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Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:11]
B
Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets, in other words, for the humanities. But what would you say if I told you that we can construct a system of ethics and morality by studying math, more specifically, the laws of thermodynamics? That's what Professor Drew M. Dalton argues in his latest book. Dalton traces a line of metaphysical inquiry from Kant through Spinoza, Nietzsche, and others up to today to show how we get from E MC squared to a full throated call to resist evil and alleviate suffering to our very last breath. I'm Carrie Lynne of the New Books Network, and this is the matter of From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism By Drew M. Dalton Drew Dalton is a professor of English at Indiana University, having received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on the normative implications of different metaphysical systems, and specifically, he's interested in how questions of right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and pleasure, are framed within aesthetics, literary theory, ethics, and political philosophy. He's the author of Longing for the Other, Levinas and Metaphysical Desire from Duquesne University Press, the Ethics of Tyranny of the Absolute from Bloomsbury and the Matter of Evil, which we're talking about today from Northwestern University Press, which he's going to discuss with me today. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the New Books Network. Drew, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:53]
A
Thanks for having me on.
- [02:55]
B
So I want to begin by asking you about your background. Your degrees are in philosophy. You're currently a professor in an English department, and you clearly have a deep interest and familiarity with the material sciences. So we share this somewhat uncommon collection of interests. And so I really wanted to hear how you found this particular path in academia.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, you know, it's difficult to answer that directly, I think, simply because I'm always suspicious of autobiographical narrative to some extent. I think they tend more towards fiction than to reality. I think we. It's easy to kind of look back and cobble together a coherent account of how we arrived at where we were, when, in fact, the steps we took there are anything but coherent. I think maybe a better way of accounting for it than is to simply talk about the distinction between these things. Right. So, on the one hand, for example, I think of science as the fundamental attempt to understand the nature of reality. It attends to reality and hews close to it. Right. Arts, on the other hand, like literature, are about meaning making. This allows it a level of sort of fantastical freedom to float away from reality and to imagine entirely new realms. If we think of, like, science, on the one hand, as hewing close to reality and arts as sort of drifting away, then I think that philosophy is about building a bridge between these two things. I think it's about tethering the art of meaning making to the scientific study of reality. So I don't think of these three things. Science, the material sciences on the one hand, the literary or cultural arts, on the other hand, and philosophy, on the third, as being all that distinct from one another. To the contrary, I think they work together to braid a kind of coherent sense of what it is to be on this planet together for. So I've always striven to kind of braid, as it were, these three things into one another.
- [04:48]
B
Okay. Yeah. I think that'll make a lot of sense as we move through this book here, because I want to ask you, too, next, how did this particular book come to be?
- [04:57]
A
Yeah, I think, you know, one thing I've found in my nearly, at this point, 20, 25 years of an academic career is that every project grows out of the previous project. Like, you write one thing to answer a problem or to address a problem or answer a question you have, and as soon as you do, you realize the panoply of other problems. You've opened up by arriving at the answers you had. And so you write a new work to address those problems. In this case, the work grew out of really a problem I had with my first book about Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas has this magnificent account of what he considers to be the primordial ethical responsibility we have to the universe. I was very taken with this idea, but I immediately found in it something troublesome. Because if I fundamentally and irrevocably owe a moral or ethical duty and responsibility to others in the world, how do I decide or make choices between those things? And so I wrote another book following up on that called the Ethics of Resistance, which attempted to kind of develop a new way of thinking about our ethical duties and our ethical responsibilities, not as something positive, that is, not as something we have to do, but rather as something negative, something we ought not to do, something we need to resist. When I finished that book, I thought, found myself thinking, okay, great, that's a fun theory of ethics or whatever, or perhaps it's even useful, hopefully. But it has no real metaphysical or epistemological foundation. And so I found myself thinking, I need to do more work in metaphysics, I need to do more work in epistemology, and I need to really be able to account, for, lack of a better word, for the ontological ground of this theory of ethics I've come up with. And around the same time, I was, as I was always doing a lot of reading in the material sciences, and I was sort of discovering this major transformation that was happening in the material sciences that initiated about 150 years ago, but really has undergone radical expansion in the last 50 and even more narrowly the last 20 years. And it struck me that there was a wonderful confluence between this philosophical problem I had, how do I ground this ethics that I've developed and these new scientific discoveries. And so that's what led to this third book, the Matter of Evil. So again, it was kind of a braiding of problems, a braiding of interests and abrading of questions that resulted in this. And now I'm trying to braid my way into a new set of problems.
- [07:27]
B
Okay, great. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So let's start with some necessary background and flesh all that out a little bit more. Today it's generally accepted that questions of morality and ethics are an entirely separate humanities domain. It's separate from the stem domains of physics and mathematics, or a lot of people would assume that there's a clear division there. But as you point out in older Western philosophy, dating Back to the Enlightenment, they did indeed attempt to apply scientific concepts of their time to support ethical assertions in philosophy, taking for granted, however, that the universe is governed by principles of goodness and that evil is an aberration and disruption of this state. And so you begin your book with that grounding, but also also turning it all on its head. So set the stakes of the discussion for us here and tell us what this is all about.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two ways we can answer this. First of all, you're absolutely right to say that for the bulk of the history of thought, for the bulk of the history of philosophy, philosophy and science were seen as two parts of the same kind of question. In fact, the very word science comes from the Latin scientia, which was a translation of the Greek word philosophia. And philosophia, the love of wisdom, was coined by Pythagoras to describe one of what he considered to be the fundamental matasis, ways of understanding, ways of thinking. And matasis is of course, the root of the word math. So in other words, for the ancient Greeks, philosophy is a form of math. For the Romans, the sciences are a form of philosophy. And this idea of the fundamental union of mathematics, that is the study of the nature of reality, scientific study of the nature of reality, and philosophy, this, for lack of a better word, science of meaning making, were unified. A testimony to this can be found, for example, in the fact that it's alleged to have been written above Plato's academy. Let no one enter who is ignorant of the study of geometry. There was this sense that understanding math, understanding science, was a propaeutic for the study of philosophical questions. So this dominated philosophical thought from the ancient world through the medieval world, and indeed even into elements of the modern or Enlightenment world. But at that same time, in attempt to overturn what it considered to be the governance of dogmatism in the medieval world, a kind of divorce started happening between philosophy on the one hand and science on the other hand. Philosophy was seen as a human art and science was seen as the attempt to understand the inhuman or ahuman or non human structures of reality. And so slowly these kind of divided up and philosophy got slotted in with the humanities and math and science got slotted in with, as you called it, the stem right things. So first and foremost, I want to heal the divorce. I want to bridge the divide. I want to bring these two things fundamentally back into conversation with one another and say that for philosophy to develop properly, it needs to ground itself in science and for science to truly flourish, it has to find the philosophical meanings of its discovery. So these two things belong together. Okay, so in some ways, what I'm doing is going back to a very ancient project. But you're absolutely right to say, at the same time, it's turning that ancient project on its head, because the fundamental assumption in this classic understanding of the universe that dominated thought from, you know, the time of Plato onwards is that the universe is indeed a fundamentally good place, that to live in accordance with nature is fundamentally an ethical virtue. And this is based on what I think were faulty scientific assumptions about the order and operation of the universe, not to mention its ultimate fate. So really, the question is, if we are going to bring science and philosophy back into conversation with one another, number one, does the science still hold that the universe is a fundamentally benevolent place for human flourishing and therefore something that we might consider good? Or does it not? And if it doesn't, then what philosophical meanings does this have for us? So that's kind of where the work begins now. You're absolutely right. What I try to show in the work is that, lo and behold, the science of our day has overturned this assumption. And this calls for a new philosophical reckoning with the meaning and ethical value of the universe. So, in other words, we can do the ancient work, but we have to do it in an entirely new way. And it requires unsettling, overturning, and frankly upsetting, both on a kind of personal level and an intellectual level. Those assumptions which guided thought in the past.
- [12:27]
B
Yeah, I love it. Okay, so more important context to your discussion is Immanuel Kant's pivotal contributions to Western philosophy's search for universal, absolute truths. Pretty tricky goal there, but he actually sounds like a postmodernist to me because he argues essentially that absolute truth is a fallacy because knowledge can only ever be from a human perspective, which is a thread that just gets further and further developed and forward in time as we go. So instead, Kant sought ways to establish a workable universal morality through human reason. But later work has shown how the relativism inherent as ideas made them vulnerable to being used to defend the worst of colonialism. I mean, he was writing from a very European perspective at that time, so that's not super surprising. Then later philosophers like Quentin Meassoux and Alain Badiou have attempted to overcome this problem of relativism by applying principles of mathematics to philosophical questions. And for our listeners. I know I'm condensing a lot here, but I think you do an excellent job of exactly that in your book, and you take a number of very dense, complicated, interacting ideas and tell a clear and compelling story of the development of a few of these threads. So I'm asking you to do that for us here, too.
- [13:57]
A
Yeah. Thanks, Carrie. That's a big set of questions there. Let me start by first of all saying I'm suspicious of the word postmodernity in general. I'm never really sure what it means or what it applies to. So when we say that there's a sense in which Kant is a proto postmodernist, I just want to push back and say, I think the only way in which I think the word postmodernity means anything salient is to say that it is an attempt to reckon with the consequences of modernity. That's really the only thing that seems to unify the broad swath of thinkers that are considered postmodernists. And if that's a definition for postmodernity. Right, this attempt to reckon with the consequences of modernity, then you're absolutely right. Kant is indeed a postmodernist, though he is still firmly placed in the modern period. Right. But really, Kant rose to fame with the publication of this piece called what Is the Enlightenment? Where he's reflecting on the consequences of this kind of Enlightenment thinking that's happening. So there's a kind of irony in Kant. There's a sense in which he is both in and outside of modernity. He is both standing within the kind of Enlightenment tradition and reflecting on it from outside. And that same irony, I think, permeates all of his work. So you're absolutely right. Like Kant, on the one hand, is trying to fulfill that enlightenment modern project, namely of kind of erecting a foundation for, and developing upon that foundation a universal science, an encyclopedic understanding of the nature of the whole of reality. And yet the foundation Kant gives us is not the one that the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers would like. Because Kant fundamentally says, hey, look, we can't access something like reality in and of itself. We can only access it in as much as it is sort of organized and understood by the structures of human understanding. So if there's any foundation, then it is us, which is really no foundation at all. But then again, the irony doubles back because he says, well, at the very least, this us is a universal thing. All of us, we humans think in a similar way, or at least in as much as we are rational. We do. But you're again right, there's a terrible irony there, because the way in which he describes the nature of this rational individual is really just himself, a white European man from the 18th century. So there's this kind of weird irony back and forth with Kant. On the one hand he lays out this magnificent project, and on the other hand he completely destroys the possibility for its fulfillment. So I think one question I like to ask is if there is any hope in resurrecting this project, on what basis can we do that? Or does it, like so many so called postmodernist after Kant, have to just be abandoned entirely? Right. What I am interested in in so called new materialists or speculative realists as they're alternatively called, is that in some ways I think they're resurrecting the Enlightenment project that Kant is also trying to do, but they're doing it in a new way, a way which is not based on the categories of human understanding, but on a radically non anthropocentric way, on something that is indeed in and of itself, but is nevertheless accessed through the structures of human thought. And you're right to note that Quentin Mehasu and Alain Badou are perfect examples of this. And the things that they find are mathematics in this regard. They're kind of resurrecting an old idea that mathematics are the language of the universe, that in mathematics human beings and non human structures of reality find a common ground on which they can communicate. And that doesn't mean that math will always yield correct things. Obviously all languages are prone to miscommunication and misunderstanding, but that nevertheless this is the ground on which we can try to start talking meaningfully about the nature of reality again, and not merely the nature of reality as it appears to us. So that's what interests me in those thinkers. And that's, in a sense, you can already see where this is going, the epistemological foundation for the kind of work I want to do. If indeed mathematics is a method by which we can start talking about reality once again, then we can talk about the products of mathematical sciences as absolute truths, as things that we can use to reconstitute our understanding of reality and therefore the meaning we have to take from that reality. So in other words, it lays a foundation for us being able to talk about things like the thermodynamic revolution in a meaningful way, as substantive of, of existence in and of itself, and not merely our understanding of it.
- [18:45]
B
And so ultimately you find Mei Su and Bai Dieu fail to correctly apply mathematics to understanding reality because for one thing, together their contradictory interpretations invalidate each other. And maybe more importantly, because they aren't entirely supported by the science, they deviate a little. So instead you propose that physics, and specifically the laws of thermodynamics, is the most promising place to find universal and abstract absolute principles of reality, including ethics and morality. So please remind us and the listeners of the laws of thermodynamics and explain how pursuing these avoids the pitfalls of Mayassu and Badiou's attempts to apply mathematical principles to ethics.
- [19:29]
A
Yeah, so let's first just kind of go back for a moment because it's not as if we're saying, hey, physics instead of mathematics, right? Because physics is applied mathematics, like physics is a mathematical language. Physics operates in and through mathematics. Instead, the problem is how Miyasu and Badu use mathematics. And I think they almost romanticize mathematics as a pure language. But if math as a language has any function, it's to communicate with reality itself, you know, so, like, maybe you can think of it this way. Math is a finger pointing away to reality. What frustrates me about Measu and Badiou is that they focus on the finger and not the thing that it points to. So my problem is less with mathematics as a philosophical method or a scientific method than the way that Mayassu and Badu fail to follow mathematics to its logical conclusion, which is the application of this brilliant methodological language to unlock the empirical nature of reality. In doing that, again, I think they fall back into a kind of anthropocentric system. They're much more interested in it as again, a language of human understanding than the means by which we can transcend the human get to the inhuman facts of reality. So I really just want to make sure that we're using math properly to take matter seriously, to take the material nature of the universe seriously, to get beyond this anthropocentrism that has bound thinking for so long, so that we can really talk about the nature of reality itself. And lo and behold, you're absolutely right. When we engage in mathematical physics, when we engage in mathematical chemistry or even sort of biophysics, what we discover is that the laws of thermodynamics reign. Absolutely. This is in essence the heart of the so called thermodynamic revolution which is currently taking place in the material sciences, that namely, everything from stellar objects to metabolic processes in the body are fundamentally governed by thermodynamic exchange. And the laws which govern thermodynamic exchange, to your question, are precisely this. So we're all familiar with the first one, the law of the conservation of energy. Right. That's the first law of thermodynamics, which effectively says, you know, kind of the classical, at least rendered classically, though this is not always terribly exact, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can merely change form. So, you know, when you have a log, which is a bit of kind of bound chemical energy, you can ignite it. That bound chemical energy then turns into radiant energy, warming your house, and is reduced then into kind of carbon cinder. So we have. There's a. There's a thermodynamic exchange. But what the second law adds to that is that the nature of this thermodynamic exchange is always only in one direction, namely disorder. So when you can only burn the log, right, you can only release from more complex bound chemical energy in the form of the law log into radiant heat energy. You can't go backwards from radiant heat energy into logs, although it might seem that way when we talk about, for example, how plants grow to begin with, and I'll talk about that in a moment. So that second law of thermodynamic, that energy only tends in one direction towards the increase in entropy, is what defines the second. The third one says that since things can only move in only one direction, ultimately all energy will move towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, which in the absolute sense is what we call absolute zero. So, in other words, all of reality is bound as some form of energy. Right. Energy can always change forms, but can only ever change forms from more concentrated to less concentrated, from more ordered to less ordered. And given that third law, it means the universe is perpetually falling apart, seeking some form of thermodynamic equilibrium, and it's doing that in and through all things at all times. Now, why does that matter? Because it breaks with our understanding of the universe, as we classically think. So let's go back to that log. We typically think we go, okay, yeah, we know we can set logs on fire, but logs, of course, are simply dead trees. And trees, living matter, we traditionally think, operates against the thermodynamic laws. Famously, Vaclav Havel in 1975 said, Life is an upswim stream. Excuse me, an upstream swim against entropy. Why? Because it seems to aggregate the radiant energy around it, like a plant absorbing sunlight in order to divide the. The oxygen in the air, or to take in H2O. And to divide these things in order to kind of. Or to take in the CO2. Excuse me. And to divide the O2 from the sea and take the sea to carbon and build itself. So we. We think of living bodies as these things which are, through thermodynamic exchange, aggregating chemical energy from radiant energy. And we go, this is amazing. This is magnificent. It seems to work backwards. But what the biological sciences, biophysics, biochemistry, and advanced mathematical physics have discovered in the last few years is that all of this seemingly contra entropic movement, or what's oftentimes called negentropic development, still operates according to the laws of thermodynamics. And not only does it operate according to the laws of thermodynamics, it seemed to operate in order to effectively speed up the entropic decay of reality. So, as we now begin to understand life, inasmuch as it seems to aggregate itself from disorder in its local universe, is only doing that because life is profoundly effective at increasing disorder in the cosmic level, at the cosmic scope. So at the micro level or at the local level, it seems to operate negantropically against the flow of the universe towards absolute decay. But at the macro level, at the cosmic level, we realize that it only does this in order to speed things up. So, for example, when the tree binds this sort of radiant heat energy in chemical form, it does so again only so that it can consume and destroy its own local network with quicker and greater efficiency. So everything, even seemingly negantropic objects, like living matter, are in fact agents of entropy. And at that level, as any number of biochemists and biophysicists will tell you, they are even more radically powerful at destroying their local environments than fire itself. So these laws of thermodynamics, which have been recently discovered through the application of mathematical physics, have radically transformed our understanding of reality. Inasmuch as we do not pay attention to what these mathematical sciences have discovered, we miss the point of them. So Mayassu and Badu absolutely have a beautiful epistemology. There are problems with this epistemology, but the biggest problem of all is that they fail to use it to actually try to understand the metaphysical nature of reality. And the only way to do that is to take seriously what the sciences have told us. And this I think you can only do by attending to this new thermodynamic revolution occurring in those sciences.
- [27:11]
B
Well, I'm convinced. But you point out that on occasion, scientists have accused humanities scholars of abusing and misusing scientific terms and concepts by misapplying them in their own fields in some form of what's called, I guess, fashionable nonsense. So I'm familiar with a trend from 15 or 20 years ago to apply the Mathematical concepts associated with chaos theory. A mathematical. It's a collection of formulas called chaos theory. People were applying that to literary analysis, often metaphorically speaking, for example. And then there was a lot of criticism from mathematicians that follow that for. For being fashionable nonsense. So I wondered, is that the kind of fashionable nonsense accusations that have been levied against Measu and Badiou? How do you think your application of entropy applies the science? Appropriately and substantively.
- [28:10]
A
Thank you. Yeah. So I think this is an absolutely fair and accurate critique of so much of what is happening in the humanities. And I, along with the people who've coined this term, Alain Sokol and Jean Briquemont, I would like to see fashionable nonsense, this misapplication and misappropriation of concepts driven out of the academy. It's absolutely horrifying to me. I think it does a disservice and epistemic injustice to the ideas, but it also makes fools of ourselves.
- [28:40]
B
So you're not buying it about the metaphorical application?
- [28:45]
A
Well, I'm not buying metaphorical applications. That's totally right. I mean, I think so. The word metaphor is wonderful, isn't it? Metaphoros. It's to take the light of illumination of one thing, the phoros and meta, move it over to something else. So if this light illuminates here, it should illuminates there. Right. The problem is because when people talk about these things, they often don't have enough information of it to actually shed any light. So they talk about it in quite a dark and opaque way. So then they take these ideas that they only have a dark and opaque understanding of and use it to illuminate something else. And the process, they only make that thing darker and more inchoate and difficult to understand. I'll never forget someone told me once, you should never try to take something more difficult to understand as an analogous way of understanding something that's easier to understand.
- [29:36]
B
Well, that's fair, yeah.
- [29:38]
A
Whether or not literature and the arts are easier to understand, I'll take issue with. But I do think trying to borrow ideas from the sciences to enlighten those things can cause a lot of problems. So for Alan Sokol and Jean Gliquemont, you're absolutely right. The whole problem is when we use science as a metaphor. But they make very clear they have zero problems with people from the humanities, philosophers, literary theorists, et cetera, drawing from the sciences, when they let the sciences guide them, when they take the sciences seriously. And that's, I think, what I'm attempting to do. Right so I'm not talking about thermodynamics as a metaphor. I'm not saying, you know, things fall apart from our bodies, to society, to political entities, to our hopes and dreams, right? I'm saying that literally, on a fundamentally biophysical level, the science teaches us that the universe is collapsing. And this challenges the assumptions that underlie the bulk of philosophical Western metaphysics, namely, that the universe is there to sustain us and to guide us. And these ideas are the foundation of the ethical judgment of the value of the universe in the Western canon. So we say because the universe sustains us, it is bound towards human flourishing. This is Aristotle. Or because it's constantly transforming, this is what Nietzsche says then it is a powerhouse of becoming for our own lives, and if we draw from these things, we can affirm it as a source of joy. But they're wrong. What the contemporary sciences have shown us is that the universe is not moving towards a flourishing or eternal becoming. In as much as it does create the conditions for the development of life, it does so only to effectively speed up the decay, collapse, destruction and destitution of not only the local environment in which those things emerge, but the cosmic environment as a whole that is a decidedly not beneficial, in a classic sort of metaphysical sense, universe, that is a detrimental universe. And if the universe is this, and we think we can derive meaning, philosophical meaning, moral meaning, from the nature of the universe, then it's decidedly clear that the universe is not a place aimed at flourishing and therefore not necessarily good, but perhaps precisely the opposite. So again, I'm not contesting the sciences, and I'm not drawing from the sciences as metaphor. I'm trying to learn from the sciences and then develop a philosophical way of making meaning from it. Again, philosophy as this bridge between the art of meaning making and the scientific understanding of the nature of reality. If we let the sciences speak for themselves and tell us about the nature of reality, perhaps we can start trying to figure out the meanings that this has to do for us at the level of the human, either intellectually, philosophically, or artistically.
- [32:43]
B
So you apply the laws of thermodynamics and entropy in particular to demonstrate that, and I'll quote you here, the entropic drive of the material universe towards complete annihilation is not a morally neutral force, but a fundamentally destructive force. Nothing less, in other words, than the classical account of evil itself. This then offers a firm foundation upon which we might resurrect a new account of ethical judgment and establish some form of moral order. So this conception raises some New questions and potential problems. First, what about free will? If entropic decay is the ineluctable reality of our universe, why should I get out of bed in the morning, much less get out of bed to do good?
- [33:29]
A
That's a wonderful question, and I realize that the podcast format is such that I'm supposed to answer it, but I'm so tempted to turn back on you and say, why do you get out of bed now? Because the thing is, you're already living in this universe and you know that. So we could talk about it on a very micro level, right? We could say, well, you. You. You've known since some traumatic moment, perhaps in your past, or perhaps instinctually all along, that everything you do is. Is ultimately moving towards your eventual death and demise, and that all that you accomplish will eventually be erased by time. I know the names of my parents. I know the names of my grandparents. I do not know the names of my great grandparents or my great great grandparents or the countless other generations of human beings would be out without which my very being would not be here. They have been erased by time. Right? And I know that that will happen to me. I'm. I'm no fool. I have no false prospects for my memory lingering very far into the future if not ending, you know, tomorrow. And yet I still get out of bed and I still strive to do good, even though I know it will come to not. I think the problem I'm trying to point out to is not a new problem, it's simply giving it a new material foundation. How do we make meaningful lives in a world that is demonstratively not only meaningless, but antagonistic to our attempts to make meaningful. Well, when you put it that way, it seems to me that that is precisely all the more reason why I should be striving to make meaning. All the more reason why I should be striving to create art, because it doesn't come out of the universe itself. I have to attempt to creatively make meaning because that thing is corrosive to it. And it's only in the re braiding, it's only in the re stitching together that I can kind of cobble together some sense of the value of my being. Right. So this is. Yeah, yeah. So I think the problem you've asked is a problem we've always faced as human beings. It's just giving it a new scientific explanation with regards to the question of free will. I think you're right. On a macro level, what we realize through this is that ultimately everything you do will come to naught. And there's nothing you can do about that. You have no freedom over the coming annihilation. But you do have freedom on a micro level of how you choose to face it and what you choose to do in the meantime. So I'm willing to assert that some level of freedom exists in a very inconsequential way. Inconsequential in the sense of ultimate reality. Nothing I do can ever actually buck the trends of nature. I am absolutely and fundamentally bound by the laws of the universe. But how I live within the constraints of those laws in the meantime is still, I think, seemingly free for me. And I think that's precisely where the question of value comes in. Either moral value, which we call the study of ethics, or aesthetic value, even driven, how do I develop beauty? And that, to me, is ultimately what really matters here. That it grounds anew the importance of committing ourselves to getting out of bed, doing good and finding beauty in a universe which is antagonistic to these activities. And which will ultimately win out in its attempt to annihilate and destroy not only those activities, but everything, including itself.
- [37:21]
B
Yeah, I love the way you answer that. Because, of course, you're absolutely right. We do have to grapple with this knowledge that on a personal level, each one of us is going to die and be forgotten. Regardless of how many beautiful books we publish. Eventually we will be forgotten. But, gosh, it raises new questions for me about. You'd think that if we were one with the universe, we're part of the universe, that we would psychologically resonate with destruction. Whereas clearly, we psychologically resonate with creation and hedonism and beauty. And I just wonder why. But that's going in such a different direction.
- [38:01]
A
Oh, but we can answer that, Carrie.
- [38:03]
B
Can we?
- [38:03]
A
Yes, we can. And that's the terrifying thing. That's what makes it all the more terrifying. Because when we hedonistically consume, we are aiding and abetting and, in fact, speeding up the entropic collapse of the universe. Our aesthetic tendency towards consumption, towards creation, is a cog in the cosmic wheel of entropic collapse. Think about it. To aggregate the materials around me and to use them creatively to make an artistic performance require such energy exertion and energy expansion that in my creative act, I am actually hastening the destruction of the universe. So I think there is an inbuilt tendency towards this. In other words, even what we might think of locally as the good or the beautiful. Is ultimately in service to the absolute destructive power of evil. The absolute nihilation of all things. So, and this goes to the ethical conclusions of the book, there is an absolute moral value to the universe, but there is only one evil. Goodness is only ever thematizable as a relative value, as a relative human value which attempts to resist, kick back at, or buck the system. Will it be successful? Definitely not, because you cannot rebel against the laws of the universe. But in doing that, in these micro acts of meaningless rebellion, you can at least approximate something called goodness. So goodness, in other words, is a species of evil. Beauty is a species of nihil. Creation is a species of destruction. And I know this. And we can make no illusions about it. But that doesn't mean we should give up on these things. Yeah. Because it is the only approximation of goodness and value that we can get otherwise.
- [40:01]
B
It's such a weird paradox. Like when we're talking about creation, like the energy consumption to reproduce, you know, on the biological level. I get you. I'm following that. That hedonism, okay, that's a desire to consume, so that's speeding up entropy. Okay. What about just doing good by people? Is, is that. Can you fit that. Braid that into this picture as well? Like just making somebody else, going out of your way to make somebody else happy or repair an injustice, that just. The only outcome is that it makes people feel good. Is that part of this too?
- [40:40]
A
Oh, my gosh. Well, so we get into some delicate topics when we get into that. But to some extent we could say, and this is actually a debate that Schopenhauer and Philip Mainlander have, and that Friedrich Nietzsche a little bit has. Gets in later in the 19th century. And this is, as you know, a big element of the latter half of the book. I would argue that on the one hand, that is about as nearly as good as you can get. So Schopenhauer says that the height of ethics is going to be compassionate protection. So in recognition that existence is tearing itself apart and that I experience that as pain, the best thing I can do for others is to try to shield them from pain. In other words, ethics is a kind of palliative care. Right. And it doesn't necessarily, at least on the surface value, speed up entropic decay. If anything, it just seems to slow it down. I think that I want to agree with Schopenhauer to some extent that we can work to try to slow things down. So let me give you a concrete example that may put a little bit more of a finer point on this. Let's talk about things like vegetarianism, veganism, or not, you know, Driving a vehicle or not using AI or any of these sorts of things, all of these Thou shalt nots, all of these things you can refrain from doing are I think effectively ways of either A, slowing down the rate of consumption in your local environment, in other words, you know, delaying the entropic collapse that is being affected through you, or alleviating B, the symptoms of that collapse, the immediate pain and suffering that it causes at the level of human experience. I think these are manifest goods. But to think that they actually free us from the entropic law is false. Because in order, for example, me to even have the energy to care for another requires me still consuming. Now I can consume again in a quote, unquote, more ethical way, I. E. A way that that reduces the amount of harm and entropic destruction. And I should. In fact, that's what I want to argue, at least in the book, but I don't ever get out of the system. Does that make any sense?
- [42:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, it does, actually. Yeah. Gosh, it's just such interesting stuff to think about. Yeah. And we are getting a little ahead, so I'll just back up slightly and ask you about. No, no, no, it's all great about Spinoza because he has this concept of monism, which is his vision of the universe, unity of ourselves with the natural world, as a model for you, like this, as a model for a secularized, non dogmatic reinterpretation of natural theology.
- [43:23]
A
Right. This medieval idea of the goodness of the universe.
- [43:27]
B
Right. And so that's the notable difference here, is that in his Christian view, the moral alignment of God's universe is goodness. And so you bring in Arthur Schopenhauer, whom you just mentioned, into this discussion for unpacking how Spinoza's view is entirely too optimistic and doesn't describe our encounters with the real hostile world. So we've been talking about some of these themes already, but yeah, maybe get a little more into what Schopenhauer is up to here.
- [43:53]
A
Will do. First, I just have to quick note. Spinoza is not a Christian by any. By any means. I mean, he was raised in a Jewish community and in fact.
- [44:01]
B
Oh, gosh, sorry, whoopsies.
- [44:02]
A
No, no, not at all. But he's drawing deeply from the traditions of Christian natural theology, there's no question about that. He read extraordinarily extensively. But here's a really interesting thing. He was kicked out of the Jewish community for being all too radical in what they conceived to be his atheism.
- [44:20]
B
So in fact, it's Deism, almost kind Of.
- [44:22]
A
Yeah, there's a new book written by Steven Nadler that argues that it's not even deism, it's an outright atheism. So. But I agree, there's a kind of deism there for Spinoza. Famously, he says, if the concept of the divine, the concept of God, is going to have any salience at all, it has to be as nature. Hence Spinoza's famous line, deus si venatura, God, or in other words, nature. Right. So you're right, it's a kind of like deism or pantheism, or according to some, that is effectively a kind of atheism. Right. So I think it's important to note that you're right. He is trying to disabuse us of the religious ideas. He doesn't think the universe is good because God has made it such. He thinks the universe is good simply because it is what it is. But his understanding of what it is is faulty. It's faulty because it's bound by the physics and the metaphysics of his time, which simply didn't have the observational tools necessary to understand that things are collapsing. For him, the universe is. Yes, it's becoming. It's constantly transforming. You know, when I die, my body is put in the ground, but then the nutrients from my body fuel the growth of plant matter, which is in turn eaten by the animal matter around me, which is in turn dies and fuels. So he has this idea of this eternal kind of recurrence that is becoming, but nevertheless has a kind of constancy in its becoming. And that constancy, that eternal constancy, is what allows Spinoza to say it is good. This constancy is a foundation for our assertion that the universe is a good place to be. It is constantly working in affirmation of itself, even if in its affirmation of itself, it has to kill me. It is never negating itself. But we now know that's just not the way the universe functions. And the first person who really cotton onto this is indeed Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century. So Schopenhauer was a. A voracious reader of philosophy, science, literature, the history of philosophy, both east and West. He was just an extraordinary thinker. And one of the things that Schopenhauer, in his engagement with the material sciences of his day, started realizing is that. Wait a second, more often than not, the universe is profoundly antagonistic to itself. Now, he didn't have the benefit of being able to draw from the thermodynamic sciences that we currently Do. They were just starting to take off in his day. He mentions them briefly, but he doesn't get it. But merely by understanding the way that the universe is operating at a purely material level, he's seeing the profound, not only agonism, but antagonism of the universe that, in my own words, everything eats and is eaten, everything destroys and is destroyed. That the universe only perpetuates itself through a series of, yeah, combative antagonisms that put. Puts the whole world at war. And he says, as a result of this, to call the universe fundamentally good is naive to the point of sticking your head into the sand. To the contrary, Schopenhauer says the world is, if anything, hell, and we are simultaneously the ones who are tortured by it and the demons doing the torturing. And so Schopenhauer says if any value can be derived from the nature of the universe, when we look at it wholly scientifically, wholly materialistically, it's that the universe has to be a manifest evil. It can only be counted as what we human beings call evil. And this turn, this birth of what we call philosophical pessimism, is, to me, so important for making sense of the thermodynamic revolution that's happening in the current world. If anything, it is the model for precisely the kind of ethical reasoning I think we can deduce from the scientific thermodynamic revolution that's happening in our own age.
- [48:23]
B
But Schopenhauer's ethics is negative in that it tells us what not to do rather than what to do to create a better world. So Nietzsche takes up where Schopenhauer leaves off and tries to fill these gaps. And you explain that while Nietzsche agrees with Kant that morality is a human invention, he nonetheless seeks to show that it doesn't mean it has to be meaninglessly relative. So, like you, he finds that a modicum of absoluteness can be found in the scientific account of material nature itself. So it's really exciting how all of this is coming together. Tell us about Nietzsche, the moral naturalist, and his ideas here.
- [49:04]
A
Yeah, thank you. I think Nietzsche is. And I don't think I'm alone here. Nietzsche is one of the most persistently maligned and misunderstood thinkers in the West. No.
- [49:12]
B
You're kidding. Yeah.
- [49:14]
A
You know, one of the classic things that's thrown against him is that he's a nihilist. Oh, Nietzsche the nihilist. And in fact, Nietzsche is very explicitly clear about this. He's not a nihilist. His whole work is aimed to negate nihilism, if anything he thinks somebody like Schopenhauer is a nihilist, you know, because he thinks that Schopenhauer is negating the possibility of some sort of active affirmation of the universe. You can follow the logic here. If the universe is fundamentally evil, fundamentally antagonistic against my being and against indeed all beings, if it creates law which require that we all consume and combat one another in order to survive, then the only thing we can do is attempt to a kick against the universe, right? Resist it, say no to it through, for example, as we said, palliative acts of care, but then also eventually retire from it as quickly as possible. In other words, die. And Nietzsche goes, this is nihilism. This guy's denying what it means to be. And here's the really fascinating thing. The person who was most influential in Nietzsche'. So Nietzsche starts off enchanted with Schopenhauer's naturalism. His earliest works are in praise of Schopenhauer. But eventually he's so sick of this sort of moral quietism and this attempt to resign from life. And he says, well, it seems to me that he's actually still anthropomorphizing reality. He's making this thing, which simply is what it is, have a negative value, when in fact we could take the opposite. We could simply say that since it is what it is and we are part of what it is, it could have a positive value in inasmuch as we affirm what it is. So you might hear reminiscence of Spinoza here. And in fact, Nietzsche read Spinoza and famously wrote in a letter to Cosima Wagner, I found a predecessor. Spinoza is my philosophical predecessor. I want to, you know. So he actually borrows tons from Spinoza, you know, to affirm reality in a new way. What's really interesting about Nietzsche is that Nietzsche was like Spinoza, drawing from the modern sciences of his time. So Spinoza didn't have those, excuse me, like Schopenhauer, Spinoza didn't have those modern sciences, Schopenhauer did. But he, according to Nietzsche, gets too negative. So Nietzsche wants to revitalize him. He wants to say, I am a moral naturalist, just like Schopenhauer. But I want to say that my understanding of the nature of the universe allows me to affirm it because, and here's the really interesting thing, Nietzsche had the first law of thermodynamics and he knew it, and he engages with it. He talked about how the law, the conservation of energy, means qua Spinoza, that the universe, even when it negates me is simply repurposing my matter to other ends. The universe then is this radically creative and inventive force which is constantly tearing itself apart only to reassemble itself in new and inventive ways like the universe. Nietzsche says. So should you be willing to tear yourself apart and re aggregate yourself in new and inventive ways, to do so is to affirm the nature of reality, to say yes to reality, as Nietzsche says, and to fall in love with your own fate. He calls this amor fati. And he says very clearly that the consequence of doing this is frolik as joy, that exact same word that is used by or gefler, that exact same word that's used by Beethoven in the ninth Symphony. It's this great great ode to joy in Nietzsche that he thinks is what's empowered by the universe. But as you might already be anticipating, Nietzsche didn't have a full picture of the nature of that universe. And it's not until the development of the second and third laws of thermodynamics that we can then say, yeah, he is still all too optimistic.
- [53:04]
B
Yeah, and I find it amazing that Nietzsche is directly responding to the first law of thermodynamics already. I had no idea that this kind of engagement with physics was happening so early in philosophy. I find that really, really exciting. But yeah, as you point out, he doesn't know the second and third laws yet. And so he adopts this overly optimistic view of nature, kind of like Spinoza as this eternally creative and renewing force. So you now turn dialectically back and forth. We're going to bring in the practical ethics of Philip Mainlander, who's a 19th century philosopher who also felt that scientific discoveries about the material world must be central to philosophy rather than dogma or leaps of faith. And Mainlander finds that individual's will to live best expresses the material reality of the universe and that if I have this correctly, that that also encompasses a telos towards our own demise. And so yeah, you've kind of unpacked this and clarified this for me as we've gone on because I just find this such a mind bending paradox that striving to live and striving to create is really just a part of destruction and moving towards death. But yeah, so how does Mainlander turn this into a positive ethics?
- [54:29]
A
Thank you. So I adore Philip Mainlander. I think he is one of the most tragically overlooked thinkers in the history of Western thought. Thought he is under theorized and in fact until recently he was not even translated into English. So when I was working with Philip Mainlander, I had to work in the original and to translate sections of his thought into English. But what I find fascinating about Mainlander is that, like Nietzsche, he was an early devotee to the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer. So he's emerging out of this new radical modern pessimism that's happening in the 19th century as philosophy attempts to reground itself in the emergent material sciences of that time period. And like Nietzsche, he had a problem with what he considered to be Schopenhauer's passivity. The fact that Schopenhauer says, hey, look, the universe is coming to a precipitous close, and in doing so requires the suffering of all things. So just give up the ghost, let it close over you, and in the meantime try not to do any harm yourself. Yourself, or in the words of the great poet Philip Larkin, you know, get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself in his wonderful poem, this Be the Verse. So he has a problem with this. And so, like Nietzsche, he also wants to create a more affirmative ethics. Yeah. But unlike Nietzsche, who breaks with Schopenhauer's pessimism, Mainlander maintains that pessimism. He goes, it strikes me that Schopenhauer is right, that the testimony of the scientists seem to to show us that the universe is at war with itself. But then here's his brilliant novel idea. If it's at war with itself, can't I make myself an agent of war that goes to war against precisely the war? Can't I mobilize the destructive capacity of the universe to try to destroy the systems that are accelerating that destructive? In other words, I know the universe is bound by destruction, chaos, terror, consumption, warfare. But can't I use that precise power of the universe as it manifests itself in me, to wield my own little bit of chaos against any system that exploits that system or exploits that chaos? Yeah. So let's give a concrete example. Mainlander was an early proponent of what we would now call feminism. He was a profound advocate for the equality of the sexes because he said, if the universe is bound towards a kind of violent, consumptive domination, if that's what happens in the universe, then can't I dedicate myself to destroying systems that are based on that exploitation? And can't I work actively to create systems of equality as a way of negating the acceleration of that destruction? And what is the equality of the sexes if not a way of actively working against the domination of one Sex over another, aka, you know, patriarchy. Similarly, Mainlander says, well, gosh, when I look at something like capitalism, it seems to me to be a political and economic system which. Which is based on exploitation, which rewards exploitation, which says, consume away, destroy away. Can't I use the destructive power of the universe to destroy something like capitalism and strive to create an alternative system which consumes less, which works towards equality? And for him, that was indeed communism. Now, what I love about Mainlander, in other words, is that he is able to mobilize the metaphysical of Schopenhauerian pessimism and the logic of that scientific naturalism and develop from it a kind of ethical and political activism. Yeah, that allows us to work on behalf of certain things and not just give up on everything.
- [58:41]
B
That's right. And so you take that spirit and that drive and direction and then you bring into the conversation some more philosophical pessimism. You mentioned that philosophical pessimism in general is coming back into vogue lately. You discussed some of Eugene Thacker's ideas. He's argued that we must take a cosmic perspective, which involves a drastic scaling up of the human point of view to encompass deep space and deep time. So clearly a kindred spirit here. And really interestingly for me, you also bring up Afro pessimism, which makes a lot of sense because now we're getting into some of the reckoning and realizations of the postcolonial era. But specifically, Afropessimism understands the very concept of human subjectivity as a construction premised on othering black people in particular in such a fundamental way that it might only be overcome through significant metaphysical revolution, which is just, wow, what an idea. And so you suggest that neither case incorporates scientific and mathematical findings to the extent that it could. So you're bringing all of this together. Tell us what you mean here.
- [59:58]
A
Yeah, so I think, I mean, I try to end this book in part by showing, hey, look, pessimism is coming back and for good reason. Right. And it's coming back in a number of different ways. So we have all these interesting, almost micro pessimisms in opposition to the kind of larger metaphysical pessimism or ontological pessimism of the 19th century. These micro pessimisms are looking at pessimism in. As emergent from certain sociopolitical situations or certain sort of political situations or certain sort of historical situations. And I want to say, I want to affirm that. I want to affirm that there's a value to understanding these things as the outworkings of a fundamental kind of antagonism embedded into the universe. But to do that requires knowing what the universe has to about it itself. So I think one of the things that I struggle with, with some of these contemporary pessimisms is that without that scientific grounding, without drawing from this sort of larger metaphysical structure, there's a risk that these pessimisms aren't truly pessimistic at all, but are really just a sign of a kind of dispirited optimism, a disappointed expectation. They think, well, the world shouldn't be this way. I have suffered as a result of it being this way, and therefore I'm disappointed of the world. And I want to say that true pessimism isn't based on my disappointment. It isn't based on the contingent factors of history. It isn't based on the sort of accidental things which have happened to me in my individual life. It is based on the absolute material structures of the universe itself. And when we understand that, we can understand that the accidental things that happened in my life or the contingent facts of history are in fact symptoms of a deeper problem. Problem, they are resultant from this deeper metaphysical problem. And what I like about that understanding is that now we have an explanation for why these contingent facts have occurred. Right? So again, follow Mainlander's critique of patriarchy as a really good example. Right. The reason something like patriarchy exists, Mainlander says, is because the universe has conditioned us in such a way that we try to dominate one another in order to secure our own, what we think of as our own safety and security in order to have more to consume. That's a problem, in other words, which emerges because of the fundamental laws of the universe itself. So similarly, colonialism, race based discrimination, chattel slavery are facts of history, absolutely horrifying and terribly morally repugnant facts of history that are possible because of the absolutely terrifying and morally repugnant malignant facts of the universe itself. So I want to come almost as an ally to things like Afro pessimism, to say if it drills down and draws from this larger tradition of metaphysical pessimism, which is science based, it'll find a strategic ally in its attempt to kick against these historically contingent sociopolitical facts. And I think particularly by drawing from the thought of Philip Mainlander, who shows us concrete how we can mobilize the malignancy of the universe against itself.
- [63:11]
B
So this brings us to your conclusion that the absolute fact of existence is that it is an expression of an entropic drive to destroy existence itself. It's a terrifying and monstrous evil and it is decidedly not good to be. I'm quoting you there, but we've been saying this already. So knowing this, we can carve out an essence. Ethics, in, quote, striving to bend the entropic thrust of existence back upon itself by actively fighting to dismantle, resist and rearrange. That sounds like a T shirt. Dismantle, resist and rearrange anyway to resist that which is destructive. The moral value is found in the striving, then, not in the final accomplishment, would you say? Is that right?
- [63:54]
A
I would say that the moral value of goodness is found in the striving, striving. So evil, to me is the absolute. Goodness is not an absolute value. There's only one absolute value, and it is materially bound in the entropic destruction of the universe itself. So the universe is evil. If anything approximating the good as a relative species of that absolute thing can be achieved, it is in the striving to kick against it. And you're right, striving to kick against it. Because you can't win, you can't beat the universe. You can't escape the laws of nature. But I think there is virtue in trying. We oftentimes forget that ethics has never been about what is. It's always been about what you should do. It's never been about the nature of the universe. It's always been about how the universe ought to be. I want to maintain that that is where ethical value of goodness lies, in the should and the ought. But the should and the ought aren't in the is. The only thing that's in the is is chaos, destruction and annihilation. Which means the only thing that is is evil. Goodness is a pipe dream. But it's a pipe dream that's still worth fighting and dying for. I remember as a child being raised and told by my grandmother that simply because a battle was lost long before you were born doesn't mean it's not a cause worth fighting and dying for for. And I still think that's true to this day. I know that I cannot win against the universe. I cannot relinquish my fellow human beings or animals or plants from the suffering that they are bound to endure in their own weird human, plant or animal way by virtue of the entropic decay of the universe. But I don't have to actively participate in it, and I don't have to be as complicit in it as I wouldn't otherwise be if I remain complicit in the systems which are erected around it. I. E Patriarchy, race based discrimination, sex based discrimination, capitalism, et cetera. I can strive as best I can to fight, dismantle, resist and rearrange those structures in new ways. Will I win? No. I am also ultimately bound for the charnel house. Just like the ground upon which I walk and the universe in which the earth exists, it is all bound for the charnel house of annihilation at the distant end of time. But not today. And today, in the interspicial moment of this time, I can say, no, no. And that goes back to this question about the micro free will, right? Goodness exists entirely in these interstitial micro moments in which you say, no. A good metaphor is this. If you go into a hospital with a gunshot wound and you say, doctor, doctor, I've been shot. The doctor, trained in medical biology, understands that you're dying. And they understand that nothing you can do can ultimately save you from this death, death, death awaits you no matter what, even if they remove the bullet. So the bad doctor says, there's nothing I can do about the condition you find yourself in. You know, find some peace and die. The good doctor says, I understand that you're dying no matter what I do, but not on my watch, not today. And not only do you not have to die today on my watch, but you don't have to suffer as much as you do. So first and foremost, we're going to stabilize the wound. We're going to give you second, some palliative care so the wound doesn't hurt as much. And third, we're going to attempt to remove it and repair it as best we can through our arts, through our creative engagement with reality, not because we are ultimately going to be successful against the structures of the universe, but because they don't have to win. Today, it's that striving to kick against, to fight, to dismantle, to resist, and to rearrange the structures of reality in these micro ways that goodness can be found if anything at all resembling goodness can be found.
- [68:07]
B
Yeah, I love that metaphor. And I love your distinction that the absolute truth is evil or the absolute value is evil. And the moral value, judgment value, as opposed to a truth claim, is the good. That makes a lot of sense. You've given me so much to think about today. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon. We've taken up a lot of your afternoon, but in a few more minutes, if you can tell us what's next. What are the questions that have arisen out of this project that are leading you on to the Next one.
- [68:45]
A
Well, thanks, Carrie. It actually goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning. Art, creativity. What does it mean in this universe to try to create. Create beauty or try to create meaning out of decay, suffering and demise? So I'm currently working on a new book which is trying to complete the system of my thought, which started with the Ethics of Resistance. Right. That's the kind of ethics and politics which was continued in the book we're discussing today, the Matter of Evil, which continues the ethical reflection, but really grounds it in the epistemology and the metaphysics. And so the new book extends that. That into the realm of aesthetics. It's tentatively entitled the Aesthetics of Escape. And it's really kind of exploring how we go about striving to live both meaningful but also, and most importantly, beautiful lives and to create meaning and to create beauty at that artistic level given these scientific facts of reality. So once again, I'm trying to use philosophy as a space in which I can braid together the scientific understanding of the nature of reality, reality and the artistic attempt to make meaning out of that reality.
- [69:51]
B
Fantastic. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, let me thank you again for being on the show today. Your book is full of so many really interesting ideas. I cannot wait to track down more and to read more deeply into these guys because this stuff is right up my alley. So, yeah, thank you for being here.
- [70:08]
A
Thank you.
- [70:09]
B
All right, goodbye. I want to thank you for listening to the New Books Network work for more great episodes on books about unbelief, secularism, atheism and non religious metaphysics. I encourage you to subscribe to the new Books in Secularism channel. Once again, I'm Carrie Lynn and I've been speaking with Drew Dalton about his book the Matter of From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism, published by Northwestern University Press. If you enjoyed this podcast, please write us a positive review in your podcast. Play there, Post about us on social media or tell a friend. I'm also interested in hearing from you about your thoughts on this podcast and the material we cover. Tell me about it. You can find me on blueskyarilyn Land. That's C A R R I E L Y N N L A N D B S K Y Social. Do you have a book you'd like covered on one of our shows? Contact us through our website, newbooksnetwork.com also, be sure to follow us on all the socials and in your favorite place for podcasts, where you'll see every time we post a new interview. In the meantime, I'll wish you an a la Prochine from Quebec until my next conversation about new books. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with
- [71:30]
A
the mission of public education.
- [71:31]
B
If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.