write public philosophy because that's sort of what I do and I feel like that's what you did very well in your book.

So maybe let's start there. What do you mean? Well, what I meant when I said that was, I think people in the academic community tend to have this debate, this meta debate over whether you should write public philosophy. Is that something worth doing? Is it something valuable?

Is do we have obligations to do public philosophy? And I think that is wrong headed. I think that's a wrong headed way of approaching writing public philosophy is to think, okay, I want to write public philosophy. What should I write about? I think you want to start with the project, a very specific, a very particular project in mind. See if it's something you can commit to, something that you can pull off, something

that would, you know, that could generate perhaps interest, but that you have some sort of close connection to, and if that happens to fall into the public philosophy domain, then great. But I just think it's a bad idea to have the meta debate at all. That's just procrastination. That's just a waste of time. But be to think of it as, oh, good, I am writing public philosophy. And I say that, as I say in the piece that you read,

I say that because I was kind of what happened in a weird way with the why-honored matters book and why I struggled with that one more than I've struggled with other things that I've done is because the idea started out, okay, I'm going to do a trade book. I'm going to do a public book. And then, and I still had no idea what the topic was. It could have been free will. It could have been, you know, emotions, moral psychology, and, you know, it ended up being honor because that, you know, it's not, I was very interested in it, but that was the one that generated interests.

And so now I knew I wanted to write a public book on honor, but, you know, that it was very frustrating trying then to figure out, well, okay, but what is the actual book? Well, it strikes me that there's some strange assumptions in that meta debate that you're talking about that maybe is the source of the issue, which is that first off, that like the public is dumb, and they have to be talked to a certain way. And when the real philosophy texts, the sort of classics sell, you know,

quite well, surprisingly well, you know, if you had to go like, hey, how many copies do you think Marcus Aurelius' meditation sells every year? I bet people would be surprised. But I think the other part in it too, is it implies that like, there's what philosophers do professionally in their academic life that somehow special or different than what communicating ideas to regular people in their, like, that there's what you would say to the public is different than what you would say as a philosopher. That, to me, strikes me as the most misguided part of that debate. Yeah, so, I mean, it's misguided in one sense,

but also just 100% true in another sense. Right? Because it is the case that academic philosophers can't write for the public like they write for each other, because they're dealing with either topics that are far too technical, that for anybody to care about, and this is what separates Plato and the Stoics from people writing on meta-ontology or vagueness or some of the subfields in philosophy are really, there's no way to get the public interested in them because they're not interesting.

And so, they would have to speak differently And they would have to choose a slightly different or even just choose different subjects to write about. So in that sense, it's true. I agree that it's misguided and it's hugely unfortunate that so much of what professional philosophy does right now would be of no interest or value to people who are outside of philosophy. Yeah, it's like, um, maybe it's not even that it's not interesting. It's that it's nonsense. Right. And often it is. It's complete nonsense. It's just found it on some assumption that is not only false, but just like you'd have to be a lunatic to believe it. My favorite example of this is the debate over the knowledge debate, like what are the

necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge. And you know, this entire literature that went that I guess started in full force with Gettier and his famous Gettier cases, but then it just kept going where people are trying to come up with, what is the theory of knowledge that is the actual objective, true definition of knowledge? And just like, why would you think that those, that is there, that that's out there? Like, knowledge is a word. It's a concept.

It's something that, it's not something that can be broken down in, in, you know, and I think so much of philosophy is like this. People trying to get precise about something that just can't be made more precise because it's just the wrong kind of concept to do that. I love the one I pick on is that question of like, how do we know we don't live in a computer simulation? Which I think is sort of intellectually interesting in one sense, but on the other like a complete nonsense question because like, let's say you found out it was true. What would you do with that information? It's like, it's like the person who instead of playing the video game goes around and looks for bugs

in the video game. Like, they exist, but like, what are you doing with your time? It strikes me as, as sometimes really smart people sort of work themselves into knots. Over things that it's like they're exerting incredible brain power and solving literally none of life's questions or problems as a result. Yeah, they're doing Sudoku puzzles. They're doing they generate some sort of puzzle that you can approach in ways that are theoretical and systematic and generate a kind of results

that people can then respond to and raise objections to and then you're off to the races, but unless the thing that you're actually talking about, there's any reason to believe that it's real, then you are just ultimately wasting your time, at least, or wasting, like, the world's time. And so, and a lot of people disagree with this. There are people in philosophy, community, who are on the other side. They'll say, we'll look at higher mathematics, though that doesn't matter to anybody and it's still

worth doing. And, you know, I don't know enough about higher mathematics to assess whether that's true or not, but I know within philosophy that so much of, and this is, you know, I've become a little disillusioned with academic and especially analytic philosophy lately. So much of it is just these self-generated debates based on pseudo questions or pseudo problems. Yeah, I had Scott Barry Kaufman on the podcast a couple of months back who I love and he was, he used to teach it NYU and he was, he was saying that, you know, he mentioned the NYU or, or maybe it was another school. I forget what it was, but he mentioned a school had like one of the leading philosophy departments in the country. And it struck me as rather sad that I don't, I don't even know what that means. Like what is in 2020? What does, what does being the leading philosophy to put, like if you go like Penn,

Penn has a leading psychology department. You look at some of the people that have come out of there that have had real impact on people's lives, whether it's Angela Duckworth or Adam Grant or some of the, is it Martin Seligman, the positive psychology stuff. You're like, oh, these people have come up with experiments or insights about happiness

and living and life that have influenced the military psychology stuff. You're like, oh, these people have come up with experiments or insights about happiness and living and life that have that have influenced the military and influenced psychology that's that's really actually changed people's lives and it struck me that you could probably look at the top 10 you know, philosophy departments in the country or the world. And the word leading does not actually have really any tie to real people's lives. It might be leading as far as other institutions think of it as leading, but it's not really leading to people. Yeah, I mean, all right, let me defend philosophy a little. All right. First of all, psychology is riddled with problems like that are the replication

crisis. But it's way deeper than that. I mean, we don't have to get into this now. Let's do it. But I think that they also are like, there's fundamental misconceptions in terms of the methodology, the experimental methodology that they use. And yes, one of the problems is it doesn't replicate, but the bigger problem is generalizing these results that they get in lab to anything that actually is reflects real life and the real challenges that they purport to address. And so I actually think, of course, they generate interest, but often they are distorting the questions that they're tackling more than they're illuminating them. And even when they illuminate them, it's often

sometimes in this very roundabout way, like something like the Stanford Prison Experiment, which like every two years, people come out with some new reason why it was a fraudulent study and empirically or scientifically bankrupt. And yet yet it does speak to some sort of truth, but not through the methodology that made it famous and is the reason we all know about it. So, like I think that psychology has a lot of problems. And I think philosophy, I think those problems in some ways are so baked into how psychologists conduct their business that it might be harder to reverse that than in philosophy because, you know, people like me, people, people who have the same attitude towards philosophy can just opt out of the highly technical debates and work on something that they think is important and care about. Whereas

psychologists can't really do that. They have labs, they have graduate students, they need to publish, to get tenure, to succeed, to get a job. And so they have to use this methodology that many of them, when you talk to them, will just admit there's some fundamental flaws with. So that's not defending philosophy as much as it is attacking technology. What I would say is that, you know, at a place like NYU, they had one of the contemporary

philosophers that I think really does do great work, Thomas Nagel. They had him for a very long time and I think his books and especially his collection of essays, mortal questions, that's what I wish philosophy was more. Now, not everyone can be that good and that insightful, but in terms of the approach that someone like Thomas Nagel takes, is something that I think perfectly kind of captures the rigor of what a philosophical approach should have

with never losing sight That we should be talking about things that people care about things that matter things that are important. So So yeah, I mean like in but that's not why they're blood leading department They're the leading department because they have the most philosophers with the most publications and grad grad school is therefore the highest hardest to get into. It's professional. No, and I would just contrast that with the audience that you reach with very bad wizards,

probably far outstrap the cum, or outpaces, the cumulative readership of all of the academic journals that all of the top philosophy departments are published in annually, right? So it's like, I think the question is, do you judge philosophy based on the complexity of the questions that it asks, or is it the impact that the question, that the questions it asks has on, you know, sort of real people in the real world?

And I guess maybe it's, it's like, it's much harder to measure that second part, and it's much easier to measure, you know, as you said, how many times are the, how many, how many publications are the people published in and how regularly? Yeah, so I mean, I don't know about, if you talk about impact, meaning practical impact, I think now I think that's extraordinarily valuable and people should have that. But I would couch it more in terms of what insight are you shedding on the world or on like a problem that actually matters. And if for whatever reason, that doesn't end up having a practical impact beyond just people who read it will understand the topic in question better, whether it's moral responsibility or

moral responsibility or consciousness or you know if it's it doesn't in addition need to you know generate some new really exciting AI research or deep learning something or you know like I think as long as you know I would I would sort of this shedding light on some aspect of the human condition that's important. If it is, it doesn't need an addition to be, like, you know, either start mass political movements or become a best seller. It has done the thing that is most important. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship,

Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon

music or the Wondery app. Yeah, that's true. I mean, and you could get into a dangerous sort of definition if you're saying that philosophy's impact is the impact has to be sort of quantity, you know, sort of one philosopher, whether it's Bertrand Russell, or someone influencing one president about a decision to use or not use nuclear weapons, you might argue as one of the most influential, philosophical encounters in human history. So I guess it's not just sort of how many people are you impacting, but what is the significance of the impact that the philosopher is having? Right. But it's an interesting question, probably one that we don't ask enough.

And then another philosopher takes someone like Peter Singer, who I think had one of the biggest impacts and for the most part, even though I'm not on board with his philosophy in total, but I so admire what a positive impact he's had on people who are in poverty and also on animals. And that book, Animal Liberation, just jump started a movement that has led to, you know, although the suffering of animals is still still tremendous, it's a lot less than it would be if there was no Peter Singer. Well, Givwell has sponsored this podcast a number of times. And I think the philosophers who sort of created this effective altruism movement out of nothing, you know, have had tremendous impact,

not just on normal regular people, but, you know, when you come up with a philosophical outlook that influences Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, and then it sort of influences how he distributes his fortune. You know, now fortune. Now you're not talking about a philosopher who impacted it, a number of students or whatever. You're talking about a philosophy that cumulatively might save millions of lives. Yeah, no, exactly. And we have give well as a sponsor as well.

And we've had Will Macaskill on the market. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I, I have problems with their, with their philosophical framework, their, the way they approach ethics. And I, and I'm a little worried about the direction that effective altruism is taking right now, and will work too, where they're so concerned with existential threats that might happen, you know, 500 years from now, that allows them, because of their philosophy, to maybe discount present day suffering. But you know, whatever, that's my disagreement, both philosophically and also just concerned, like a concern ethically, but they have again contributed more good to the world than I could ever hope to,

even if, you know, I have quibbles with their approach. Well, it's just a much more important question to be asking, right? Like, you know, what are our obligations to future generations? What's our obligation to the less fortunate? How do we know the impact we're having is the most effective? I love those questions compared to you know, how do we know whether we exist? You know, uh, well, what do you want? One creates tangible change in the real world and the other is almost a form of sort of mental masturbation. Yes, no, of course. And like, is a table? Are there tables? Do tables exist? That is, yeah, it's, it's mental masturbation. I remember I had long time ago I posted like how much

of philosophy, this was like for philosophy, this is for other philosophers, I think it was on Facebook, it was a long time ago. Is the appropriate response to do just a wanking gesture to? Right. How many? And you know, most people put it up and from all different sub areas, put it up at like 70 to 80 percent. That it's just a pure like circle jerk. And, you know, that's unfortunate. It's probably true of a lot of fields, you know, in academia.

And I just happen to be most familiar with this and then through the podcast and knowing a lot of psychologists, I know they're dirty laundry too, a little bit more than I would know, like histories or, you know, biologies. Well, it does bring us back to this question of like the public philosophy. One of the knocks, one of the things you get when you do effectively do public philosophy, or maybe this is even one of the reservations that people have about doing it, who are in academia. Obviously, I don't have the same sort of dilemmas them, but it's this sort of,

it's this, you'll see it even in the comment section of some of the stuff I post, people will be like, oh, what would Marcus really think of you monetizing philosophy? Or this person is monetizing philosophy, blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure the psychologist we were talking about get it to, but that's always struck me as And as funny because it's like, you know, the wanking philosophy you're talking about someone is paying them to do that as well. They're just like they're just inefficiently monetizing it. And and by the way, like I would I would rather monetize my work commercially, like writing something in a book

that someone voluntarily pays $25 for, then essentially existing off the teat of the state or being paid by a non-profit to monetize philosophy solely for my sort of own intellectual stimulation, which unfortunately is how I think a lot of, you know, quote unquote, professional philosophers are doing it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to, like, I haven't heard that kind of purest objection to public philosophy. objection to public philosophy, the worst that I heard as I was, you know, like coming up as a grad student and then early career was, you know, practically speaking, this might be bad for your career, which turned out, as I say in the piece, to be the opposite of

the truth, it was like essential for my academic career, the public stuff. But I haven't heard, I mean, maybe partly it's because so few philosophers actually make money that it's not a worry, like it's not a it's not a concern that we have to deal with. But I would say that, you know, I would say that that kind of attitude is confined to a kind of certain group of philosophers that I would never associate and don't interact with. It's not something that anybody who might be interested in writing public philosophy would have to worry about or deal with. It's funny to me how timeless it is, right? One of the early still,

I think it's maybe Clientes, there's this sort of, should they take money from kings or not? I think it was Clientes who famously never dedicates any of his works to a king, whereas some of the other philosophers were, I mean, Aristotle famously is the ultimate sort of patron-based Aristotle famously is the ultimate sort of patron-based philosopher, but it's weird how we compartmentalize. You host a podcast where you talk about philosophy that you sell ads for.

That gets categorized one way versus you apply for a grant to fund your philosophical exploring. That is somehow seen. I think that that's categorized differently. When really it's effectively the same thing, but yet for thousands of years philosophers, if you know, are you allowed to make money, should a philosopher be poor? Seneca famously is a philosopher allowed to be rich. You know that that we've been

wrestling with these questions for so long, strikes me as illustrative that maybe it's just a total dead end and there's no answer and you should just figure it out for yourself. Yeah, yeah, I mean, so mindfulness, this debate comes up a lot too. And, you know, is mindfulness and, you know, Buddhist meditation in general, is that now become marketed and, you know, like mindfulness ink, to the point where it actually infects and damages the very thing that would make it, you know,

marketable in the first place. It's a valuable approach to life and building, you know, the correct habits to appreciate the world more than you do, appreciate other people. And so I don't know, like I could see, I don't know that argument all that well, but I could see, I don't know that argument all that well, but I do see a lot of corporatization of these kinds of things that seems like that they have the potential to be destructive

in some ways or undermining the true mission in some ways. But again, with philosophy, it's just it's not an issue. Anyone that serves an audience, I think, feels that pull, right? Because you know kind of what your audience wants, you know what they like, you know where maybe they have views that differ from your views, you know? And so I think that's maybe a good segue into your book, the idea of honor. Maybe one strong argument for an important, or maybe one argument for a strong sense of honor is you need that. Here's who I am. Here's what I stand for. Here's what I'm willing to do, not willing to do, to counteract some of those forces, whether it's the, what the king wants you to do if you're a philosopher 2000 years

ago, or it's, you know, surfing the Facebook or Instagram algorithm today, or it's deciding what advertiser you're going to accept for your philosophy podcast in 2021. Right. Yeah. And I sort of, I think you might need a sense of honor and a sense of integrity, especially when it comes to those things to navigate, not just you know, the philosophy world, but the world in general. And I think one thing that honor oriented approaches to ethics and also honor oriented cultures value tremendously is the sense of integrity, this kind of willingness to overlook short term costs to defend the principles or to just be who you are. And it's a very hard thing, I think, to develop in isolation. I think this is, you know, this is something that you need an overarching

framework, except if you're just happy to be kind of born with that where, you know, there are certain people. And I think I'm on the pretty positive end of this where I wasn't going to play games that I didn't wanna play. And I wasn't gonna do work that I thought was not valuable. And this is one of the good things about academia. You always have this sort of baseline of, well, now I'm not gonna, that doesn't mean I'm gonna, you know, struggle to raise my family

and put food on the table because you have your job and you have your salary and all of that. But I think this sense of no, here's what I think's important, here's what I don't think is important. Let the chips fall where they may. That is a really important thing for I think your happiness, your level of self-respect, and it is something that I think honor cultures, enhance in a person, or they try to, it's

something they value in a person more than I think it's valued right now. It's hard to teach too, I think, in our culture today where we're afraid, we don't like judging, right? Like you're not supposed to judge lifestyles, choices, other people, you're supposed to sort of not do that. And then so it makes it hard, I think to inculcate a strong sense of like, here's who I am, here are the lines I won't cross

when everyone is supposed to be able to be whoever they want with no judgment. It's a tricky thing. I would certainly argue that, you know, I'm a big believer in personal liberty and sort of leaving everyone alone, but it does feel like it's hard to balance those two things. Yeah, I mean, but take a different example though.

So we have this in the academic community and it's part of the larger sort of zeitgeist right now, this whole worry about cancel culture and people judging you on Twitter. There's a lot of judgment being thrown around in places, in blogs and in social media and a lot of professors freaking out about that. And there I would say the honorable thing to do

is to allow yourself to be judged and not panic. You know, all of these people who are whining about cancel culture and all the, you know, encroaching totalitarian left, based on just a vanishingly small number of cases and risks that you would actually take, if you expressed your opinions, stood by your principles, expressed what you believed in public. Often the horrifying consequences of that is that you just get shit on on Twitter for a

couple of days, and then everyone forgets about it from then on. And like to me, like the honorable thing to do there is to say, you know, commit, say what you believe, don't be scared. And then also don't whine about the fact that you are chilled now because you're worried that people are gonna judge you. Just like that's part of the deal, that's life.

You say things, not everyone's gonna agree with it. Some people are going to judge you. Just like that's part of the deal, that's life. You say things, not everyone's going to agree with it. Some people are going to be mad. They'll be unfair attacks on you, too bad. That's the price of having a sense of a code. And again, this is something I think it's hard to teach people and it's more something that either you were brought up with or something that we would definitely need to have a more cohesive social unit to implement that as a value more than it currently is.

Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I joke to a friend that the irony of cancel culture is that there are definitely people out there who need to be canceled and they are almost never the people who are getting canceled. Right.

Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I just don't also, I don't think though that there are that many people getting canceled. Right. Yes. And certainly in academia, that's the case.

It's, yeah. that's the case. Yeah, there's this weird, obviously, what we're calling it now, white fragility, but there does seem to be a very real fragility in people who seem to have these things that they can't stop talking about and are very afraid that people are going to criticize them for incessently talking about it. And it just, it's like, look, if you're going to take the ride, you got to, you got to pay the price. Like you're talking about a controversial thing. Controversy is going to ensue no amount of whining about it preemptively. Just like just just take it. I don't understand. Right. Like I you want to talk about race and intelligence constantly. Then you're going to have to suffer a little some attacks on Twitter. You know, that's part that's

that's the deal. And again, if you really think that that's important and you're not just playing for like a sub-stack at some future date to be set up. Then like then yeah, of course, you have to take some of the hits and that's what people aren't willing to do. And they preemptively are paranoid that they are going to get that they're going to be canceled, fired, whatever, even though there's very few cases of that ever happening. And then they complain about the fact that they even have to be scared about it. Like, they're such crybabies, the segment of the so-called intellectual dark web. They're just whiny little bitches. This is one of my hobby horses on the podcast.

They drive me crazy. Right. The whole point of courage is that you have to be braving something. And so, yeah, the race intelligence thing I've talked about this before, my favorite part about that is it's actually very similar to some of the philosophical debates we were talking about. And I bring it up every time I meet, every time I talk to a friend of mine who's been sucked in, or, you know, I'm just asking questions. I go, what are you planning to do with this information? Let's say you found an indisputable link, you know, that this race or that race is, you know, some marginal percentage point different as far as IQ goes. It's like,

there's so many preposterous assumptions. First off, that IQ is really that important. Second, that it would tell you anything about the individuals that you meet in your life. And third, you're like a self-employed freelance writer. You don't even, what are you gonna do with this information? How are you gonna apply, how are you gonna apply racial intelligence disparity day to day in your life? Or

even, you know, why would we do it? It's nonsense. Yeah, exactly. Even at the level of policy, especially given, you know, the fact that A, the differences may not be real. And B, that if they are, they're, they're so marginal, there's nothing you could do. And then so the question is, why are you so focused on it? And why do you think this needs to be at the forefront of public and scientific inquiry?

And often the answer to that is troubling. Yes, you're right. It's when Charles Murray, I think it is tied you know, is troubling. Yes, you know, right. It's one like Charles Murray, I think it is tied to a more kind of conservative project of, well, you know, if, and it's all, this is based on, I think, a faulty line of reasoning, but it is, I guess, a coherent line of reasoning. If you find massive differences, then maybe that would mean that certain programs that are designed to lift people up should be abandoned because they won't be able to be lifted

up because the intelligence isn't there. But that, of course course is so faulty and also more like, morally important. Now, I don't know if Murray really believes that if it really is tied to his more kind of economic conservativeism, but I've seen that link and it doesn't strike me as totally implausible. Yeah, so I don't know like, yeah, and I know I'm not I'm not one of these big people who are outraged that Charles Murray is allowed to write books or give lectures. I think he should be, but you know, there you could see it tied to some larger project in a way that would be unsettling, I guess. There's a and I want to get back to honor, but speaking of sort of honorable people who

live by a code of honor, there was a great line from theater Roosevelt when they were, you know, looking to pass the 19th Amendment. And, you know, he was asked, you know, should women be allowed to vote? And he was an early proponent of that. And someone said, you know, but what about the differences between men and women? And he said, in all of my life, I've never noticed more differences between men and other men, meaning that, you know, like even let's say statistically there even was some, you know, significant differential.

And I think if there was, we'd have overwhelming data about it by this point, but and we don't. It's always this sort of measly, you know, inconclusive data points in my experience. But it's kind of confused, like, understanding of race and it's linked to genes. Yeah. But it's like, it doesn't tell you, and your point about it being morally important, it doesn't tell you anything about the person sitting in front of you. And in fact, you would be better off not knowing that information because it's more likely to make you biased against the person in front of you when you could

be sitting across somebody who's way smarter and better than you. And frankly, you know, from a humility standpoint, that's how you should go around the world thinking anyway. Yeah, I mean, I guess they would say, but you, A, it's important because it's scientific, you know, it, it, it sheds some ways on it. Yeah, fact is a fact. The facts don't respect your feelings, they say. You know, um, the most sensitive people in the world seem to respect. Exactly. Exactly.

The most sensitive people in the world seem to repeat exactly. Exactly. If you call them out on Twitter, they'd have a breakdown. But then also, I guess from an individual, as an individual, it absolutely would make no difference. Maybe in some possible world, it could conceivably inform policy. But a lot of this is also based on genetic deterministic ideas of the link between what's hereditary and what your fate is.

And there are so many things where we can be genetically disadvantaged that are so easily fixable. And so many things that are part, that are, have nothing to do with our, or with our genes, it just has to do with how we were raised, that are completely impossible to fix. And so, you know, like the fact that there might be some hereditary basis for intelligence wouldn't tell us anything. And it's just, it's based on a faulty thing. It's like, oh, well, you know, the eye, what's like eyesight is hereditary. And people have bad eyesight. Doesn't mean we shouldn't give people glasses and contact lenses, right? Like just because it turns out that it's not how you

erased, but it's, you know, it's your DNA, it's in your DNA, doesn't mean we can't take steps to address that. Isn't that a funny thing to go back to the point about honor that, and maybe that's why honor is in such low esteem today is that maybe we blame the British for this, but I guess it's most of Europe. We got in this weird kick for several hundred years where we started to think that honor had something to do with genetics and as opposed to who you are as an individual and what your own pattern of behavior and actions are. And so even this whole idea of an aristocrat or a noble family, you know, is this silly perversion of what honor actually is.

To me, honor is a choice. Honor is something you're educated with, something you either apply or don't apply. And we got on a weird blind alley with it. Yeah, I mean, there is a collective, like an important collective aspect to it. I don't think it's bloodline as much as it is your group. However, that group is defined. And which, you know, so you see a lot more collective responsibility in honor culture's collective punishment. So, and that goes, that runs very deep into honors roots

from the get go. There is also a kind of individualistic honor that I think, you know, you see popularized in like American Westerns or something like that where you have this wanderer who has a code and lives by the code and has very few personal attachments or ties. But I think that's the exception or maybe the samurai is like this to to some degree. But I think that's more the exception than the rule. I think honor is, it has a much bigger social element.

And I think where we started to abandon it was in our focus on the individual and individual rights being the thing and dignity being the only thing that matters. And once that happened, it made it difficult for honor to remain something that people cared about because they were so focused on the individual and lost interest in the collective or the social. Yeah, I guess that's true.

I mean, so where do you think the line between sort of pride and honor is? I'm fascinated by an example like Kato. You have this man of incredible honor and integrity from this long Roman lineage. And and that's so you could see it that way and then you sort of what it was opponents think they think of him as an intractable impractical, impractical, insufferable guy who can't bend or compromise. So honor is this thing we admire in the abstract until we bump up against a person of honor who's now in our way. Yeah, I guess. I mean, so right, there are insufferable people

who are very focused on honor, but there's insufferable people. There's no ethic that will make insufferable people not insufferable, I don't think. You know, like I think a great honor culture, one that I talk about in the book are hockey players and hockey teams. And hockey of all the athletes, they are the most humble, the most down to earth, the ones, you know, the least insufferable of all athletes, I think, as a general rule. So I think it really just depends what the overarching values are within the culture, which can be very flexible. And if, you know, if you're somebody, and I don't know the details of Kato, he's actually the

one stoic. I don't even know if I've ever read. We didn't really write anything. Oh, get right, right. He didn't write anything. Well, that's one reason. So, but I don't even know that much about him, I guess, compared to like Seneca or Marcus Aurelia's or Epic Davis. So, I don't know the details there, but I do know, you know, the Roman sense of honor carried maybe some more insufferable aspects to it than other cultures where it's just don't value that kind of, I don't know, pomposity.

We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Well, let's talk about one that you are familiar with, Senaqa, because I think Senaqa is such a relevant example and I wanted to get into politics a little bit, but here you have Seneca and he's selected as Nero's tutor. There's no reason not to turn the job down at the beginning, but it becomes increasingly clear that his charge is to ranged. And there's this tension. James Rom has an amazing book about Santa Cruz called Dying Every Day. But there's this question, and it's a question we're asking ourselves today about different members of different parties. But does he stay and try to

to keep things in line, or is he obligated by honor and principle to quit on the spot and not be a part of it? And I think that is a question of our time. Where does, when and where does one become complicit? Yeah. And I think one of the things that Stoics get right is that the approach to ethics as being primarily about building the right habits. on a daily basis like that, it will corrupt you in ways that you don't even recognize, even if your intentions are good, to the point where, I don't know, someone was saying this about the Republicans who will debase themselves in endless ways

to still appeal to Trump and Trump supporters. Like that the mask becomes the face or something like that, that all of, or the, yeah, the mask becomes the face. Like they're putting on a mask saying, like the latest thing, they're going to contest the election, even though everybody knows, they know in their hearts that this is bullshit, but they're doing it anyway. And then you keep doing that day to day to day as some Republicans have. And you just become that person. I mean, look at Ted Cruz. Like nobody could have, it's almost hard to conceive of anyone having like less self-respect. I'm almost hard to conceive of anyone having less self respect. I wrote this down to talk to you because he's both of our senators.

And I tweeted this yesterday, it's like, imagine being such a bootlicker that a man humiliates your wife and you respond not just by campaigning for him or voting for him. That would be sort of one mark against your honor. But then you risk your entire career to help him steal an election that he didn't win when he himself had accused you of cheating in an election that you didn't cheat in. We think of honor as sometimes being this antiquated like, oh, this is about fighting duels and I'm glad it's gone. It's like, no honor is just the basic level of self-respect that it should take to be able to wake up

and not kill yourself. Right. And it is this exact, and that self-respect also serves as a kind of check on you being overconfident that you can predict the consequences of whatever your compromise is. This is actually something I talked about in the public philosophy piece too,

is I think people are willing to compromise because they think that they figured out that the consequences will make it worth whatever it is that they have to sacrifice in terms of their integrity or in terms of their principle. And then the irony often is that it doesn't work out that way at all. It works out completely different ways that you never could have predicted. You never could have imagined.

Maybe this is true of Kato, right? That, you know, how does he, like, what makes him think that him being there will actually be better for Nero than him than him leaving? It's your your your epistemic position in those kinds of situations. We tend to be overconfident, overconfident in our ability to kind of game out what will happen. And just having principles and self respect just stops you from even playing that game, trying to figure out what will do the calculus as to because the truth is,

like most of the time, that stuff we can't control or predict anyway, and so you might as well just have some integrity and do something that you can live with yourself and not feel ashamed about. Well, you can rationalize a lot of stuff with what they call now preemptive what aboutism. Like if I don't do this, what if the alternative,

which I can't even know is worse? And I think you can imagine Sena Kassant himself, you know, if I leave the person who Nero has advice him after me, could be worse. And if you allow yourself the seductiveness of that rationalization, there's no line that you won't cross because everything could be worse than what you are currently consenting to. Yeah, you know, it's funny. This reminds me of another philosopher I think did great work, Bernard Williams, and he has this famous objection to utilitarianism

that it is an attack on your integrity, but by integrity, he means like your actual construction as a person. Like you have projects, you have emotions, you have a personality. And what utilitarianism is constantly asking you to do is an assault on that. Because for exactly the reason that you just said, you are trying to do what's best for the world, and that will often mean that you have to do something that is completely against what you believe in, what kind of marks you and distinguishes you as a person from anybody else. And so like you said, there's no line. There's no line that will keep you together as like a coherent human being if you're constantly trying to play political or whatever

games. Well, we were kicking Kato around a little bit. I think there's an interesting example from Kato's life that I'd be curious about your thoughts from an honor perspective. So before the overthrow of the Republic, Pompey comes home and he approaches Kato, they've long been enemies.

And he says, look, Julius Caesar is ascendant. We should become allies. And he offers his daughter in marriage to like Cato's son or something like this. He offers a marriage alliance. And Cato responds, you cannot buy Cato through women. Basically, he's like, I'm not gonna accept this bribe. And the result though, is that Pompey

seeks the same marriage alliance with Caesar. And so Plutarch's knock against Cato is that Cato ends up fighting to preserve the Roman Republic. But by refusing this quote unquote bribe or alliance, he brings about the exact thing that he feared. And so I think that is the tricky thing about honor. It's like, if you're thinking about it from the utilitarian perspective, then yes, he should have done it. If you're thinking about it from the integrity honor perspective, you don't take bribes. It doesn't

matter what the potential consequences of taking or not taking the bribe is. And that's probably a simpler and cleaner way to go through life, which is I don't take bribes. Right. Exactly. And there will be times where maybe if you took the bribe, it would have been better for everybody, for the world, if you had taken the bribes. But your ability to gauge when that's true is probably nowhere near at the level that you think it is. And so, that you think it is. And so, you know, again, this is just like it's a habit, have the habit of sticking by your principles. And if there are some costs to that, which there will be, though more than likely be outweighed by the benefits in the longer on any way. Yeah, I didn't think about it that way, but you're right, there's an arrogance to it or egotism to going like, I know. So therefore,

this time it's okay to break the rules or break my code of honor because I'm so smart I can see into the future and it's going to work out this time. Right. Like someone like Josh Hawley is probably making that calculation when he announced that he was going to lead a jacked to the certification of the election or whatever the electoral college results he's probably thinking, well, I can, you know, this will make me popular with Trump voters in 2024. And I can lead real populist change that I believe in. I don't know. Let's get with less, with less raw edges and, you know, less racism or I can, I can contain this energy. So I'm going to make this compromise. Right. And the truth is he has no clue what will happen in 19, in 2024 or whether this will

hurt him or help him. And so again, like, there's no way to predict that. There's no way to predict like anything that's going to happen. But it does know it's wrong right now. Right. But he knows it's wrong right now. So don't do it. You know, like that's the thing. And, um, and so yeah, there is arrogance. Like you said, it's a kind of epistemic arrogance that just doesn't square with our actual abilities to predict something with even any sort of complexity. If there was a, well, I think there's two, there's two really good examples of honor. I'll give you a positive one and a negative one and you tell me what you think.

There's a story about General Mattis after they, you know, after the inauguration, they all sit around a table and the Trump asked them, he asked, Trump asked everyone around the table to say why they're proud to serve him. So, you know, Mike Penn, so you're so wonderful, you know, and it goes around cabinet member over and over and over and over again. And Mattis is stuck in a bind because he doesn't want to debase himself and he doesn't see himself that way. And so he's the only one who dodges, and I think he says something like,

I'm proud to serve the, he makes it about the cause himself. And to me, that was a, you know, he was setting the tone of his relationship going for, which eventually ends in him leaving. I contrast this with what I think sort of encapsulates the honorlessness of where we are politically right now. Ron and McDaniel, who is the head of the RNC, do you know what her middle name is? Her middle name is Romney. She's from the Romney family.

But when Trump appointed her, it was on the condition that she dropped her maiden name. So, to take, like, just imagine the spinelessness and sheer, like, lameness of your boss, your future boss offering you a job on the condition that you debase yourself by changing your name. And then you wonder how you find yourself in the deranged position of unleashing the crack in and all this nonsense about the election. It's like it was written at the beginning how this was going to go. Yeah, exactly. And I think politicians typically are in a league by themselves

when it comes to lack of honor and kind of compromising in ways that for, you know, from an external perspective, just seem like there's just no reason to live at all if this is what you're willing to do to yourself, you're actually like, then what are we even doing here? If you're gonna like, if you're gonna like lick the ass of the person who called your wife ugly and said your dad, kids, Jay, randomly, probably meaning thinking that was Jeff, Jeb Bush at the time. Like that's like what's the point of any of this, you know, and you really do wonder with them. And someone like Madness coming from a more

honor-oriented military culture is probably somebody who's just not habituated to this daily debasing that politicians can be. So I don't know. I always think with politicians, if they actually did just speak their mind, even when it wasn't politically convenient for them, people would respect that, or at least way more than they think. But I don't know. That's the irony of Trump, right? Is that he's completely obliterated any of these fears that that politicians use to rationalize why they don't want to say things, why they don't want to piss anyone off. It's like he's shown you can just do whatever you want. And as long as you know what your base wants, you can probably survive it. And as long as you don't cower and fear and you kind of own what you said in some respects,

you can probably get away with it. There's a, yeah, there's a weirdness. I love that we were obviously knocking on Caesar earlier, but Caesar has this line in Shakespeare's play where he goes, what have I conquered gall to be afraid of telling graybeards the truth? It strikes me as hilarious that it's like you made it all the way to the Senate. You're one of a hundred people in the entire, like you're one of the 100 most powerful people in the world. And you're going to lie about the size of somebody's inauguration crowd because like,

there's a Republican Senator, I know who who's taken a stand on the election, the objection thing, in a way I thought was honorable. And I sent him an email and I joked and I said, yeah, what good is six years of job security, if you're not going to use it to, you know, to say what you think. And it's hilarious that these people who are, are guaranteed a job for, for a well after Trump will be gone are afraid to piss off a guy who's not even president anymore. Right. And who, as you say, exactly, like who should have obliterated any conception of you have to say the right thing politically to advance your career? Like he, this is one of the things I think people, like that you could almost admire about Trump is that he just

didn't give a shit. And he would just say whatever and people respected the authenticity of it, even if he was being authentic to his narcissistic self, like there was just the authenticity of it and the lack of short-term political calculation, or at least the seeming lack of short-term political calculation, was I think a part of his draw. And it's amazing that like, you know, you point that out. It's ob, it seems obvious and yet nobody seems to have drawn the less that lesson from it. Yeah, Lindsey Graham, you just, you just be an opponent who, who spent a hundred million dollars trying to beat you

and you won in a landslide. And now you have job security for the next six years. Yeah. How can, how can you not have some semblance of personal integrity or a line you're going to draw or or or even just have the balls to be like to I don't think it's particularly honorable, but Cicero, you know, during all of this we're talking about Cesar Cato. Cicero just goes like, well, I'm going to let this sort itself out and then I'm going let this sort itself out.

And then I'm gonna side with the winner. Like these people don't even have the balls to just be like, I'm not gonna destroy my own career getting involved in this. I'm gonna wait right in the middle of it for no gain, because I don't wanna be, I don't wanna take the heat on social media to go to what you brought up early. I really think that's it. I really think they just don't want mean tweets directed at them. Yeah, or, you know, they're always worried about getting

primaried. But again, if they had principle and they stood up for what they believe, I think enough voters would respect that for them not to worry about it. And then like you say, it's just insane for somebody who's just gotten elected for six years to do anything that betrays who they take themselves to be. I mean, I think some of them just have just lost that. Like they don't value at all standing up for something that is politically inexperient. They've lost that value in their personal sense of like what's important in life. And then they do become just this, you know, this vessel for political expediency that's, you know, that's completely soulless. And this is why people hate

politicians. It's maybe the place to end though is is I think it can be so easy, I think, to question or impune the honor of other people. But to me, the study of this, like I think we can have the conversation we just had about Lindsey Graham and Josh Hawley, and not even actually touch on real politics. I think this is just moral lessons for what kind of person you wanna be.

And then so it's like, hey, when somebody comes to you and says, you know, when the Chinese publisher of your book says, hey, can you drop this or that? So it's more palatable. Or, you know, somebody says, hey, will you do this or that? You know, can you look in the mirror and go, I'm not going to do that even though it's going to cost me a little bit. The point, you can spend your whole life looking at the unhonorable or honorable decisions

that other people do, but then you've got to decide, hey, again, what podcast advertisers am I going to accept? This person's offering me money, but their product is bullshit. So I'm going to turn it down. Like, honor has to be, I think, ultimately applied to your own real life or it's just a mental masturbation.

Yeah, I was wondering, I was listening to your interview with Wright Thompson. Yes. And there was a quote that one of you said about, there are these certain moments in your life where you have to stand for that just are going to reveal who you are as a person. And what you do at that moment, it's almost existential like what you do at that moment will kind of define who you are. You don't know what you can't recognize, right? Isn't this the idea?

You can't recognize when these things are. And so you have to be diligently ready. And I think that is, there's no life, whether it's politics or academia or sports or being an actor or working at Google or working as a plumber or whatever, like there's no profession or area of life where you're not going to be faced with those. And you know, this is again, like what I respect about stoicism is a lot of that philosophy is just preparing you so that you will have the courage and the wisdom to not let those opportunities or to

not fail when you're presented with those decisions or opportunities. And to go to your point about making it a habit, right? John McCain didn't know probably that that was the last vote he was going to make, that it would be the sort of the final cementing of his legacy. But I'm guessing he probably didn't even have to think about it that much because that was who he was and that was the code that he lived by. Even though in that case, he was, you know, the heat he was taking was going to be from his own party, voting essentially to preserve something that he over and over again said that he didn't support or like.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And I think he's an interesting case because he made what he was told was a politically expedient calculation having Sarah Palin as his running mate. And he saw, I think he talked about this later in life. He, that was a big regret of his. He wasn't behind it, but he was convinced that, and then he ended up losing anyway. So like, there's just no, like,

it's, this is why I think it really is just the rule of thumb is stick for what you believe. Don't take shit, don't do things, don't compromise. And often when you do that, the good that you're trying to achieve to sacrifice whatever level of respect or integrity you have doesn't come about anyway. So then now you've just humiliated yourself

or betrayed some core principle that you believe and with nothing to show for it, you know? Totally. This was so great. Thank you so much. And I think you actually did very much succeed in your work of public philosophy. It opened my mind to a bunch of things.

And it's a book I think everyone should read. Oh, I really appreciate it. Thanks. This was a lot of fun. podcasts.