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- [00:00]
Shiloh Brooks
Hey, y', all, I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking with Coleman Hughes. Coleman is an author, podcaster, and columnist.
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Announcer
For the Free Press who frequently writes.
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Shiloh Brooks
About issues related to race, public policy and culture. Last year, he released his first book.
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Announcer
The End of Race Arguments for a Colorblind America.
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Shiloh Brooks
Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of visions, published in 1987, change Coleman's life. Today, I'm asking him why. This is Old School.
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Announcer
Old School is proudly brought to you by the Jack Miller Center. The Jack Miller Center's mission is to reinvigorate education and America's founding principles by empowering professors, supporting teachers, and bringing civic education to millions of students nationwide. If you believe in educating the next generation to sustain American ideals, join us@jackmillercenter.org.
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Shiloh Brooks
Coleman Hughes, welcome to Old School.
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Coleman Hughes
It's great to be with you.
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Shiloh Brooks
You have written a profile of Thomas Sowell, and I asked you to come on today to talk about a book that changed your life, and you picked Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions. Tell us a little bit about who Thomas Sowell is.
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Coleman Hughes
He's an incredible story of a man that could only come from America. He, I believe he was born in North Carolina, Jim Crow era, without hot water or electricity, way out in the sticks. And as he put it in his memoir, when he was a child, white people were, I think he said, hypothetical to him, as in he'd heard of them, but he'd never seen one. So. So he grew up in a segregated location at 10 years old. This would be in around 1943. He moves to Harlem with his grandmother or aunt, I forget, and grows up in a poor neighborhood in Harlem as a teenager, has all kind of conflict with his guardian to the point where he's out on the streets at 16 or 17 in a homeless shelter for teens, sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He makes it from that scenario through getting kind of odd menial jobs, like working in like a, like a, like a mail office of some kind. Some kind adults sort of take a chance on him as a kid, and he works his way up to the Marines, eventually to Columbia University. It's found he has really a knack for economic thinking and mathematics and so forth, and ends up going to UChicago and Harvard and then teaching at Cornell in the 70s and 80s. He's doing research on minority groups all around the globe for an international perspective on America's racial equality issue and ends up writing many versions of an argument that essentially says, in America, we have this default assumption that once everyone can vote, once everyone can go on the bus in the same place, once everyone can, you know, go, go to any school they wish, that what should follow next is equal income, equal wealth, equal everything. So he looks around the world and sees if this assumption checks this assumption against the data from 200 years of European history, you know, couple hundred years of history of minorities in Africa and Asia. And he finds that basically nowhere, nowhere do you find that it is the case that groups have an equal outcome, even when the group that has more political rights does less well economically. So even in the precise opposite scenario of what we would expect in America. So he basically, rather than arguing at the surface level about black people and white people in America, he goes to a deeper level to get at what is your vision of the world? What is your expectation about how the world should be sort of on its own? What is your deep model of reality of human nature here and that, that, that, that. He, he does that again in his book Conflict, Divisions. Except instead of just focusing on racial inequality, he's basically focusing on political disagreements writ large. So why is it that people that are both smart and well meaning can disagree about issues from economics to crime to education? Is. And he offers that there's like this, two deeply different models of reality.
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Shiloh Brooks
My view of books is that they come into our life oftentimes the most influential ones when we least expect them. Oftentimes the most influential ones are like lightning strikes for us. We read them and the world makes sense in a new way, or we see something we hadn't seen in it before. And so I'm curious who you were prior to reading this book such that by the time it fell into your hands and tell us how it fell into your hands, it really resonated with you.
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Coleman Hughes
By the time I read Conflict, I was already familiar with several other soul books. And because they hit similar themes, I'll instead sort of tell you about the first time I read Soul.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
Which was a little before I read that.
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Shiloh Brooks
Perfect.
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Coleman Hughes
So I think I was probably 19 years old and I had just dropped out of Juilliard School for music, where I was a jazz trombone major. My mother had just passed away, and it was a period of my life where I was very depressed and not incredibly functional as a human being, to put it mildly. And I was really trying to read everything that I could get my hands on just because I wanted to get out of my own head, because my head, my Inner monologue was too depressing to listen to all day. So I was like, I'm just gonna read all day. So that instead of listening to my own thoughts, I'm listening to other people's thoughts. I just. I grabbed everything that was around my house. I went to the library all the time up in Port Chester, New York, and just like took out any book that was interesting. Science and philosophy, Economics, all these things were interesting to me. And my father, who I believe did his thesis as an economics major at Howard University, where he actually was in Economics Club with Kamala Harris, he did his thesis on some of Sowell's work, which this would have been maybe in the early 80s, maybe in 82 or so, or maybe. Yeah, maybe 85. And so he had a book called Race and Economics, I think it was called, or the Economics of Race by Thomas Sowell on his bookshelf. And I said, okay, I've heard this guy. I've seen this Sowell guy's name on the Internet, vaguely. People seem very polarized about him. And so let me see what this is all about. Let me see how nuts this guy is. And I read the whole book and it was absolutely kind of a transformation because I had never actually asked myself, nor had anyone asked me, what my baseline assumption is about how the world would be absent racial discrimination. Right. This is a situation where, as the saying goes, every man has a philosophy, but not everyone knows it. Right. Like you have assumptions.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
You just may never have assumptions. Asked yourself to write those assumptions down, say those assumptions explicitly. So one of the biggest kind of moments of realization and reversal is just to look at, and as Soal does in that book and many other books, the massive income disparities between different groups of white Americans and different groups of black Americans. Meaning we put. We have these bucket terms like white person, black person, that mask massive, like large numbers of specific subcultures, specific groups that have massive disparities between them that by definition can't be explained by racism. In other words, if you're looking today, I'm talking, you know, 2020 and on @ the difference between Americans of Irish descent and Americans of. Of Russian descent. Right? I walk down the street, I see those two people. I'm just thinking, white guy, white guy, right? There's like a. Something like a 20 cent on the dollar income gap between those two groups today, long past the era where that could plausibly be explained by anti Irish racism. Right. Though that actually would have made sense over 100 years ago. So when you start looking at that it starts, it start, you start from this assumption that things generally are equal unless there's unfairness happening. And then you see, okay, well actually that's not true in the case of this group of white people, okay, it's Pakistani Americans make 60 cents for every dollar made by Indian American, though none of us could tell them apart on the street. And then you go exception, exception, exception, exception, until you realize it's actually the rule. And this is when your model of reality flips. Okay, actually the rule is that inequality is the norm because you've got people coming from different cultures, different, different values, different skill levels, different occupational patterns. And how is it, how, how could it even be possible that you would have groups that have different histories, different geographies, different demographies, different in every way you can, you can be different and yet expect groups to achieve the same result?
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Shiloh Brooks
I mean, you said you were 19 and you had this kind of situation in which you realized that the phenomenon that you see that had always had a simple explanation, in fact consists of a variety of causes that go into explaining it. So you have this multi causal thing and you would never, never thought sort of that there could be five causes or 10 causes or an infinite number of causes.
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Coleman Hughes
That's exactly right. That's a great way to put it. It's exactly that. You, if you grew up, if you grow up in America and certainly in the liberal half of America, as I did, you and you ask what is the cause for a racial disparity? There is one answer to that question and it's, there's many words for it. You could say racism, you could say discrimination, you could say systemic bias if you're fancy. But what you're getting at is unfairness. Unfairness at some level of society is the reason why there's a wealth gap, why there's a. And then when you read Soil, you see actually around the world, not just in America, around the world, there's like 50 different default causes for disparity between groups, one of which is unfairness. So it's not that unfairness isn't important. It's not that it's not worth looking into. It's not that racism doesn't exist, it does. It's that if you see a racial disparity, you cannot jump to assuming it's there because of unfairness.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, yeah, this is very good. And I think this is what the best books do to us, is that they call into question our deepest hell convictions. And you have a kind of existential crisis when you Realize that everything you believed before was, you know, was only half true. I mean, let's talk about conflict, divisions a little bit. It's an extraordinary book and I had not read it prior to you recommending it to me. So you've already given me a gift by giving me a good book that I'd never read before and that I learned a lot from. But for somebody who's never read it and somebody who's coming to it for the first time and maybe coming to Seoul for the first time, what is this book about?
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Coleman Hughes
We look out at the world and we see these two political groups call it left and Right, Republican, Democrat, whatever you want to call it. We basically see two tribes of people that have a bunch of agreements over here and a bunch of agreements over here.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
And if you're fur gun control, I can predict that you're going to be. You believe in climate change and you're against voter ID laws and you think systemic racism is, is characterizes the cops. Like I can predict a whole bunch of. There's a whole basket of views that go together and on the, on the right, there's a whole basket of views that, that go together. So, so is seeing this. And he goes, why is that? Because that's not obvious that that would be the case. Yeah, right. It could be that there's just, you know, everyone has their own beliefs and there's no baskets, there's no like lists that you're kind of everyone subscribes to. There are two underlying worldviews, two views about human nature that lead inevitably to a similar shape of disagreement on a hundred different issues. So these are two fundamentally different worldviews. One worldview says that human nature is changeable, it's malleable. We can, through better education, we can become better people, whole societies can become better and human society is, if not perfectable, then vastly improvable by means of improving our character as individuals through better education and better teaching and better morality. And not only that, but experts, like people that really know their stuff, should be in charge of things more often because they know what's best, they've spent their time studying it and they're the experts. Right. And then the other view of human nature, which is called the constrained vision, better called the tragic vision, is that human nature is, is flawed, limited. It's always going to be those things. We are always going to be fundamentally more selfish and self interested than giving.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
The, the idea of us, of human beings en masse, sort of becoming like Jesus Christ or, or the Buddha is just never going to be in the cards. Yeah, and it's much better if we structure our institutions, taking human, frankly, human shittiness as a given. And. And perfection is completely impossible. And every time we try to attain it, we make things worse. So what you can really just do is try to create institutions that set up a good incentive structure like free markets, take power out of the hands of experts and bureaucrats and put it. Distribute it throughout systems like a market, because even the experts don't know enough to be in charge. Truly, there's just too much to know, and each one of us individually is too stupid to know it. So you got to distribute power. And so one vision imagines really a huge transformation for the better being possible. And another vision says, actually the best we can get is like a little better than we were yesterday. And, you know, plugging holes in a boat and then seeing when the new hole comes up and plugging it again and trying to survive. And it's important we recognize the limitation.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. I like very much that you put the summary of the two visions in terms of human nature, because that's what resonated with me and that's what I thought of as I was reading the book. There are these two visions you've pointed out, the constrained and the unconstrained. The constrained seems to be modest or moderate with respect to its hopes about what we can achieve in the world, how good we can make the world for ourselves, and how good ourselves can be. So it seems to say there are fundamental limits to what we can do. Man is in some ways evil or not evil, but you might say fallen or something, or flawed at heart. And so our hopes for cleaning man of all of those shortcomings, much less our hopes for clearing the world of all of its evil and these sorts of things, those hopes are misplaced. They're almost immoderate, almost like a paradise. This is not possible. And so we have to be moderate about what we think we can do and what we can be in the world and what our political institutions can do to make our lives better and these sorts of things. Whereas the unconstrained view seems to be unconstrained with respect to its hopes for human flourishing. What man can be is not yet known to us. It's infinitely perfectible. We could become. Who knows what we could have. The perfectly just society, the good society. Human beings can become angels or something like this. And so it seems to me that those two different orientations, one which recognizes limits to what politics can do for man and to what mankind itself can become on the one hand versus one that doesn't recognize limits to what man can become on the other, is sort of the foundational or animating thought of the book. And then Sowell goes on to spin that out and show what that core instinctive, you might say, view, if you hold one or the other, what that means for you with respect to all sorts of other practical problems in the world, crime, poverty, et cetera. Does that sound accurate to you?
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think in a way, maybe the best way to think about it is that, you know, it's like it's a spectrum and it's an instinct, which is to say most people have an instinct that the world is more unconstrained or the world is more constrained. And some people are very extreme in that. Like, you know, the stereotype of the hippie, like, you know, this is a person that is like, you know, definitely in a polyamorous relationship and definitely votes super left wing if they vote at all. But like, you know, believes, you know, you know, probably, you know, believes that even like a serial killer can be reformed if you just like kind of give them a hug and they get loved in the right way, like any. No one is beyond. No one is beyond saving. This that's like the stereotype of someone who is an extremely unconstrained, has an extremely unconstrained instinct. And then on the other hand, someone who's just totally cynical, someone who just basically doesn't want to help anyone outside of his own family. You know, he's never given a dollar to a homeless person because he assumes they're every single time they're going to spend it on drugs or something like that. That would be the stereotype of sort of an extreme constrained.
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Shiloh Brooks
But it seems to me that the other sort of elephant in the room here and soul has a whole chapter on this is the faith that the two sides have in the power of reason to affect our lives. You mentioned this when you talked about experts. One side thinks that with enough expert knowledge and wisdom, scientific knowledge perhaps, we can engineer on the basis of our faith and reason perfect solutions to our problems that are rational solutions and live therefore in a rational society which is just for everybody and be guided by reason alone. That's the unconstrained view. The constrained view seems to say there are limits to what reason can do in the world. We can have the most eloquent words and the most reasoned solutions and the smartest experts. But when those things are deployed in flesh and blood human beings. They will not turn out with the perfect results that our reason, as we reason through these things had promised us that would come about.
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Coleman Hughes
Yes, I think that's definitely a part of it. I think the way I might put it is that. So it's like the power of reason versus the power of incentives.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
So let's say, okay, we've got this climate change problem, right? We're going to get the experts to study it for years and recommend solutions. And they recommend that we start recycling, right? This is like an important thing that we can do to preserve the planet. Great, easy. So let's like educate people to recycle, right? Let's use the power of reason, the power of persuasion. People will see reason, they'll understand, will teach them from a young age that if you've got plastic, you put it in this one, if you got trash, you put in this one, et cetera. So fast forward 10 years or whatever, you study it and you see that recycling has had almost no impact on anything. And you go, hold on, what's going on here? It clearly our educate. We haven't been educating people enough. We haven't emphasized this enough K through 12. We need more, you know, we need more flyers in public places, we need educational videos, we need a celebrity example video. And like, this is like one by one, from the inside out, we're gonna, we're gonna raise the consciousness of humanity and like, that's how we're gonna solve this problem. But then someone from the, from the tragic vision is going to quickly intuit and by instinct say, well, the problem is not that it's complicated or that people need more expertise. The problem is they have no fucking personal incentive to recycle. They do not personally benefit from recycling. It is a slight nuisance in their life. It requires some extra time and extra thought. People are selfish and always will be. So this is not a durable solution to our problem. If you want a durable solution, you're going to have to change the incentives for people that like produce these things, right? You're going to have to make it in our self interest to recycle. You're going to have to make it in the self interest of companies to use more sustainable materials or something like that. And so someone with a tragic vision would probably not even think to push recycling at the beginning because they would consider it so obvious that human beings aren't going to en masse, change their behavior, even in small ways, because we're all too selfish. And the exceptions Just prove the rule. Whereas people with the other vision would instinctively want to start a nonprofit that goes into kindergartens and teaches kids to recycle.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right. The constrained view seems willing to digest some measure of injustice in the world. To say we can incentivize it as much as we can. It's sort of like free markets. Seoul talks a lot about markets. There will be in free markets people who are poor. Like just. That's part of the function of the thing. And so we have to come to terms with the fact that our solution to the problem does not in every case provide each person with a kind of flourishing. We have to digest some measure some compromise some, you know, be moderate about our hopes, digest some injustice. Whereas the other side, with the recycling, well, no, no. We just need more education and we can perfect this thing such that everyone recycles and we solved our problem. An unwillingness to digest or come to terms with injustice, perhaps, or imperfect solutions, one might say. This seems to be dispositionally something that separates the two.
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Coleman Hughes
Yes. So the tragic vision does not believe solutions are possible.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, in the fullest sense, yes.
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Coleman Hughes
There's no solution for poverty, there's no solution for war. Right. There's no ending these things.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
The reason there's no ending these things is because of human nature.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
We would have to become different kinds of animals in order for there to be no more war. There's no version of us currently constituted biologically that's compatible with a war free world or a poverty free world.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
And so the holder of the tragic vision would hear slogans like end poverty and end war to be just, not simply naive, but actually meaningless. Because the whole question is how you manage the trade offs of poverty, which will always be there. How you manage the trade offs of war, which will always be there.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
I mean, in the case of war, the problem is that obviously just because you don't want to go to war doesn't mean others will not want to go to war on you.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
So the trade off there is how much war do I need to do in order to prevent the worst kinds of war against me?
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
Because if this, if the answer is zero, you're going to be destroyed. Your country is going to. If you never fight back, eventually some other country will invade you because education isn't going to work on them. It's probably not even going to work on you.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
So the much smarter thing to do is think about incentives and deterrence. How do I deter my enemies? How do I make my enemies understand that if you invade me, it's not going to be. It's going to hurt you more than me.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
Or at least as much. Right. Whereas someone with an unconstrained vision would have, you know, a proposal for stopping war altogether. I mean, I guess something like. Something like the United nations to some extent reflects the unconstrained vision. You know, this idea that if we all get in the same room together, we're all, you know, Post World War II, we can just resolve stuff with our words so that we don't have to go to war anymore.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right.
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Coleman Hughes
And so that's kind of an example.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, that's a perfect example because it shows there's a certain rational optimism on the United nations example that there are. We can get together and reason through, by way of words, solutions to problems, and we can have world peace or something like this. Like this tremendous hope which is conditioned on us getting together and reasoning.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah. Versus finally agreeing on.
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Shiloh Brooks
Exactly. Right. Versus, like this, the starting point, which says there will always be war in the world. Because human nature is such that no institution, no matter how rational and well meaning, can constrain and order the impulses, the wild and unpredictable vicissitudes of man, or something like that.
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Coleman Hughes
Or just the incentives.
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Announcer
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
As long as there's something to be gained from war, people will go to war.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right, Right.
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Coleman Hughes
People will launch war whether or not you're willing to defend your country.
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Shiloh Brooks
And this same analogy applies because we should take it. I mean, you've now got us into the practical with the recycling and the. But he talks at length about crime, that the constrained vision sees something interior or inside of human beings which compels them or drives them to commit crimes which can't be rooted out, no matter how good the justice system is, no matter how rehabilitative it is, these sorts of things. Whereas the other side seems to view crime not as a consequence of something inside of us, but as a reaction to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and their injustice. Bad neighborhoods, poor public policy, or these sorts of things. And so if we can only make better neighborhoods and better public policy, we can rid the world of crime. Whereas the folks on the constrained side would say, no, you can't rid the world of crime. There's something in human beings which will always perpetually be drawn to commit crimes of various kinds for various gains.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah, the unconstrained person is going to say, you know, what happened to this person? How did we fail this person? That they went out and committed a double homicide in. In a gang feud. Right. And A person with a constrained vision is going to say, well, they're part of like, let's say it's a gang related murder, okay? They're part of a economic criminal enterprise fundamentally not that different from a company just operating by different rules and with different incentives. And they had something to gain by killing members of a rival gang, the same way a Wall street firm would have something to gain by poaching a rival.
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Shiloh Brooks
Right?
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Coleman Hughes
So that you can't get rid of those incentives. As long as there's a market for drugs and a black market, that's going to happen. And it doesn't mean anything went wrong. It doesn't mean society failed this person. What it means is that society needs to have a really strict set of rules and incentive, a counter incentive to this kind of behavior. It has to be like, if you do this, you're going to go to jail very quickly and it's going to suck. So that has to be in the minds of the people considering these decisions. And that's it. That's all we can do. We cannot educate our way out of a problem of having a black market that's always going to be there.
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Shiloh Brooks
Sowell is nuanced enough to say that these things are a gradient which you've been emphasizing throughout your talk with me. He points out some very interesting examples of hybrids of the constrained and unconstrained. He talks about Marxism, which I think is the most interesting. Fascism and utilitarianism. What's interesting to me about Marxism and the way that it's a hybrid is Marxism begins with assumptions that we live in a constrained world. That world is constrained by material conditions. But the end of Marxism, or its goal or its summum bonum is that we will solve the problem of the injustices that are inculcated by material conditions and reach a kind of unconstrained paradise where we have found perfect solutions through communism to all of our problems. And so it's constrained in the sense that it acknowledges limits on human beings through material conditions the way Marxism does. But it's unconstrained in the sense that its paradise is this sort of unconstrained perfect solution. You know, whatever philosophizing in the morning and fishing or in the evening or whatever it goes with the, that Marx says it. And so I'm fascinated by the way that these two things sort of fuse over various kinds of political philosophies over history. So I, I just point that out, by the way, to, to show folks that that soul's a pretty nuanced Thinker. Let me now just say one aspect.
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Coleman Hughes
He wasn't. He was a Marxist in his youth.
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Announcer
Yeah.
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Shiloh Brooks
So it makes sense that he would see the depths of the problem.
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Coleman Hughes
And he was a very. An extremely learned Marxist when he. In other words, he read every page of Das Kapital and understood it.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
Which is more than you could say for 99% of Marx.
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Shiloh Brooks
That's right.
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Coleman Hughes
So his, his book on Marx is to my knowledge, the very best explanation of what Marx meant. If you're ever, if you've ever been confused by Marx, read Marx by Thomas Sowell.
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Shiloh Brooks
Soule does an extraordinary job elaborating the character of the two visions and showing what separates them and admitting that they're hybrids. And it's a really beautiful portrait. What I was left wondering is, and we've touched on this a bit, what is it that makes someone adopt a vision initially we've used the word over the course of our conversation. Instinctive. You could talk about subconscious. What Soul seems to neglect is. And what in a way is the more interesting, if not the more interesting question than an interesting question, which is, what is it that makes the man to the left of me unconstrained and the woman to the right of me constrained? What is that? You know, where does that commitment come from? And it seemed to me that there are, if I put it this way, some pre political factors that Sol doesn't take into account. For instance, one's religious orientation, I suspect might well condition which of these two visions one adopted. If one believed that man was fallen or something like this, or that the power of human beings was limited in the world and that God would be the solution to these problems in an afterlife or something like that, then one might well be constrained. And that's a pre political thing. One didn't come to that conclusion on the basis of a kind of consideration of public policy. If that's absent in your life, you know, you might have other sort of pre political assumptions that would animate adopting the unconstrained view. And so my sense was that there's a kind of psychological piece to this, the first cause, which is why does a person go in a given direction in the first place? Not to say they can't change. They can change.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah. And well then it raises the question, can you choose what you believe?
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
Which I'm not sure you can.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Coleman Hughes
Right. Because like I have to be convinced of something to believe it. It's not exactly a choice, you know, in the typical sense. Right. Like I chose what to wear today. I had a lot of options and this is what I chose. For whatever reasons I chose it. But I didn't choose to believe that I had a podcast with you scheduled today, like that was. If you had to persuade me out of that, you'd have to tell me. Actually the Shiloh podcast is Friday, not Thursday, and I'd have to. And I wouldn't believe you until I checked my calendar and my email and got the information or whatever. So in some way you, you don't really choose what you believe. You, you, you have an instinct for constrained or unconstrained or some mixture of the two. And that either comes from your genetic preset or, or your sort of hard earned life experience or not hard earned. And you know, you have the beliefs you have at any particular moment.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, but you can change them. I mean, as soul did. One can change one's mind. So that shows it's not all true.
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Coleman Hughes
But the thing is, one's mind is changed. It should be in the passive voice, right. It's like I can't change my mind. Like I move my left hand, right. I can take in new information and see what it does.
- [35:20]
Shiloh Brooks
Right. Arguments.
- [35:21]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I can take in arguments and see what it does, but it may not change my mind. It. If it, you know.
- [35:26]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. So it seems like Sol was subscribed to the constrained view.
- [35:34]
Coleman Hughes
Yes, definitely. As, as an adult.
- [35:36]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. And I, and I'm. I'm curious to hear where you yourself lie on the spectrum, but it seems to me that given that he's subscribed to the constrained view as an adult, he may not do justice to the unconstrained view and its power. And that is to say, one of the thinkers he gives as an example of the unconstrained view is Jean Jacques Rousseau, who's a great French philosopher. Rousseau's philosophy gives rise to a whole tradition of unconstrained thinkers, especially in the Enlightenment, culminating with more modern thinkers like Nietzsche and these sorts of things, all of whom, say, the world in which we live can be and is in our control, such that human beings can be perfected by way of, let's say, modern science and its attempt to rid the world of cancer, or let's say modern political and social movements which seek to rid the world of injustice or racism or whatever the case may be, that one can engineer, by way of sufficient thought, an unconstrained solution to a problem. In a way, although soul is constrained, and you may or may not lie more on the constrained side, it seems to me that the world in which we live takes as its presupposition the unconstrained view. I used to teach, for instance, in a college of engineering. Scientists seem to believe that almost anything is remediable by way of science. You know, that one can eventually innovate and invent cures for cancer, ways to grow food such that it takes fewer resources that the limits that we find ourselves butting up against. I think of Elon Musk and many of his sort of grandiose views about what the world can be and renewable power and the paradise in which we'll find ourselves if only we allow the engineers to go forward with extraordinary research. Or the same is true of political views. The constitution is outdated. We have knowledge now we didn't have then such that we can shape an even more perfect union, an even better regime as a consequence of progress that's been made in political science or political theory. So you can do the scientific aspect of this, you can talk about the political aspect of this. But it seems to me that despite a kind of predisposition for a constrained view, the world in which we live has faith, deep faith, enthusiasm in the unconstrained. And so I wonder what you would make of that.
- [38:19]
Coleman Hughes
Well, one thing to make of it is that there have been moments in American history that testified to the power of the unconstrained view, most importantly the civil rights movement. So again, this is a situation where you can actually look at it through either lens. So from the point of view of the unconstrained vision, the civil rights movement was a moment where millions and millions and millions of white Americans, by dint of seeing their own government turn hoses on peaceful black protesters on tv, had a genuine moral change of heart on an issue of importance, namely the morality of segregation and Jim Crow. And this is true. I mean, it's true if you look in the behavior and the polling numbers and everything, it's that it was just mainstream at one point that white people and black people should be separate. And even in the north, it was not really an issue of deep moral censure of the north to the south. And then the civil rights movement, through peaceful protest and demonstrating the brutality that that provoked in reaction, changed hearts and minds genuinely. And so this was a. This was a major aspect of. Of the civil rights movement, obviously. And so the concept of sort of changing hearts and minds and changing society as a result, that's at the heart of the unconstrained vision. And that's, that's. It was quite a. Quite an important moment in patterning how Americans think, have thought about politics ever since. Right. Like we're at some level, we're always looking for the next civil rights movement. Whether it comes or not is another matter. On the other hand, if you have the constrained vision, you could look at the civil rights movement from the point of view of getting rid of a kind of an element of social engineering. Jim Crow was social engineering. It's often forgotten that Plessy versus Ferguson, the lawsuit brought in Louisiana against segregated train cars was funded by the train car company. It was funded by the train car company. They did not want to segregate their passengers. It makes no sense if you have to have a white car and a black car and you've got 200 prospective customers all white, but they can't sit on the black car. Right. You're just hemorrhaging money by not allowing freedom of movement on trains, on buses. It makes no sense from the point of view of, from the point of view of a profit maximizing company. So they're the ones that funded that, that lawsuit. Not, not like human rights groups or anything like that. Well, there was some of that too, but. So from the point of view of the unconstrained vision, you could argue that the civil rights movement was an example of getting rid of a social engineering policy and allowing freedom in the unconstrained sense, which is government can't tell you where to move, where to go. Right. Although you'd have to add the caveat to that, that it actually required. Required companies to serve black customers even if they didn't want to, which is not really unconstrained to say something for. This is why I think about them much more as instincts than visions. Because a vision implies that in theory it could get the world right.
- [42:05]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [42:06]
Coleman Hughes
I don't think either vision can get the world right in every instance. It's way too coarse grained and the world is way too complicated.
- [42:14]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
- [42:14]
Coleman Hughes
But as you know, we have to simplify the world to think about it and we have to model. And a map is always simpler than the thing it's mapping. Right. So it's like I do have a, more of a. More of an. A constrained instinct about how people are going to behave in any given moment.
- [42:34]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [42:34]
Coleman Hughes
That instinct is going to misfire many times in my life, but I think it, I think it serves me well more than it misfires.
- [42:41]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [42:43]
Coleman Hughes
And I think that's true of my experience. And I also think that intellectuals in particular, far over index on the unconstrained.
- [42:53]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
- [42:54]
Coleman Hughes
I don't Think normal people.
- [42:54]
Shiloh Brooks
I buy that.
- [42:55]
Coleman Hughes
I think the average cab driver is pretty constrained.
- [42:57]
Shiloh Brooks
I buy that.
- [42:58]
Coleman Hughes
But the average intellectual who deals in words for a living, almost by definition. I mean, the reason Thomas Sowell is like so unique. It's like much of what he says is common sense to the common man, but strikes the intellectual as like extremely subversive. Yeah, because I think by nature the kind of people drawn to the written word as a profession, almost by definition like or over index on wanting to change the world with the written word.
- [43:31]
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- [43:41]
Shiloh Brooks
And for good reason.
- [43:43]
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- [44:27]
Shiloh Brooks
So one of the things we like to do is ask our guests to pick a kind of favorite or resonant passage. Do you happen to have a passage that you think is one that's worthy of highlighting?
- [44:39]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, on, on page 25. I think this sums it up really well and also puts it in the context of, of the state of nature, if you will. You know, like, you know, if you read Rousseau and Locke and all these enlightenment guys, they're arguing about what humans are like in the state of nature, which is to say before governments form, like what are we really like at our, at our base level? Right? So, so writes, while believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law abiding society. So, so what is this getting at? This is getting at the idea that basically humanity starts out for 100,000 years living in a situation where war is normal, people die and are killed every day, everybody is poor. Right. I mean, I'm talking about tribal societies, right. I'm talking about how hunter gatherer societies lived everywhere on earth for a hundred thousand years before people discovered agriculture and started building civilizations. Right? So basically, what we are at our genetic level are creatures that are wired to be in a group of about a hundred others that we consider family, fight tooth and nail against any other group we find, unless we find it more comfortable to cooperate, more beneficial to cooperate. But, you know, always war is on the table. Just bloody raids of other tribes and bloody revenge raids on those tribes, and everybody's poor. There's, There's. We start out with poverty as the default. We start out doing anything selfish or anything that benefits us at the expense of someone else, unless there's a system in place to punish that. And so that's who we are. That's what the unconstrained vision would say. The constrained vision would say that in the state of nature, we're much more like Howard Zinn's picture of Native Americans. It's like we're. We've got, you know, the fig leaf on our loins and we're nice to everybody and there's no war until the white man comes and everyone has enough to eat and everyone shares. And it's Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, essentially. Until, you know, somehow greed is, like, introduced to the picture. Right.
- [47:36]
Shiloh Brooks
And.
- [47:38]
Coleman Hughes
Scarcity is introduced. Right. Like, you'll hear people with the unconstrained vision talk about the introduction of scarcity or the rhetoric of scarcity, whereas someone with the constrained vision would say, well, scarcity is a matter of fact. Like there isn't, as Sowell puts it in one book, what everyone wants adds up to more than there is, which is, you know, a very simple and effective way of putting it. So. So what this gets at is that the. The unconstrained vision and constrained vision, one thing they always fight over and always will, is what human beings and what human societies were like prior to the formation of agriculture and governments, because that gets at who. Who we are and what we're capable of at our core.
- [48:32]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, that seems true to me. And so you think. I mean, based on the passage you read and what you just said, it occurs to me that what Saul is trying to do is kind of give a theory of everything in politics. In other words, he's trying to give the meta explanation like it's the causality for all of our political choices in the world. That's a sort of a dangerous thing for a philosopher to do.
- [48:53]
Coleman Hughes
It's very ambitious.
- [48:54]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, it's in a way, very unconstrained because, I mean, I know he's a constrained thinker, but what he provides us with is a theory of an Explanatory theory of all of politics, which is a very kind of rationalistic, shall we say, enlightenment or unconstrained way of approaching the world. Like, let me now write a book that explains all of the things.
- [49:17]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. Well, you could say, if you believe as he says, that man is limited in his knowledge, then how could a guy like Sol know so much?
- [49:26]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, yeah. The word of the day is epistemology. Now epistemology comes from the Greek word episteme, which means knowledge, and logos, which means an account or an argument about. So what you have with epistemology is an account of knowledge or knowledge about knowledge. Epistemology is a science like biology, psychology, but it's the science of knowledge itself. What can we know about knowledge and how do we come to know what is knowledge for sure and what is not knowledge? The same way biology is, what can we know about bio life or psychology is what can we know about the psuke, the soul? One of the things that I think about when I read books is each book is a medicine for some problem that someone has. So if you, if you're sick about love, there might well be a novel about love out there that you could read and would bring you some comfort and perhaps some insight and wisdom at that moment. If you were to find it right, or if you were frustrated with our politics or the polarization in our politics, you might know of a book out there that you could read and would have some sense making effect on you, such that books become, you know, medicines for afflictions, intellectual or spiritual, that we have, assuming those books come into our life at the right time. So I'm curious to get you to diagnose who is the person and what is the mental, spiritual, however you want to put it, intellectual situation in which they're in, such that Thomas Sowell's book is the cure for it, or is, if not the cure, the. The first step on the way to, you know, a kind of more fulfilling perspective on these matters. How is this book a medicine and for whom?
- [51:28]
Coleman Hughes
That's a great question. So I think it's, it's. It's a medicine for someone that has suffered because they believed in a project that sounded amazing. Someone who was seduced by either a political movement or an ideology or, you know, an idea or a way of living that sounded like the Garden of Eden and sounded amazing. And then very painfully and slowly character arced toward realizing that it created so much more pain for everyone than it had to. If they had been less idealistic and less naive and Accepted that they were flawed and selfish human beings at the beginning, rather than having to learn that the very hard way over a set of years. I mean, I think of. You know, I've been watching this show, Couples Therapy on hbo, and this is, you know, like, this is not a political example. You see some of these couples that have been in polyamorous relationships for, like, years and have just, like, drip by drip realize that they cannot do it, that they could not cure their own jealousy, they could not reason the jealousy out of their partner, and they're just like, you know, several years of grayed hair later realize that, like, polyamory is not for me.
- [53:08]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [53:09]
Coleman Hughes
Okay. The political equivalent of that. There's a million different ways it could be. It could be. I mean, for. For, you know, it could be any number of things. But to spare you that very painful way of learning many of these lessons that get learned, that person is who this book is a medicine for. Just accept that you are not surrounded by a bunch of Buddhas. You are surrounded by a bunch of normal people. That's okay. They are flawed. You are flawed. You are selfish. When push comes to shove, each person should be assumed to pursue their own self interest, unless they are your family member, your father, mother, child, wife.
- [54:03]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [54:04]
Coleman Hughes
Empathy doesn't extend quite that far that we can actually learn to treat each other the way that we would ideally want, which is to make the world one big family. That would be so awesome, wouldn't it? I think it would, but turns out, not on the menu.
- [54:25]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [54:25]
Coleman Hughes
So whoever's been harmed by that idealism, that's who this book is for.
- [54:31]
Shiloh Brooks
So let me do a lightning round really quick with you. Who's your favorite philosopher? I know you're a student of philosophy. Do you have a favorite?
- [54:36]
Coleman Hughes
I've never consciously had a favorite philosopher ever. You know, I've taken a lot from a lot of different people. I liked Bertrand Russell quite a bit when I read him. I've always had an affinity for John Stuart Mill among. Among the great classical liberal philosophers and for modern philosophers. I've always loved Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. Thomas Sowell would count as well, of course. Of course.
- [55:08]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there a book that you couldn't finish that you thought, you know what couldn't?
- [55:13]
Coleman Hughes
Not doing it.
- [55:14]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. Like, because it was bad or for whatever your reason is. You were just so repulsed by it. You're like, I'm putting this thing down.
- [55:20]
Coleman Hughes
So I'll tell you a book I couldn't finish because it was too good. And too. It was like the anxiety, like I was shaking reading it because it was, it was overwhelming, was the Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, who was a psychologist who came out of the Freudian school. And he came a lot out of Otto Ronk, I think. And he basically talks about how, how, how human beings are stuck permanently between the pretense of ourselves as basically outside of the animal kingdom. It's like better than as higher. And the reality of being, you know, essentially monkeys that are one day going to be food for worms. Right? And how this, these two conflicting notions of ourselves create the desire to beat death away by creating immortality projects. Right? It's like, okay, our bodies can't be immortal, but we cannot alone in the animal kingdom. We can't accept that. So we do things like write books that are going to outlast us and have children or make the choice to have children, as opposed to doing it on sexual impulse, which is how animals do it. And we do all these things to essentially cheat death. And the way he unfurled that in the book was powerful and anxiety provoking and really in some way depressing. And so I couldn't finish it the first time that I read it. I had to put it down for months and came back to it.
- [57:09]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there a book that you have read recently that changed your mind about something?
- [57:19]
Coleman Hughes
Trying to think. It's hard for me to pull one off the top of my head.
- [57:24]
Shiloh Brooks
What about a book you pretend to read, to have read?
- [57:27]
Coleman Hughes
Like, do you want to?
- [57:28]
Shiloh Brooks
You know, some people, you know, people do it. Come on.
- [57:30]
Coleman Hughes
Oh, we all do it.
- [57:31]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there?
- [57:32]
Coleman Hughes
I've never read the End of History and the Last man by Francis Fukuyama, although I don't think I've ever pretended to have read it. But it's one of, it's one of those books that's referenced so often that you can feel you've read it without having read it. And that's very dangerous because whenever you go to those kinds of books, you always find they're way more interesting than you thought they were. That's right. And they're different than you thought they were. That's right. That's right.
- [57:55]
Shiloh Brooks
Last question. Are you audiobook E reader paper? Do you have strong views?
- [58:00]
Coleman Hughes
Some people do all of the above. I personally, you know, like, here's the thing, at the end of the day, I think everyone in an ideal world prefers a paper book. But I am extremely impulsive with book buying. So if I want a book, I want it fucking now. I don't want to wait even a day for it to come in Amazon. I would much rather be able to get it on Kindle right now.
- [58:22]
Shiloh Brooks
Right now.
- [58:22]
Coleman Hughes
I'm extremely impulsive with purchasing books, so that overrides. You know, I buy most things on Kindle because I want them now.
- [58:30]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
- [58:31]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah.
- [58:31]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, Coleman Hughes, it's been a pleasure. I'm grateful to you for sharing this book with me, with our audience people. Go read Conflict, Divisions. Thomas Sowell, Masterful. Thank you so much.
- [58:40]
Coleman Hughes
Thank you.