Athwart Magazine has published a piece I wrote on the unacknowledged (because unknown) influence of Rousseau on all the so-called “post-liberal” ideologies that have arisen today to challenge the so-called “end of history.”

Rousseau’s initial challenge to liberalism in his 1750 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts is the fount from which all the political drama of the modern world has erupted. Socialism and anarchism, communism, fascism, and romanticism, even identity politics are based upon his critiques and insights. And today, we once again find ourselves in such interesting times, as a profusion of new ideologies challenge liberalism’s seeming total hegemony—

When we look at our political landscape today, we find this same menagerie of fantastical motifs once again being put into practice (or at least being LARPed) by liberalism’s growing number of opponents. On the academic left, we hear calls for the elevation of “Indigenous Knowledge,” which is argued to contain wisdom forgotten by our fast-paced, materialistic society. On the online right, we see a proliferation of anonymous Twitter accounts portraying warrior iconography with explainer-threads celebrating ancient citizenship and manliness. In education, a growing number of alternative models—homeschooling, child-led, tactile, classical and more—have arisen to undermine the bourgeois education factory. Further, the recent “trad” trend of large families and well-defined gender roles—especially when paired with rustic living conditions—is straight out of Rousseau’s novels, but is also found in his most practical work, Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (1758). Even mainstream liberals have been infected. As astutely portrayed by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise (2000), bohemian counterculture has been co-opted, now repackaged and sold as a bourgeois “authentic experience.” It seems that Rousseau’s thought not only refuses to die, but haunts us still.

Read the full text here or listen above: Smiling Enemies: What Rousseau Saw Coming

This week I am once again joined by St. John’s College tutor emeritus Eva Brann. With us also is Siobhán Petersen, a fellow alum of the St. John’s Graduate Institute. Ms. Petersen is currently teaching a class on the Philosophy of AI at the Johns Hopkins Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Together we search for the essence of the mind of the machine—its relationship to our own and to the world. Is it an analogy or analogue, image or idea, artifact or artificer? Through the gateway of Book X of Plato’s Republic, we dive into the cave beneath the cave—a world of images of images of images—that AI threatens to create to see what of truth is reflected there.

With the release of Chat GPT3 a year and half ago, the public was thrust into a new world that we (myself included) seem to understand little about. Our imaginations have been set ablaze with the possibilities of what could be accomplished with the increased power of machines that appear to be able to think and create for us. What new secrets of the universe might we unlock; what new tools and toys might we invent; in what ways might we even enhance human being; or alternatively, what new tragedies might we bring upon ourselves? The possibilities at the moment seem limitless—which, in my opinion, is always a dangerous proposition. By developing this revolutionary technology publicly, we seem to be performing a massive social experiment at scale, with little social control of how this new technology is to be implemented—and thus with little idea of what the outcome will be. 

What better book to utilize, then, for delving into such a discussion than Plato’s Republic—a work, that is at least nominally, about how to create the perfect society through the proper social and political mechanisms? Although a closer reading reveals that it is in fact a warning against such attempts, there really is no greater work in the Western tradition for stimulating such questions. And of course there is the greater fact that, as in Alfred North Whitehead’s formulation, all philosophy is simply “a series of footnotes to Plato.” So why settle for pale imitations, when you can get it straight from the source? 

(Plato, The Republic, 598b-d)

On this week’s episode, I welcome back my good friend John Felis to explore what is called “Stuck Culture”—the idea that novel and original cultural output has come to a standstill. Our discussion, though, will focus less on what it is than if it is. These days, we seem to be suffering from two different and contradictory forms of malaise: both a deficiency and an excess of novelty. While on the face of it, this would seem to negate the principle of noncontradiction, when looked at from a deeper level, it is revealed that they are in fact two sides of the same coin.

To attempt to get to the bottom of this question, we explore this topic through the lens of an ancient account of what has come to be known as the Peloponnesian War that took place between the Greek cities of Athens and Sparta from 431-404 BC written by the Athenian general, and participant in the war, Thucydides. This text is particularly useful for trying to understand what is going on today because of one of the central terms that reoccurs throughout: stasis.

In English, we generally employ this word to mean “a state of inactivity or equilibrium;” yet in the Greek it means “civil strife,” or to put it in more contemporary terms, “civil war.” Etymologically, stasis literally means “standing” or “stoppage”—which implies stagnation; yet civil strife would seem to be the very peak of motion and activity—of chaos. The duality of this concept, I believe, helps to reveal the true nature of what is happening in our culture today.

(Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 3.81-84)

On this week’s episode I am joined by retired St. John’s College tutor (and living legend) Eva Brann. She taught at the college for more than sixty years, and is the author of over twenty books, including The World of the Imagination, The Music of the Republic, Homeric Moments, and The Logos of Heraclitus. Ms. Brann is also part of an august Plato translating team that has done the Statesman, Sophist, Symposium, Phaedo and Meno.

Our discussion centers around the nature of technological thinking and the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman thought and our own day.

Click here to watch the documentary series Higher Gossip I did with Ms. Brann and other St. John’s tutors.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 11-22)

In this first episode, we discuss a short essay by the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin called “The Metaphysics of Chaos.” The piece is from the appendix to the 2012 English edition of The Fourth Political Theory, a kind of political science for dummies for those looking for a way out of the postmodern morass the contemporary West now finds itself in.

Our conversation is less a deep exposition of Dugin and his thought than an exploration of the contemporary world and its potentialities. Dugin’s work is used simply as a jumping off place and a touchstone to which we periodically return to help explicate what is at stake in today’s political and cultural upheaval.

For those interested in reading the essay, it can be accessed here, starting on page 232.

(John 1:1-5)