Coffee & Wisdom

David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is “Coffee and Wisdom” This week we have been looking at the concepts of Naïve Optimism and the idea that “truth shall set you free” And, kind of balancing off, maybe some mutually exclusive ideas that we need to, in our own lives, probably balance out because there is a difference between realism and optimism and that truth that sets you free and those beliefs that are perhaps not exactly true, but do get us through life. Naïve optimism just to define that is the belief that your chances are always better than 50/50. This has been shown over and over again that the average American believes that they are above the fiftieth percentile in just about everything. Well, a book published in 1882 called “The Gay Science”, that’s usually the translation that’s done, it’s become more or less traditional at this point, from Nietzsche. And this is the book in which he says “God is dead”. Now, he he numbers the paragraphs. And I want to look at paragraph 110. “The God is dead” paragraph is 125. So he’s building up toward this particular saying, do note the the year that this was published, 1882. The book I was talking about two days ago, it was done in the 1870s, an earlier book. I’ve mentioned before just contextualization that First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis was founded in 1881 and then this time period, 1881, 1883, that definitely comes at basically the time of this book and that that group who founded the congregation were part of a Darwin reading group looking at natural selection and what these new ideas meant.

Nietzsche was also juggling these ideas at the time, although he probably never actually read any of Darwin’s work. It was in the water of Europe in the day among at least the intellectuals of the time. He has this to say about the origin of knowledge. “Over immense periods of time, over immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and help to preserve the species; those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: That there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances; bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.” These are assumptions that built up over time that Nietzsche thinks are merely assumptions and do not reflect the truths of our species. “It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted,” says Nietzsche. “It was only very late that truth emerged as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those fundamental errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial.

Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue” were determined down to the most remote regions of logic.” So, “truth emerged as the weakest form of knowledge,” claims Nietzsche in his book “The Gay Science” in which he will later claim God is dead and we have killed him. Now you see what he’s doing here.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I am the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is “Coffee and Wisdom”. And this week we are looking at optimism, foolish optimism, over-optimism, no optimism at all, and which is kind of what I’m going to talk about today. I’ve been looking at the phrase “Vertitas vox liberabit”, which means “the truth shall make you free”, and which is actually a quote from the Gospel of John 8:32 taken out of context, as I have been discussing. But that kind of appeals to people that somehow the truth will do something to make you free. So one of the things that I have been thinking about here is, you know, what is a concept of truth? How do we want to talk about that? And so I’m just differentiating here between truth and fact, and what’s the difference between a truth and a fact? A truth cannot be seen. For example, “justice” that is an abstraction, “democracy” that is an abstraction. And you can see also that these are human invented ideas. A fact can be seen or measured. And in this case, think about gravity. No, you can’t really see it, but you can see its effects. You can measure its effects, and that would be a fact. You can do gravity experiments anywhere in our world and come up with a lot very similar kinds of ideas and answers. So a truth is socially constructed, all right, a truth is socially constructed. And that’s how I want to talk about this then.

And if it is socially constructed a truth, we don’t have the truth with a capital T anymore. We have a whole lot of little T truths out in the world. Yesterday I discussed one of the first ideas that came along in the Western world to question this idea of what we see in terms of languag in reality. It was a philosophical essay by Frederick Nietzsche in the 1870’s called “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” He’s not going to worry about whether or not it’s moral to tell the truth or to lie. Rather, can we discover any truth at all? And his conclusion on that, to be very brief, if you want to know the whole thing, look back to yesterday’s program. But he says truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. So we have elided a metaphor. We have elided concepts into something that we’re calling a truth that actually well, now it’s not really quite a truth. It’s just an abstraction. Now, one of the groups that looked at this a long time ago are the skeptics. And nowadays we, too, that use the term skeptical all the time. But it was originally a philosophical movement, first in India and then in Greece. A skeptic means “skepsis”, it’s based on the Greek word skepsis, which means investigation. So skeptics are those who investigate. And they also call themselves the “ephektikoi”, they are those who suspend judgment.

The Greek verb for this is Époque. They put things in brackets so that, you know, I’m not going to really decide about that at Epoque. So the goal is a relaxed life without unsubstantiated beliefs. I want to live my life in such a way that I don’t believe anything that I don’t know is in some way tested. Well, if you’ve been reading Nietzsche, you know that that’s not a whole lot that you’re going to be doing in terms of substantiated beliefs. So there you go. Now, this is based on a much older idea. The first skeptics are the Ajnana school which was absorbed later into the Jains and Buddhism in northern India.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and wisdom. And this week we are looking at skepticism and naive optimism and those kinds of ideas. And to start, let’s think about a question: “What do many universities, the CIA and the ancient secret order of the Knights Templar all have in common?” And the answer is their motto, “Libreria Vertitas Acireale”, the truth sets or will set us free. Why are they all saying this? And do they all mean the same thing? I think that’s an interesting question. Well, the truth shall make you free originates in the Gospel of John 8:32. Yesterday, I discussed a little bit of the context of that and specifically this is taken out of context. And purportedly these are the words of Jesus who is talking about sin and the way to get out of sin. So is this a moveable idea, and are we able to cherry pick it and take it out of the context is indeed one of the questions that we need to answer. “Whose truth?” Is one question and “what is free?” is another question, and yes, there are all kinds of assumptions built into something that sounds at first fairly profound, doesn’t it? Well, so let’s think for a moment about this idea of truth. I would distinguish truth, in fact, in my mind anyway. And I think as some philosophers agree with me, there is a difference between truth and fact.

Truth cannot be seen. Justice, for example, is abstract. Yes, there are examples of justice, but actually as a truth, you can’t put your finger on it. It is a concept. On the other hand, a fact can be seen or it can at least be measured. Gravity, for example. We don’t actually see it, but we can measure it. And so the difference between a truth and a fact has to do with how abstract it is and how measurable it is. So my conclusion on that is that truth is socially constructed and in fact is universal. Universal is a problematic word, just as truth, in fact. But you get the idea. Truth is different in different social contexts, but fact is something that can be measured anywhere on the planet. That’s probably where we want to go with that, anyway. The foundational idea to talk about what truth is in the way that we talk about it nowadays comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 to 1900. So often in philosophy, Nietzsche was the first to think of ideas that would become whole fields of philosophy later in the 20th and now in the 21st centuries. What I want to refer to today is on truth and lies, in a non-moral sense. This is a philosophical essay that you can find in various places. It is available online. If you don’t read German, you are at the mercy of various kinds of translations with various programs to go along with that.

One of the challenges of reading Nietzsche these days is that his work has gone through the baffles of so many different people, judging, deciding, etc. And, yes, because he had a fan club within the Nazi party, he is often written off as something over here. But I think that’s a misunderstanding of most of his work. So a lot of people these days, at least, are trying to relook at Nietzsche by removing the baggage that built up in the during the the 20th century, especially. A book that just came out, I think a year or so ago, is on Truth and Untruth, which is a new translation of some of Nietzsche’s work. So you can find these out there. You can buy them relatively inexpensively or there are lots of them free in PDF online. He has this to say. And again, he’s going to say that I’m going to look at truths.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. But starting a new week this week and our theme is Naive Optimism and Stone Walls. The question this week is the nature of truths, the nature of optimism, the nature of naiveté and where we run up against reality. So the first thing I want to kick off with is considering this. This is a phrase that you’re going to see everywhere if you start looking at the models for universities and even on the right, the CIA. And that is “veritas liberabit vos”. “The truth shall set you free.” Now, this comes from the Gospel of John in the Bible, and it is attributed as a saying of Jesus who said, “and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. In Latin, in the Roman Catholic Bible tradition, “veritas”, truth, “liberabit” that would be “liberate”. And “vos”, us, you. And so there you have the general idea of what’s going on. Now, what would a university and their idea of truth have to do with this nice badge from the U.S. CIA, which you notice tries to make it a little more of an English syntax, but the same Latin pertains. So let’s think for a moment about this, because there are some assumptions built into even something as short, but as big as “the truth shall set you free.”

We can ask just the opposite question. Would it be just as true to say “You shall know an illusion and an illusion will set you free”? What’s freedom? What’s illusion? What’s truth? These are fairly large ideas, and the point and the answer maybe isn’t quite as easy as it might at first appear. That’s what we need to think about because, you know, I mean, what about a big lie? Can a big lie also set you free? Why wouldn’t it? Why would it? Good question, I think. So, one of the books to look at here is an old one. This comes from 1951, “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. This book is often referred to and it’s often thought of, as it says on the little blurb here, that it’s probably one of the best thoughts in terms of politics and social ideas since Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, because it’s really trying to get at boiled down to absolute ideas of how we deal with social interactions in politics. I have one question there for you is what is what does Eisenhower and Hillary Clinton have in common? And both of them often quoted Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”. Within that book, Hoffer says this, “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” Oh, wait a minute. What could that possibly mean? “We can be absolutely certain about only about things we do not understand.”

Well, that’s a good question, and I think he might be right about that. And that is that absolutely, absolute conviction and absolute truth are maybe not the same thing. And maybe often conviction about something that I know this is true is driven by actually the doubt behind it. This is what Hoffer claims anyway, and that’s why his book is still around. Even though it was published in 1951, it’s never been out of print. There have been thousands of different editions printed over time because it’s very intriguing what he has to say about politics and social movements. Well, let’s go to the full context. Let’s go back to the Bible. So let’s see what Jesus was actually talking about here. “Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him”,

David Breeden is speaking all week about embodied cognition

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at different aspects of “embodied cognition.” I have been contrasting the two phrases: I think therefore I am, and I am because we are. Of course, “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum)” comes from Rene Descartes, leading to ideas about dualism and materiality and spirituality as being split in some way. The full phrase is dobito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum: I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I am. Doubt then being the confirmation of personhood and selfhood and of the I. Well, that’s all up in the head, isn’t it? And that then is distinguished from other things we’ve been looking at. For example, this term “embodied cognition,” which I have not yet exactly defined, because we did want to go into various aspects of it before we thought through too much about it. But the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology says this “the thesis that the human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems) and its interactions with the physical environment. This concept emerged from work in late 20th century linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy. So again, the thesis that the human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems). So no, we can’t actually have a brain in a jar, if we want to preserve the personality. Basically this is what embodied cognition is telling us: You’ve got to have the body as part of the brain in order to have what we would consider to be personality or a self or this thing we call I. I said earlier in the week, Amishi Jha is a neuropsychologist. She says, “Emotional function and cognitive function aren’t unrelated to each other. They are completely intertwined.” So our emotions and our thinking, our cognition, which also then encompasses the body, are all a matrix of things, actually, and then we can separate them out. But these are abstractions that we’re separating out, not the actual thing. Now, this goes back to some very ancient wisdom that is still with us today. We talk about the Western world and Descartes’ dualism, but many parts of the world have never been touched by this particular kind of idea. I quoted Michael Onyebuchi Eze yesterday: “The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.” This in his book, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. Many philosophers and scholars in various African nations are nowadays talking about embodied cognition. That is part and parcel, very much of the way of thinking in tribal groups, ancient parts of African culture that has not been stamped out by Western religions, as we’ll see in just a moment. Another word we do need to learn is entrain: “to fall gradually into synchrony with a rhythm or something that varies rhythmically.” Entrainment is when various things do become synchronous, people can do that as well. We can become synchronous through music, drumming, movements of various kind, tai chi, that kind of thing. Entrainment then embodies the cognition and pulls people into or out of their own heads and into a larger organism, a group. One way that we can entrain that we’ve talked about is marching, off we go. And especially goose-stepping is a very great way to entrain people. As you see, it becomes quite mechanical,

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This week on Coffee and Wisdom, we’ve been talking about embodied cognition and the difference between two phrases, “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”, that we’re discussing the Western idea that led up to this very individualized concept of the person and then looking a little bit at how this differs within other cultures. That’s more of what we want to do today. This is from a BBC online magazine. The author is David Robson, and it’s called “How East and West Think in Profoundly Different Ways”. Fun little article if you want to look it up online. Partially in there he says this; “Psychologists are uncovering the surprising influence of geography on our reasoning, behavior and sense of self. From the broad differences between East and West, to subtle variation between U.S. states, it is becoming increasingly clear that history, geography, and culture can change how we all think in subtle and surprising ways, right down to our visual perception. Our thinking may have even been shaped by the kinds of crops our ancestors used to farm, and a single river may mark the boundaries between two different cognitive styles. Wherever we live, a greater awareness of these forces can help us all understand our own minds a little bit better.” Interesting and intriguing, I hope you find those ideas. One of the things he mentions in the article is this idea of Weird, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and Democratic.

Joseph Heinrich was the first person to name this in his book, “The Weirdest People in the World.” At that time, he was a researcher at the University of British Columbia. Now he is a research assistant fellow at Harvard. He says, “If we are what we see, and we are attending to different stuff, then we are living in different worlds.” One of the critiques here then is why are we looking at mostly privileged college students when we do various kinds of psychological research? And that idea, when he introduced it, really began to change how research was being done in American universities. Robson goes on to say, “The tacit assumption had been that this select group of people could represent universal truths about human nature, that all people are basically the same. If that were true, the Western bias would have been unimportant. Yet the small number of available studies which HAD examined people from other cultures would suggest that this is far from the case. “Westerners — and specifically Americans — were coming out at the far end of the distribution”, says Joseph Heinrich, again now at Harvard, who is one of the study’s authors.” And as I’ve mentioned before, this is one of the ways we know there is somebody behind the curtain. Generally, we call that European ideas, Weird, white supremacy, etc. The idea that whiteness is in some way a universal value. There are have been a lot of books that have come out since that time. This discovery, one that you might be enjoy because it is a PDF online and free is “Decolonising the University”, edited by three professors in Johannesburg. That would be getting outside of this Weird designation to look at how really other people in the world see reality.

Robson goes on, “When questioned about their attitudes and behaviors, people in more individualistic Western societies tend to value personal success over group achievement, which in turn is also associated with the need for...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m senior minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is coffee and Wisdom. And this week we are looking at the idea of embodied cognition. That is the difference between “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”. Talking about cultural difference and how we perceive the world and what the implications of that really are. I refer often to a quote from Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, he lived 1926 to 2006. And he said this: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.” So you get the idea here from an anthropologist who has been studying the interpretation of cultures and how cultures socially see the world and as the difference between groups and individuals that the Western conception of the individual, which we just discussed last week, is really the basis for the idea of classic liberalism and then democracy that develops out of that idea and then also the Protestant Reformation idea of the individual. Those are very cultural specific, even though they may seem like the way it has to be to individuals who are living in the social constructs that come out of those traditions.

So a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. Yeah, do your thing. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to a lot of people in our world. Going on with this idea, Charles Taylor is a Roman Catholic philosopher. He lives in Canada. His book, “A Secular Age”, is considered by many to be absolutely central to our understanding of theology in this new era. It came out in 2006 and is usually referred to when we talk anything about secularity, individualism, and in how our social systems are working today. He has this to say. “This frontier of self-exploration has grown, through various spiritual disciplines of self-examination, through Montaigne, the development of the modern novel, the rise of Romanticism, the ethic of authenticity, to the point where we now conceive of ourselves as having inner depths.” His argument is that, guess what? In the Middle Ages, people didn’t see themselves as having inner depths. Again, they saw themselves as much more a part of a social matrix or system, not as individuals. But since the Protestant Reformation, this keeps getting underlined, until we have what he calls an ethic of authenticity that really is pushing people toward feeling authentic, when, what would that even mean? He goes on to say, “The dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.”

There’s the idea, and as I’ve been talking about, and go back to Monday, this Decartesian dualism, this mind-body split, that’s going on, is a very Western post-Greek philosophy idea that goes directly into the Christian ideas of body and soul and get embedded within Western cultures and seems to have gotten even more extreme here in the United States, in our cultures and in our religions. So the mind body problem: here’s a good New Yorker cartoon that pretty well sums it up. “Get up”, says his brain. “No”, says his body.

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This week we have been looking at the idea of embodied cognition, why the Western world has been slow to coming to this realization, looking a little bit at the theology and the science that has been part of that, and the philosophy. Then looking at where other parts of the world where these ideas have been part of the water, cultural water for many years. And what I’m contrasting here is “I think therefore I am” as a way of exploring cognition, and “I am because we are” as a way of exploring cognition. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the persistent ideas in the Western world, or questions, has been, could we save Hitler’s brain? Yes, this is a silly 19 late 50s, early 60s movie Sci-Fi about this kind of idea. But it very much comes out of a Western idea of how the body really doesn’t matter. It’s all about that gray tissue up there. Could we save it and then would we have the same person if we put that brain in a different body? This has been around for a long time and it has been explored more or less scientifically back in the 1960s that we did have a Robert Ettinger who came up with the idea for cryonics. He is long dead, but maybe not because his body has been preserved at his institute. In the mid 60s, he wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality when he founded the Cryonics Institute. Still around today, you can still pay to have yourself frozen to see if somehow later in time you might be thawed out and exist again in the body that you had when you died. So how about that? Again, pseudoscience to some extent, some science involved. But it’s also not true that Walt Disney had his body cryogenically preserved and that it is under Disneyland in California. No, that’s an urban myth, but some people do leave their bodies to the Cryonics Institute. All of this idea really comes from a Western philosophical idea that we usually call Descartian dualism, the mind/body split that has been explored so much in the Western world. As I mentioned yesterday, really, Rene Descartes was merely summarizing and building on an idea that goes all the way back to Plato and becomes very much embedded in early Christianity and then, therefore, is spread over Europe and then Europe’s colonies as they colonized the world. Cogito, ergo sum, “I think therefore I am” is the famous part of that. But it is a little more complicated. Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum. “I doubt, therefore I think, I think therefore I am.” So the essence of thinking is doubt, according to Descartes. That very much has been a driver within the scientific world since that time. Now the Protestant Reformation, as I mentioned yesterday, with its inherent ideas of nationalism and theology and individualism, eventually this idea of the autonomous self gets built into what last week we were calling classic liberalism, and it does eventually become part of Roman Catholicism as well. Pope John Paul II wrote, “transcendent dignity of the human person as the visible image of the invisible God.” Really, that is exactly what those reformation Protestants were saying a long time ago. But it has now become part of Roman Catholic doctrine as well. This is in a encyclical called Centesimus Annus, “The 100th Year,” that came out in 1991. And it was a reflection on Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” by Pope Leo XIII back in 1891 when he began to try to think about how Roman Catholicism could embrace the workers’ movements of the time that were happening all over Europe and th...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom starting at a new week. And this week we’re going to be looking at the idea of embodied cognition because this has been very much a hot button issue through hundreds of years in the Western tradition and kind of got us into a place where we’ve been a little bit confused over ideas. This, of course, is a very silly sci fi movie called “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”. But it is part of a folk idea that somehow the brain contains all of our personality and consciousness. And couldn’t we just keep Hitler’s brain in a jar and then put it in someone else and they would act like Adolf Hitler? It’s a good question and we don’t really know the answer, but there are some fairly good clues from science as we work through this. This ties back to last week and what we just discovered and talked about. We talked about the idea of liberalism last week, how it starts out in one particular place that we call classic liberalism that’s about individual freedoms and then moves towards something else. This week, we want to look at the Western idea of individuality because these are two very tied together ideas. So to set the scene, we go back to the Protestant Reformation in the fifteen hundreds and that underlined the idea that faith was about personal struggle rather than group ritual or tradition.

That is what Protestantism is really based in from the beginning, is that it is between one person and God. Therefore, the individual becomes this place of the cosmic struggle and therefore the individual becomes much more important in the Western mind. So this is this central to understanding several things that are going to be coming together. So it’s much more about the personal. During that time, translations of the Bible into local languages allowed people to interpret scripture for themselves. We should discuss the fact that nationalism was very much a part of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther couldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been protected by various of the German states during his time from the Pope and his minions. The mandate to read the Bible expanded literacy, especially here in the US. That becomes absolutely central, but it becomes important all over Europe as well. And of course, the printing press exploded publication of various kinds of things. And really, that’s one of the arguments for how the Reformation could not be stamped out because all these printing presses were creating all of this Protestant propaganda all over Europe. So in classic liberalism, there arose this set of values. The individual was the locus of the cosmic battle between good and evil. This individual must then have some kind of divine sanctions, and that would include some kind of individual worth and autonomy.

And then the idea that God granted these rights of man that becomes central to the American and in the French revolutions. So the divine deist God, as we’ve discussed before, would somehow grant these rights and therefore the individual had them, not suddenly the monarch as much as once they assumed. Well, then what I want to think about this week is the difference between these two statements. “I think therefore I am” and “I am because we are”. Very different statements from very different parts of the world, very different social systems. And that’s part of what we need to think about as we explore the idea of a brain in a jar is not really being reflective of how reality a...

David Breeden is speaking all week about the issues with liberalism.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at the Holes in Liberalism(s). I added an s because, there are a lot of different kinds. Today I want to ask, where is the middle of the road? Because it seems like we are leaning toward extremities as we are talking about these issues. Can we find a middle of the road? Well, Maggie Thatcher, not a middle-of-the-road type person, says, “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by traffic from both sides.” Well, yeah, that is one way of looking at middle-of-the-road-ness and compromise is, that, no, better get on one side or the other. What we’ve been talking about, however, is that it’s hard to see exactly where liberalism fits into the larger picture of human politics that we’re talking about. Now, one of the things that we have to be careful of is hot-button words. If you look at this particular schematic you see down here at the bottom “Sane-Insane.” Well, now that seems to be kind of a value word, isn’t it? Other ones are not so value-laden, but this one, yep, Sane-Insane sounds a little value-laden. Do look at this in terms of we go from Libertarian, that would be a complete, that’s this Minarchism or Anarcho-Capitalism, just letting it go, “abolish the state,” up to what they see as Authoritarianism, which is, on the one side, the kind of Soviet-style Communism, on the other side of Fascism of an Italian or a Nazi type. And, where we have Liberalism is right here, the circle above this line of the 50 percent, (this one calls it a vast sea of Libertarianism), but definitely toward the Authoritarian side of things, which is not something that contemporary liberals, in the U.S. anyway, tend to think of Liberalism. But we do need to think about that in terms of how the actual terminology has played out. I did share with you, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the ideas about what different kinds of Liberalism exist. This is important. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is peer-reviewed and it is free on the Internet, so you can find out serious philosophical ideas. Under the term Liberalism it starts out with the debate about liberty, the presumption in favor of liberty, because why would we want such a thing? And that is a question. Negative liberty, which we talked about in terms of negative freedom, positive freedom or positive liberty, and then republican liberty, republican being the kind of politics that the United States has, not a Republican Party, but republican rather than actually a democracy. Republican liberty, the debate between the old and the new classical Liberalism really is freedom from, it is, the state will not interfere with you in terms of your property or your person, but that’s about it. Whereas a new Liberalism, especially here in the United States, has gone toward a kind of a look at the entire social structure and trying to reconstruct in some way a more fair society. So than liberal theories of social justice are important to look at, because how far do we go in reconstructing society? And that’s all the way on the other side of what classical liberalism was all about. And then the debate about the comprehensiveness of liberalism, political liberalism, liberal ethics, liberal theories of value and the metaphysics of liberalism. That is the actual philosophy of these ideas, because we know that liberal democracies came in for some bad press, especially during the CoVID-19 crisis in which some nation states were considerably more nimble ...