The Myles Treadwear Podcast: Recent Episodes
Myles
This podcast is about the ways that philosophy, reason, and critical thinking can improve our lives and enhance our consciousness. I started it because I am completely enamored with and fascinated by this kind of stuff. I try to approach ideas and issues in the manner of Socrates, as least in a humble and aspirational sense. My objective is to identify various ways of thinking that we encounter in our daily lives, whether at a societal, group, or individual level, and try to put them through some semblance of the Socratic wringer. My bona fides, which I put forth with the greatest humility, are these: Some years ago, I obtained a degree in philosophy. Since then, I've been in engaged in the brute world of commerce as a professional advisor and businessperson. Yet I have always counted myself a philosopher, even if in only the most dilettantish and amateur sense, and philosophy has consistently been a source of consolation and joy amid the travails of a busy life.
Professor Susan Stebbing was a British philosopher who accomplished a great deal during her relatively short life (1885 to 1943). Her book, A Modern Introduction to Logic became a standard textbook for the study of analytical philosophy. She was a prolific writer and thinker, producing not only academic works but also several publications for the more general reader.
In this episode, I discuss what was perhaps her most widely read work, a handbook on critical thinking called Thinking to Some Purpose (subtitled "a manual of first-aid to clear thinking"). The book was published just as World War II was breaking out in Europe. That was, as it happens, good timing. It seems that the public welcomed Professor Stebbing's wise assistance in identifying and navigating the flow of information, disinformation, opinion, and irrational political utterances that accompanied the British move to a war footing.
For this episode, my particular interest is in chapters six and seven of the book, entitled respectively, "Potted Thinking" and "Propaganda."
In a sense, Stebbing's discussion of "potted thinking" foreshadows the extensive work that psychologists and philosophers have subsequently done in the area of heuristics. Necessarily, we employ lots of intellectual shortcuts in our daily lives. They're useful tools, and in fact life would be spectacularly tedious or maybe even impossible without them. Stebbing's point, though, is that we misuse them when we employ them in order to skate over rational and careful analysis in circumstances where a careful and disciplined use of reason is actually called for. In other words, "potted thinking" or heuristics can cause us to fail to think things through in situations where we really ought to be thinking them through.
And potted thinking (misused) can also serve as the underpinning for propaganda, which further induces a suspension of reason as it seeks to persuade us with appeals to emotion or even just intellectual laziness. An example that occurs to me as I read Stebbing's chapter on propaganda is the proliferation of yard signs during election season. Does the presence of a sign in a yard - or many signs in many yards - somehow make a candidate more suitable for office? On the merits, no, but there is undoubtedly a psychological effect - we're lured in by propaganda that makes use of the familiarity heuristic in a way that involves no subtlety whatsoever! Propaganda is often insidious, Stebbing points out, and this certainly seems borne out in its use of uninspiring banalities to great practical effect.
Although Professor Stebbing's book is now somewhat dated in its language and its references to politicians and cultural phenomena, its essential message is as compelling as ever. The ongoing festival of meme-making, wise-cracking, and popularity contests that comprises much of social media is fertile ground for lazy thinking and propagandizing. Many would argue that since 1939, when the book was published, things have in fact only gotten worse as far as our mainstream culture's continual beat-down of rational discourse is concerned.
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There seems to be consensus among serious commentators that American diplomacy seems has gone into serious decline in recent years. Our credibility as an honest broker is low not only among our enemies and rivals, but among our friends and allies as well.
Funding for the State Department has been in relative decline. Seasoned career diplomats have left the scene, with no legion of up-and-coming foreign service professionals poised to replace them. Within the federal bureaucracies, the diplomatic function has been splintered and farmed-out to departments and agencies that have little or no expertise in international relations. The foreign service, in general, seems to have suffered a loss of prestige, particularly among the bright young people that it once attracted. The leadership of the State Department has mostly been relegated to political also-rans and retreads or wan timeservers.
Yet to what extent are these shortcomings the cause of our diplomatic decline or symptoms of it? Is the prevailing view that diplomacy is now something of a quant relic? And to what extent has idealism - and in particular the belief that our fundamental foreign policy mission is to export, by force if need be, our liberal democratic ideals - taken over as the prevailing foreign-policy ethos? And if so, how is that working out for us?
In this episode, I argue that the world is calling out for a renaissance in American diplomacy - but a diplomacy rooted in the realism of thinkers like Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz rather than a profligate and naive commitment to nation-building and the construction of a worldwide liberal hegemony. A foolish, sanctimonious America is not what is needed or sought, but a wise America, with sensible aspirations and a realistic commitment to the promotion and defense of its own interests would seem to be very much in demand.
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In 1956, Oxford University granted an honorary degree to former US President Harry Truman. Elizabeth Anscombe, a British philosopher who taught at Oxford, opposed the grant of the degree on the grounds that in deciding to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Mr Truman had committed acts of mass murder.
Anscombe is a fascinating character and was one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. She was also possessed of enormous intellectual courage, and publicly made the somewhat unpopular case against the award of the degree to Truman. In 1958, she published a pamphlet in which she set out in detail the arguments she had put in support of her position.
As an admirer of both Truman and Anscombe, and of course as a philosopher of sorts, I find myself drawn to this dispute. Truman accepted the degree, apparently unfazed by Anscombe's opposition to it. And Anscombe never backed down, asserting that the US insistence on Japan's unconditional surrender, coupled with the almost taunting language of the Potsdam Declaration and a refusal to engage with Japanese offers to negotiate peace, rendered the bombings a deliberate attack on civilian populations by the US in circumstances where it had ignored legitimate diplomatic alternatives.
It could be said, of course, that even if Anscombe's hindsight was perfect, it had fallen to Truman to make a decision that would have catastrophic consequences whatever he had done, and that he had had to decide in real time, with imperfect information, advice that was undoubtedly confounding, and a fundamental responsibility to his country and the world to try to minimize death and suffering.
From a moral perspective, the stakes could not have been any higher. And Anscombe argues that it may well have been the advent of a flawed and troubling consequentialist school of moral thought that led to a grisly calculus in which many thousands of innocent lives were taken at a stroke.
In this episode, I try to consider Anscombe's arguments objectively. The terrain is difficult, both emotionally and intellectually, and such profound circumstances do not admit of facile moral reasoning. But to me, it is terrain that must be traversed, and wherever we come out on the matter we should be grateful to Elizabeth Anscombe for having taken this on.
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We talk about God all the time. Even atheists talk about the God that they don't believe in. But what do we have in mind when we talk this way? In this episode, I take an introductory look at two questions: First, what are some of the ways that people conceive of the nature of God? And second, does it matter much - even for the devout - how one actually conceives of God? I consider these questions from the perspective of Christian theology, atheism, and agnosticism, and also consider some empirical data derived from opinion polling.
Ever since my youth, I've had a fascination with these types of questions. This episode gets the ball rolling in a prefatory way, and there is much more that I want to try to address in subsequent installments: How much of religious belief, I wonder, consists only in comforting stories that we tell ourselves, and how much can be validated by our actual experience of the world. Of what value is circumstantial evidence in relation to our notions of the divine and are some types of circumstantial evidence more compelling than others? Should we acknowledge the religious impulse within ourselves, and if we do how do we shield it from pernicious influences that might range from televangelist hucksters to our own wooly-minded wishful thinking? Can I know God, can I look into the face of God, or is it foolish or even impertinent to make those kinds of queries? Does the fact of our faculty of reason dictate that we must always remain within the boundaries of rational thought, or can we acknowledge that there are aspects of the world that lie beyond our zone of rational understanding? If the latter, should we try to explore such matters, and if so, what tools do we have for such exploration?
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In this episode we travel, via parable, to Las Vegas, where we explore the ramifications of the Aristotelean formula for the flourishing of the human spirit. Our hero is an earnest coal miner, whose life has been transformed by apparent good fortune. When faced with the prospect of unlimited hedonistic pleasure, what becomes of virtues that have been honed and perfected in the inhospitable depths of the mine?
The notion of the "Aristotelean Formula" that I put forward consists of five steps: (1) recognizing the virtues; (2) practicing them; (3) making them habitual; (4) habit thus forming character; and (5) eudaimonia. And the question that we explore in this episode is what happens when one works this formula, with some measure of success, encounters circumstances where it is tempting to dispense with the whole business in favor of what might be considered a more Epicurean approach to the good life (although in caricaturing it as such, I appreciate that I may be doing a disservice to the depth and complexity of Epicurus' thinking).
In any event, the episode is mainly a parable. Maybe it's not a great one (I try), but like any parable it's intended as a device for illustrating and thus trying to think about a set of abstractions in somewhat concrete terms.
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In this episode, I consider John Locke's principle that the legitimacy of a government depends on the consent of the governed. I look in particular at the ways this principle comes to the fore when public officials overstep the boundaries of their legal authority. Some recent maneuvers by various players in the US federal government provide good examples: What are the consequences - in terms of consent and legitimacy - of the increasing tendency of US Presidents to attempt to legislate by executive order? What happens to such consent and legitimacy when federal administrative agencies try to appropriate new powers for themselves? And why, as a free people, should we be more concerned about process than substance in such situations? Music attribution:
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In this episode I take a look at a popular meme used by life coaches and motivational speakers: No one is coming to rescue you. The idea, of course, is to jar the listener out of his complacency with the news that he's on his own in this world. And there's no doubt but that it's a message many of us need to hear. But is it actually true? I consider it from a couple of perspectives. First, is there is sense in which a part of the self - a piece of self that can be partitioned into independent observer, navigator, and helmsman - can come to the rescue? And if so, how does such an apparent psychological sleight of hand work? Second, there is the maybe more controversial question whether there's some external guardian standing ready to come to your aid. In answering these questions, I draw on some of the usual suspects - Socrates, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas - but also invite a degree of speculative thought that leads, for me at least, to a somewhat surprising outcome. An apology here: I have dozens of ideas for this podcast, and I have massive enthusiasm for putting them out there. My presentation, though, is not that great. I know, for instance, that I tend to sound kind of professorial and boring. I am, however, really working on this, coaching myself and also getting some help from people who are more adept at podcasting than I am. My dilemma is whether to publish episodes as I ascend the learning curve, or to wait until I get a whole lot better before releasing anything. I've opted for the former at this stage, on the theory that humiliation and embarrassment are great motivators for improvement. If anyone is actually listening to this stuff, then bless you and thank you, and I do want to assure you that I prepare these episodes with care and do my best to ensure that my arguments are cogent and sound. Music attribution:
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In this episode I try to break down the devolution of politics, particularly in the United States, into a form of mass entertainment. I look at the way our media sources exploit politics for this purpose, and how they emphasize the most divisive and emotive aspects of politics in order to generate an addiction to outrage among their viewers, listeners, and readers.
I look in particular at the motives of our media outlets, as well as those of the politicians who take part in this phenomenon. I also give some examples of the way the tendency to treat politics as entertainment has evolved over the years from relatively civilized debate to an unedifying spectacle of name-calling, vulgarity, and general sophistry.
Finally, I consider the effect of affinity for a political tribe on one's intellectual credibility. How seriously can we take the person whose approach to political dialogue consists mainly in the parroting of a set of party-sanctioned talking points?
The question inherent in the discussion is whether we can somehow turn away from the unhelpful, divisive, and emotionally overwrought approach to public affairs that many of our media outlets and elected officials seem so determined to perpetuate.
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My podcast is about bringing critical thinking techniques, and especially a Socratic approach, to living in the world and engaging with it.
In this episode I look at the phenomenon of groupthink: What is it? Why is it so pernicious? And what can we do about it?
The term "groupthink" was coined by Irving Janis, a psychologist who introduced the term in a 1971 article in Psychology Today. He writes that the term is meant to be an invidious one - signifying poor decisions arising out of flawed, group-based processes - and that he crafted it in the tradition of George Orwell's newspeak.Janis used the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion as an exemplar, parsing through the public record of the decision-making process that led to the debacle. He identifies eight characteristics of groupthink, and then considers ways that a decision-making process can be crafted so as to avoid the possibility of groupthink.
I look to expand on this, considering the groupthink phenomenon from the perspective not only of a party who controls a committee or board's processes, but also that of the less powerful individual who finds him- or her-self caught up in a potential groupthink scenario. To illustrate my points, I construct a hypothetical workplace decision-making process, and evaluate the options available to a committee member who is about to be railroaded into accepting an outcome that will have adverse effects on his team.
It seems to me that - particularly during recent years - most people could point to any number of terrible groupthink decisions that affect them directly. This happens not only in one's own workplace, school, or local community, but also at the highest levels of government and geopolitics. Peer pressure and intolerance for dissent seem to run rampant in our society, and it's up to the thinking woman or man to push back when a group begins to veer, impervious, in the direction of a bad outcome.
I hope you find the episode thought-provoking and maybe even useful.
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