WEBVTT 1 00:00:03.233 --> 00:00:06.713 Paul Lewis: That's the rumor. Okay. 2 00:00:06.713 --> 00:00:20.893 mullins: That's that's the rumor. So we we will start off with Paul's gonna make a few comments and the Alan's gonna follow up with some questions, and then the floor is open for an hour and a half. So Paul, go ahead. 3 00:00:21.453 --> 00:00:37.723 Paul Lewis: Yeah, and I'm gonna keep it really simple and short. I know Alan's got some good questions. I don't know that we'll ever get any answers or definitive answers to any of them, but what I tried to do here is acknowledge that at the heart of 4 00:00:37.723 --> 00:00:53.433 Paul Lewis: of Polanyi's project is this moral project, trying to understand why we destroyed Europe. And so moral inversion is a key part of his diagnosis. So there's an ethical sensibility that underscores or underlies all of his work. 5 00:00:53.453 --> 00:01:01.422 Paul Lewis: People have written about his ethics, but nobody's developed a systematic ethic based on his work. 6 00:01:02.553 --> 00:01:07.202 Paul Lewis: And, you know, I wasn't trying to do that in this essay either, but at least 7 00:01:07.293 --> 00:01:26.183 Paul Lewis: draw out some of the characteristics of a Polanian ethic. You know, what kind of vision of the good life, what kind of understanding of moral agency emerges out of reading Polani. So an ethic that is Polanian would, I think. 8 00:01:26.193 --> 00:01:31.773 Paul Lewis: need to deal with some of these things. So that's, I'll just leave it at that. 9 00:01:35.103 --> 00:01:35.952 mullins: Yeah, yeah, Alan. 10 00:01:36.233 --> 00:01:40.332 Allen Dyer: Okay, and I'll… I'll jump in. I've. 11 00:01:40.533 --> 00:01:55.492 Allen Dyer: written a note to Paul, so he's heard of most of what I have to say, and I'll share that, in which I, first of all, want to acknowledge Paul, and for all of you, what a lucid and an insightful 12 00:01:55.493 --> 00:02:12.463 Allen Dyer: essay this is. As many times as we've, and I'll say this personally, as many times as I've read about moral inversion and read Diane's wonderful essay about it, and looked at both some of the shorter pieces Polanyi's written, and as well as 13 00:02:12.463 --> 00:02:16.622 Allen Dyer: having read Personal Knowledge several times, I find, still. 14 00:02:16.693 --> 00:02:31.323 Allen Dyer: this essay very useful in that regard. So thank you, Paul, for that. Thank you for the clarity and lucidity and insight. I love the map metaphor for the orientation it provides us. 15 00:02:31.623 --> 00:02:41.812 Allen Dyer: moral vision and moral agency. Not unlike Susan Sontag's two passports metaphor, the sick and the well. 16 00:02:41.863 --> 00:02:51.812 Allen Dyer: And also Polanyi's use of metaphor, the scientific outlook, a medical metaphor with its sickness and cure. 17 00:02:52.443 --> 00:03:01.093 Allen Dyer: I appreciate the succinct questions that Paul came up about my chapter that we talked about last time, and I would like to have come up with 18 00:03:01.343 --> 00:03:17.362 Allen Dyer: succinct questions similar to those. Instead, I've left with a number of why questions to invite Paul's speculation, and he's heard these questions, and for all of us for jumping in when we have the open discussion. 19 00:03:17.823 --> 00:03:23.583 Allen Dyer: First of all, why did we destroy Europe? 20 00:03:25.033 --> 00:03:39.183 Allen Dyer: This is a theme that Freud and Einstein also took up in an essay or exchange of letters called Why War? Einstein suggested that there should be an international agency overseeing 21 00:03:39.183 --> 00:03:45.742 Allen Dyer: international conflict, which the League of Nations did set up, and Freud, who 22 00:03:45.743 --> 00:03:56.082 Allen Dyer: Lost a grandson in World War One, which he considered senseless, led him to some speculations about a death instinct and the darker side of human nature. 23 00:03:56.083 --> 00:04:07.393 Allen Dyer: I think Polanyi is more sanguine, more optimistic about human possibility, but no less concerned with the destruction of the early years of 24 00:04:07.393 --> 00:04:08.802 Allen Dyer: of, 25 00:04:09.303 --> 00:04:21.322 Allen Dyer: the 20th century, and actually, the precursors of that in the 19th century, Dostoevsky, Marx, Nietzsche, which his 26 00:04:21.913 --> 00:04:30.543 Allen Dyer: Paper, elaborates with also some clarity that we don't always see in his more abstract writings. 27 00:04:31.153 --> 00:04:50.293 Allen Dyer: Why War, Polanyi's article is from 1968, and would have been much on his mind when I first met, Polanyi in 1969 in Oxford, and he commented to me what was somewhat, shocking to my 21-year-old self. 28 00:04:50.403 --> 00:04:57.973 Allen Dyer: When he referred to the… what I remember his saying is the disillusion of European culture. He may have said. 29 00:04:57.973 --> 00:05:13.052 Allen Dyer: the destruction of European civilization. But that was a lot for me to assimilate at that point, and I was delighted to have an opportunity to go back to the 1968 paper, which really does offer an awful lot of insight. 30 00:05:13.053 --> 00:05:22.993 Allen Dyer: And then coincidentally, The Eccles paper that he refers to follows in tradition and discovery, immediately on the Bob. 31 00:05:23.213 --> 00:05:25.963 Allen Dyer: 19… 68 paper. 32 00:05:28.883 --> 00:05:41.762 Allen Dyer: This is a wonderful place to start a discussion of Polanyi's ethics and its relationship to epistemology. And Paul gives us a succinct explanation of moral inversion. 33 00:05:41.903 --> 00:05:59.742 Allen Dyer: Arguing, in answer to the question, that under the influence of positivist philosophies, Western liberal culture decoupled moral passion from commitment to the reality of moral values. Moral values such as Truth. 34 00:05:59.813 --> 00:06:02.023 Allen Dyer: Goodness and justice? 35 00:06:02.313 --> 00:06:14.243 Allen Dyer: And that this separation allowed moral passions, which we might understand as emotions, although they may not be quite the same thing, this separation allowed moral passions to be redirected 36 00:06:14.313 --> 00:06:24.742 Allen Dyer: to destruct in destructive ways, which ultimately led to the rise of violent authoritarian regimes like those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. 37 00:06:25.693 --> 00:06:42.562 Allen Dyer: And we might add, following my concern that the early years of the 20th century are shaping up like the early years of the… the early years of the 21st century are shaping up like the early years of the 20th century, we might add Putin, Orban, Modi, and Trump. 38 00:06:43.053 --> 00:06:49.732 Allen Dyer: How does this happen? When Polanyi dynamism, what is the force that propels it? 39 00:06:53.773 --> 00:06:56.002 Allen Dyer: Learning the lessons of history. 40 00:06:56.053 --> 00:07:08.203 Allen Dyer: as they are sketched out for us, we see the emergence of violent authoritarian regimes in the 21st century, perhaps for similar reasons. A muddling of reality. 41 00:07:08.203 --> 00:07:16.572 Allen Dyer: As I suggest in Madness and the Political Divide, or a loss of moral vision, as Paul suggests in Mapping the Territories. 42 00:07:17.613 --> 00:07:20.453 Allen Dyer: Paul mentions that Polanyi speaks of 43 00:07:20.573 --> 00:07:39.423 Allen Dyer: transcendent values, I guess one could say transcendental values, truth, goodness, and justice, the very ideals that positive philosophies repudiate, values that can't be measured, counted, or quantified. And so ethics, as well as aesthetics. 44 00:07:39.673 --> 00:07:47.663 Allen Dyer: Metaphysics, theology, and psychology, the devalued disciplines, are the ones that find Polanyi most useful. 45 00:07:51.043 --> 00:08:09.662 Allen Dyer: I'm gonna comment here, I'm sort of a branch in my thinking. The disciplines that find Polanyi most useful, I recall this is something that Doug Adams often used to say, how Polanyi helps us when we're dealing with questions of value, aesthetics. 46 00:08:09.663 --> 00:08:12.112 Allen Dyer: Which was particularly concern of Doug Adams. 47 00:08:12.113 --> 00:08:28.022 Allen Dyer: and ethics, which is particularly a concern of Charles McCoy, how Polanyi helps us with those. Not that he answers the questions that we might have about ethics, aesthetics, theology, metaphysics, even psychology, but how he helps us think about those disciplines. 48 00:08:28.133 --> 00:08:37.683 Allen Dyer: Why haven't we developed a systematic ethic from Polanyi's ideas? And as Paul says. 49 00:08:38.703 --> 00:08:55.163 Allen Dyer: the definitive account of a Polanyian ethics is yet to be written. Why haven't we developed a systematic ethic from Polanyi's ethics? I take it, and I think we all might take for granted, that an explicit system of ethics would be an impossibility 50 00:08:55.163 --> 00:09:09.713 Allen Dyer: Given the tacit structure of knowing that ethics emerges from what we believe we know. So the relationship between ethics and epistemology, that we have to go through epistemology to get to ethics. 51 00:09:10.533 --> 00:09:14.373 Allen Dyer: as Polanyi helps us understand. 52 00:09:16.663 --> 00:09:24.103 Allen Dyer: And here's another question to ponder in the 21st century. If people once lived in a culture of shared values. 53 00:09:25.183 --> 00:09:29.832 Allen Dyer: Are we additionally challenged in a pluralistic world? 54 00:09:30.023 --> 00:09:37.173 Allen Dyer: Is this world of liberal democracy whose loss or destruction Polanyi and Freud and Einstein lament? 55 00:09:37.363 --> 00:09:43.402 Allen Dyer: Irretrievably a thing of the past, or is there some way that we can hold onto that or recover that? 56 00:09:43.913 --> 00:09:50.333 Allen Dyer: Post-critical philosophy chronologically preceded what we now call postmodernism. 57 00:09:50.703 --> 00:09:57.943 Allen Dyer: Postmodernism is often undergirded by a Marxist idealism and possible relativism. 58 00:09:58.043 --> 00:10:16.303 Allen Dyer: With Polanyi's cautions, do we imagine that we might be in a liminal state between the old postmodern age and a yet unnamed and undefined post-postmodernism? In other words, what is the relevance of all of this for the 21st century? 59 00:10:16.883 --> 00:10:19.883 Allen Dyer: And a final question in perplexity. 60 00:10:20.223 --> 00:10:26.893 Allen Dyer: Do you, Paul, or any of you, have any suggestions and strategies for introducing newbies 61 00:10:27.413 --> 00:10:36.763 Allen Dyer: To the subtleties of post-critical thinking, people not yet familiar with Polanyi's ideas, what is a good point of entry to post-critical thinking? 62 00:10:37.353 --> 00:10:39.652 Allen Dyer: I'm looking forward to the discussion. 63 00:10:45.773 --> 00:10:50.433 Paul Lewis: Yeah, that's, That's a lot to try to respond to. 64 00:10:50.433 --> 00:10:51.793 Allen Dyer: Yeah, okay. 65 00:10:51.793 --> 00:10:54.443 Paul Lewis: B. 66 00:10:56.413 --> 00:10:57.463 Paul Lewis: I have moved. 67 00:10:58.033 --> 00:11:00.523 Paul Lewis: Let me sort of respond. 68 00:11:01.073 --> 00:11:02.463 Paul Lewis: In the middle. 69 00:11:02.843 --> 00:11:06.893 Paul Lewis: With perhaps the easiest of the questions to answer. 70 00:11:07.223 --> 00:11:17.163 Paul Lewis: You know, why haven't people developed a systematic ethic from Polanyi's perspective? And I think Diane Yeager, in her essay, on moral inversion. 71 00:11:17.163 --> 00:11:28.532 Paul Lewis: from, what was it, 2002, 2003, somewhere in there, in Tradition of Discovery, that's reprinted in the Festschrift. I mean, she gives some reasons for it that I think 72 00:11:29.133 --> 00:11:34.323 Paul Lewis: Or plausible. One is… Polanyi's complicated. 73 00:11:35.323 --> 00:11:51.143 Paul Lewis: He doesn't explicitly address ethical questions, and a lot of people will find it difficult to understand his epistemology in order to get to the implications for ethics. 74 00:11:51.323 --> 00:11:57.303 Paul Lewis: I think part of it, too, is, especially when Polanyi was writing. 75 00:11:59.083 --> 00:12:05.663 Paul Lewis: Ethics really was more, coming out of the philosophy… the analytical philosophy mode. 76 00:12:05.813 --> 00:12:11.043 Paul Lewis: More concerned with what some folks have called decisionism or quandary ethics. 77 00:12:11.233 --> 00:12:20.262 Paul Lewis: It's not till 1971 that Edmund Pinkoff writes Quandary Ethics, where he says, basically, we're getting it all wrong. 78 00:12:20.333 --> 00:12:38.253 Paul Lewis: we need to start paying attention to the kinds of persons that we are, because who we are is decisive for our answers to the question, what should we do? And that's, at least for me, one of the ways that the whole issue of character ethics or virtue ethics. 79 00:12:38.303 --> 00:12:41.203 Paul Lewis: One of the times that it starts to blossom. 80 00:12:41.433 --> 00:12:43.283 Paul Lewis: So I think… 81 00:12:44.453 --> 00:12:52.082 Paul Lewis: Again, people had a certain stereotype of what ethics was about. Polanyi doesn't… at least didn't fit it at that time. 82 00:12:52.223 --> 00:12:55.862 Paul Lewis: He talks about passions. 83 00:12:57.553 --> 00:13:06.322 Paul Lewis: A lot of people are scared of the passions, or the emotions. So much of Western philosophy has said, no, we need to be about. 84 00:13:06.583 --> 00:13:18.313 Paul Lewis: Yeah, rational. We need to be rational. Rationality has to control the passions. And some people want to take that back to Plato's analogy of the two horses pulling the chariot. 85 00:13:18.433 --> 00:13:23.833 Paul Lewis: So there's… I think there's a lot of… there's a lot of, baggage there. 86 00:13:28.563 --> 00:13:33.363 Paul Lewis: And for those of us who have written about ethics, I think 87 00:13:34.503 --> 00:13:43.683 Paul Lewis: It's because we found Polani more informal… informational and useful to our projects. 88 00:13:43.893 --> 00:13:59.492 Paul Lewis: I think it's helped me write a better Christian ethic. And that's been my focus. I think there's a whole cluster of reasons and probably more than that as to why people have not written a systematic ethic. 89 00:14:02.163 --> 00:14:08.013 Paul Lewis: I'll stop there, see if anybody wants to, Pick up on that topic. 90 00:14:10.133 --> 00:14:11.383 Duane Lookingbill: all. 91 00:14:11.383 --> 00:14:11.953 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 92 00:14:12.493 --> 00:14:17.522 Duane Lookingbill: So, I'm just listening to what you just said. 93 00:14:17.863 --> 00:14:22.193 Duane Lookingbill: about epistemology and its helpfulness to our projects. 94 00:14:22.563 --> 00:14:26.163 Duane Lookingbill: Is it… is it, therefore, maybe somehow 95 00:14:26.503 --> 00:14:33.462 Duane Lookingbill: more heuristic to ask, like, what is Polanyi doing than What is Polanyi saying? 96 00:14:33.643 --> 00:14:37.562 Duane Lookingbill: For all the reasons that, already were pointed out about 97 00:14:37.813 --> 00:14:40.403 Duane Lookingbill: If you have the sense of the tacit. 98 00:14:40.593 --> 00:14:45.352 Duane Lookingbill: The answer isn't in the explicit, because the tacit has the last word. 99 00:14:45.623 --> 00:14:50.632 Duane Lookingbill: So what is Polanyi doing in his epistemology that's helpful? 100 00:14:51.483 --> 00:14:54.112 Duane Lookingbill: Say, for example, Christian ethics, where 101 00:14:54.393 --> 00:15:07.182 Duane Lookingbill: I would assume, I mean, you could lop off the fact that in personal knowledge, he says, well, we're not going to deal with revelation. And yet, he doesn't exclusively deal with reason alone, so… 102 00:15:08.153 --> 00:15:14.773 Duane Lookingbill: So he's doing something there that… what is he doing that's helpful, especially when you're sort of 103 00:15:15.063 --> 00:15:24.393 Duane Lookingbill: Not necessarily outside his heuristic vision, but you're working on something that's your project and not his project. 104 00:15:26.953 --> 00:15:31.382 Paul Lewis: Yeah, I guess I see a couple of things. 105 00:15:33.633 --> 00:15:36.442 Paul Lewis: One is he's helpful, again, for 106 00:15:37.273 --> 00:15:40.783 Paul Lewis: For saying that all ethical reflection, Christian, Buddhist. 107 00:15:41.113 --> 00:15:42.733 Paul Lewis: rationalist whatever. 108 00:15:43.093 --> 00:15:51.983 Paul Lewis: makes certain… bears on… it's informed by tacit commitments, that we have learned over time. 109 00:15:52.543 --> 00:15:54.392 Paul Lewis: And that truth… 110 00:15:55.753 --> 00:16:02.482 Paul Lewis: You know, the search for truth, the search for goodness, the search for beauty, whatever. It's really a process. 111 00:16:03.483 --> 00:16:19.773 Paul Lewis: And, you know, that's helpful for me within the Christian tradition, to remind me that, Christian ethics, Christian doctrines are all really attempts at faithful innovation. That's why I called the book what I called. 112 00:16:19.773 --> 00:16:23.212 Duane Lookingbill: And that's your new book. That's not a that's just just so. Right? 113 00:16:23.213 --> 00:16:25.022 Paul Lewis: Yeah, yeah, 114 00:16:27.553 --> 00:16:36.223 Paul Lewis: One of my teachers in graduate school said the best theologians are always trying to balance two 115 00:16:36.843 --> 00:16:44.722 Paul Lewis: two competing tendencies. One is to… we're trying to hold on to two things at once. Maintain the integrity of the tradition. 116 00:16:44.983 --> 00:16:50.223 Paul Lewis: At the same time as it needs to be made intelligible to each new generation, right? 117 00:16:50.563 --> 00:16:51.593 Paul Lewis: Okay. 118 00:16:52.773 --> 00:17:05.572 Paul Lewis: And so part of the arguments in the history of theology, the history of Christian ethics, is whether these innovations are faithful or not. But we're always doing it. I mean, it's there in the biblical texts. 119 00:17:05.573 --> 00:17:10.632 Duane Lookingbill: And there's… and there's where Polanyi comes in, when I said he isn't just concentrated on 120 00:17:11.103 --> 00:17:16.762 Duane Lookingbill: But reason alone, because of this fiduciary component and fiduciary program, and… 121 00:17:17.403 --> 00:17:25.632 Duane Lookingbill: I don't… do you think he says faith is reason? Maybe that's the wrong question, but I'm just saying, my witness is totally in resonance with 122 00:17:25.953 --> 00:17:29.542 Duane Lookingbill: Where you're coming from, and what you're saying right now. 123 00:17:29.923 --> 00:17:30.673 Paul Lewis: And as as. 124 00:17:31.403 --> 00:17:43.072 Paul Lewis: As I'm talking, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I've relied on Polanyi's idea of dynamic orthodoxy, and maybe that's influenced my idea of faithful innovation. 125 00:17:43.073 --> 00:17:51.392 Duane Lookingbill: But again, so then how do you get newbies into dynamic orthodoxy? He's asked some good questions, hasn't he? 126 00:17:51.393 --> 00:17:58.423 Paul Lewis: Yeah, I mean, like, I teach an Engaging the New Testament class for freshmen. 127 00:17:59.133 --> 00:18:01.072 Paul Lewis: Which is mostly freshmen. 128 00:18:01.663 --> 00:18:08.542 Paul Lewis: And I'll say things like, okay, look at, look at, the prologue to John's Gospel. In the beginning was the Word. 129 00:18:08.723 --> 00:18:16.573 Paul Lewis: Okay, the word is, comes from the Greek Logos Stoic philosophy. 130 00:18:17.113 --> 00:18:20.243 Paul Lewis: And then, as the author of John's Gospel. 131 00:18:21.503 --> 00:18:35.033 Paul Lewis: keeps to talk about it, it resonates with what the Jewish tradition was referring to as Hokma, wisdom, right? So the author of John's Gospel is saying. 132 00:18:35.262 --> 00:18:39.823 Paul Lewis: What the Stoics call Logos, and what the Jewish people call Chokhmah. 133 00:18:40.203 --> 00:18:43.362 Paul Lewis: became human in Jesus. 134 00:18:43.813 --> 00:18:47.362 Paul Lewis: Now, there's some fierce innovation going on there. 135 00:18:47.643 --> 00:18:59.773 Paul Lewis: Right? In the biblical text. One of my other favorite examples is, in 1 Corinthians, where Paul's… I think it's 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul is. 136 00:19:01.273 --> 00:19:04.892 Paul Lewis: talking about sexual misconduct in the church in Corinth. 137 00:19:05.003 --> 00:19:14.433 Paul Lewis: And talking about divorce or not, and he says, hey, look, I have a word from the Lord on this. I know a saying of Jesus. No divorce. And he goes on a little bit, but… 138 00:19:14.793 --> 00:19:21.492 Paul Lewis: If you're married to an unbeliever, and the unbeliever wants out, divorce is okay. So he's just contradicted Jesus. 139 00:19:21.873 --> 00:19:30.212 Paul Lewis: And at the end of the chapter, he says, I think I too have the Spirit of God. I can hear him stomping his foot when he says that. But you know, even through the. 140 00:19:30.213 --> 00:19:30.553 Duane Lookingbill: the. 141 00:19:30.553 --> 00:19:32.143 Paul Lewis: There's this kind of… 142 00:19:32.863 --> 00:19:52.713 Paul Lewis: Struggle to connect the tradition with, the situation, the questions and the resources, that we've had. Again, Thomas Aquinas is a, another perfect example. How do I square this Aristotelian philosophy with the platonic Christianity that I, have inherited? Yeah. 143 00:19:52.823 --> 00:19:53.563 Paul Lewis: Sorry. 144 00:19:53.953 --> 00:19:54.763 Paul Lewis: Dick. 145 00:19:57.913 --> 00:20:03.343 marymoodey: For me, And this is a very personal position, I know. 146 00:20:03.783 --> 00:20:09.753 marymoodey: The core of Polanyi's ethics is that Discussions ought to be convivial. 147 00:20:11.353 --> 00:20:17.253 marymoodey: And that… Why is that… why do I consider that to be a norm? 148 00:20:17.753 --> 00:20:21.173 marymoodey: You know, some kind of a rule that I think. 149 00:20:21.543 --> 00:20:28.873 marymoodey: As a practice, we do try to follow, so there's a certain sense in which I'm going back to this idea of 150 00:20:29.283 --> 00:20:36.542 marymoodey: of what Polanians try to do, and I think one of the things that we try to do is to keep our discussions convivial. 151 00:20:36.883 --> 00:20:37.453 Paul Lewis: Okay. 152 00:20:37.453 --> 00:20:46.422 marymoodey: And that notion of discussion, I think, is really important from a Polanyi perspective because he places so much emphasis upon 153 00:20:46.633 --> 00:20:50.122 marymoodey: the model of scientific discussion. 154 00:20:50.333 --> 00:20:50.953 Paul Lewis: Okay. 155 00:20:51.453 --> 00:20:57.003 marymoodey: as a prototype for discussions in other institutional domains. 156 00:20:57.833 --> 00:21:02.493 marymoodey: And so I think that in some ways, For Polanyi. 157 00:21:02.763 --> 00:21:12.422 marymoodey: truth always emerges somehow in those kinds of interactions, those kinds of discussions, and that the ideal for those kinds of discussions 158 00:21:12.913 --> 00:21:14.942 marymoodey: Is that they be convivial. 159 00:21:15.223 --> 00:21:16.372 marymoodey: And of course. 160 00:21:16.593 --> 00:21:29.242 marymoodey: That's open to different kinds of interpretations. And yet in practice, we reach some kind of working agreement about what we mean by being convivial as opposed to not being convivial. 161 00:21:29.243 --> 00:21:29.923 Paul Lewis: 2, 162 00:21:30.343 --> 00:21:42.063 Paul Lewis: And I think central to that is something that you mentioned, is we're all committed to trying to better understand what is the truth about these matters. You know, we may not have 163 00:21:42.833 --> 00:21:48.792 Paul Lewis: the complete answer. And we may not ever have the complete answer, but we can… we can get better answers. 164 00:21:54.133 --> 00:22:02.013 Paul Lewis: Again, kind of going back to something we talked about in the last video, Reality is always gonna. 165 00:22:02.173 --> 00:22:05.812 Paul Lewis: Reveal itself to us in always new ways. 166 00:22:07.713 --> 00:22:17.163 Allen Dyer: Well, you stress that in your paper, Paul, about the incompleteness, the inevitable incompleteness of tacit understanding. 167 00:22:17.163 --> 00:22:19.693 marymoodey: Yeah. Yeah. 168 00:22:19.883 --> 00:22:25.072 Paul Lewis: And so the… the challenge is to… how to maintain this commitment to 169 00:22:26.163 --> 00:22:33.143 Paul Lewis: The process to truth, etc, knowing that our answers are always going to be partial. 170 00:22:34.813 --> 00:22:38.013 Paul Lewis: Doesn't mean they're false, they're just partial. 171 00:22:46.623 --> 00:22:47.613 Gus Breytspraak: Gary? 172 00:22:47.613 --> 00:22:48.433 marymoodey: Yeah. 173 00:22:48.673 --> 00:22:53.812 marymoodey: I have some muddled thoughts brewing. 174 00:22:54.093 --> 00:23:00.852 marymoodey: From… Why haven't… We developed a systematic. 175 00:23:01.453 --> 00:23:02.293 marymoodey: A. 176 00:23:02.933 --> 00:23:17.163 marymoodey: a definitive and make, pedagogy or thought process of Polanyi's ethics And… 177 00:23:17.273 --> 00:23:28.353 marymoodey: And I'm thinking, and this ties in… sort of with the Dialogues emerging from scientific thought. 178 00:23:28.883 --> 00:23:29.893 marymoodey: And. 179 00:23:30.123 --> 00:23:41.382 marymoodey: and movements that we see in history and art and language, that there's a fluidity and a constant 180 00:23:41.663 --> 00:23:48.493 marymoodey: evolution where words don't aren't locked into 181 00:23:48.873 --> 00:23:57.722 marymoodey: a specific meaning, and and I'm always finding it fascinating how words evolve and new meanings. 182 00:23:57.903 --> 00:24:02.262 marymoodey: emerge. And so I think. 183 00:24:02.993 --> 00:24:09.683 marymoodey: A systematic approach could almost limit 184 00:24:11.453 --> 00:24:13.973 marymoodey: the discussion. 185 00:24:14.003 --> 00:24:28.682 marymoodey: I think about a system of scales that we had the octave for so long, and then Schoenberg comes along and says, aha, what about a 12-tone scale? So he breaks from the system, and in education. 186 00:24:28.683 --> 00:24:45.983 marymoodey: when we have teachable moments, usually they're breaking out of the system of scope and sequence, and they take a new pathway, and more discussion comes out, and perhaps 187 00:24:46.533 --> 00:24:49.182 marymoodey: That's a muddled way. 188 00:24:49.403 --> 00:24:54.322 marymoodey: To say, perhaps this is why. 189 00:24:57.673 --> 00:24:58.343 Paul Lewis: Oh. 190 00:24:58.903 --> 00:24:59.753 Paul Lewis: Bill. 191 00:25:00.593 --> 00:25:02.033 Paul Lewis: Did I see you raise your hand? 192 00:25:02.033 --> 00:25:12.063 mullins: Yeah, I was going to go in a little different direction here. I do think Polanyi is complicated and that's probably one of the reasons he hasn't been mined. 193 00:25:12.473 --> 00:25:27.593 mullins: quite as much in what we call ethics as he could. But I think there are parts of Polanyi that, really, those of us who take Polanyi seriously need to work more on and make more 194 00:25:28.003 --> 00:25:41.333 mullins: available, or at least get in the discussion with a broader circle of people. I think embedded in Polanyi is a certain notion of moral agency. 195 00:25:41.483 --> 00:25:45.032 mullins: And we really haven't, laid that out 196 00:25:45.123 --> 00:26:00.522 mullins: very clearly. And of course, it's all tied up with evolution and with the emergence of human beings and this whole theme about emergence, which people like Charlie have been working on. 197 00:26:00.593 --> 00:26:20.273 mullins: I really think we need to, sort of help people by, in some ways, digging in and sorting out, some, more… somewhat more clearly how Polanyi thinks about, moral agency. And the other thing that I think, is really, in some ways more, 198 00:26:20.573 --> 00:26:37.202 mullins: sort of social and political. I think there's a moral vision in Polanyi of the good society and the good life. And, Paul, you do an excellent job of sort of unpacking, I think. 199 00:26:37.313 --> 00:26:52.373 mullins: what Polanyi sort of thinks about the good life, he thinks of it in terms of his experience in the scientific community as a discoverer, and that motif of discovering is a sort of, 200 00:26:52.853 --> 00:27:12.632 mullins: right in the middle of things, it seems to me. And he thinks that that happens in a certain in a society that's organized in a certain way. Now, Polanyi's notion of how society should be organized, I think is not likely to be very popular in the social and political discussions of today. 201 00:27:12.903 --> 00:27:19.032 mullins: So those are two areas that I think just might be worth mining. 202 00:27:21.793 --> 00:27:27.833 Paul Lewis: Yeah, yeah, I don't know where… quite where to begin. 203 00:27:28.353 --> 00:27:35.403 Paul Lewis: With all of that, Again, I've tried to set some pointers there. 204 00:27:36.523 --> 00:27:39.773 Paul Lewis: You know, another thing that comes to mind. 205 00:27:39.893 --> 00:27:46.773 Paul Lewis: 2, and maybe this is something… That takes me back to. 206 00:27:47.533 --> 00:27:52.512 Paul Lewis: The first question, why did we destroy Europe, but also part of moral agency. One of the things 207 00:27:52.883 --> 00:27:56.872 Paul Lewis: That we need to remember is that evolutionarily, we're primates. 208 00:27:57.593 --> 00:28:08.512 Paul Lewis: We've got a primate heritage, and what primatologists have found out is that primates are really good at in-group cohesion and really bad at. 209 00:28:08.643 --> 00:28:10.793 Paul Lewis: Cooperating without groups. 210 00:28:12.313 --> 00:28:24.373 Paul Lewis: And so, Where we draw those lines between in and out, I think, are important. 211 00:28:27.293 --> 00:28:32.503 Paul Lewis: And I was gonna go somewhere with that, and I just lost it, so… But I guess. 212 00:28:32.503 --> 00:28:33.612 Allen Dyer: I checked that. 213 00:28:33.613 --> 00:28:33.983 Paul Lewis: Go ahead. 214 00:28:33.983 --> 00:28:45.723 Allen Dyer: I take that to be an important insight, because the whole question of evolution and emergence is both philosophical and biological, and the primate 215 00:28:46.233 --> 00:28:58.173 Allen Dyer: reminder, is a description of the world that we live in, and the experience that perplexes us, I think, perplexes us all at this moment in time. 216 00:28:58.173 --> 00:29:02.633 Paul Lewis: Well, and I think it's, it's, it's part of our embodiment, too. 217 00:29:03.133 --> 00:29:09.773 Paul Lewis: in many ways, and probably ways that we can't completely trace out. And so what… 218 00:29:09.913 --> 00:29:11.923 Paul Lewis: What becomes, you know, and… 219 00:29:12.773 --> 00:29:23.462 Paul Lewis: I think we still have a tendency to think in polarities, right? We're either prone to violence, or we're prone to cooperation. No, we're prone to both, and probably a lot of other things, too. 220 00:29:24.023 --> 00:29:31.282 Paul Lewis: And so the question, I think the real question is, what triggers cooperation? What triggers. 221 00:29:31.563 --> 00:29:37.782 Paul Lewis: triggers violence, you know, and it's usually some form of threat. 222 00:29:37.963 --> 00:29:39.203 Paul Lewis: And I think it's… 223 00:29:39.753 --> 00:29:45.273 Paul Lewis: You know, it's fairly obvious to say that a lot of people feel under threat these days. 224 00:29:46.823 --> 00:29:53.902 Paul Lewis: different groups feel like… I mean, some groups feel under threat. 225 00:29:54.123 --> 00:30:03.652 Paul Lewis: because of DEI stuff. Other groups feel under threat because of the dissolution of democratic norms. 226 00:30:05.813 --> 00:30:11.832 Paul Lewis: You know, and that's going to increase potentially violent behavior. 227 00:30:12.153 --> 00:30:15.213 Paul Lewis: And I don't know, you know, one of the things 228 00:30:16.583 --> 00:30:21.013 Paul Lewis: that… and probably somebody has written on this, and I'm just not familiar with it. 229 00:30:21.123 --> 00:30:24.543 Paul Lewis: But the question why we destroyed Europe. 230 00:30:26.883 --> 00:30:30.973 Paul Lewis: Certainly there are ideas involved, but what about the institutions? 231 00:30:31.083 --> 00:30:33.932 Paul Lewis: that enabled this. 232 00:30:34.653 --> 00:30:37.083 Paul Lewis: You know, World War II is in part 233 00:30:37.783 --> 00:30:43.352 Paul Lewis: a product of the Treaty of… after World War I. 234 00:30:44.103 --> 00:30:54.883 Paul Lewis: People are jumping around on my screen. I'm getting lost here. Right. So what are the institutions and practices that carry these ideas and perpetuate them? 235 00:30:54.883 --> 00:31:04.782 Paul Lewis: You know, lots been written about how conservative think tanks have influenced current Republican politics. 236 00:31:04.873 --> 00:31:10.933 Paul Lewis: I don't know. I think that's an important part of this too. And I see a bunch of hands. I don't know who was first. 237 00:31:11.623 --> 00:31:18.913 Gus Breytspraak: Yeah, Craig, I can't, and there are two others, and then we can get back to Mary again. 238 00:31:19.833 --> 00:31:28.722 Craig Wickstrom: Yeah, I just had a question, you know, what if… what if trying to develop a Polanyian ethics is a mistake? 239 00:31:28.873 --> 00:31:39.593 Craig Wickstrom: Maybe we just need to see Polanyi as a tool, his thinking as a tool to developing ethics. I mean, that's what you described, Paul, is how you use Polanyi. 240 00:31:40.263 --> 00:31:48.903 Craig Wickstrom: And maybe the complexity is such that developing a quote-unquote Polanyi and ethics. 241 00:31:49.313 --> 00:31:52.913 Craig Wickstrom: Is… a mistake? 242 00:31:53.023 --> 00:31:57.512 Craig Wickstrom: Perhaps? I mean, I don't know what a Polanyian ethics would be. 243 00:31:59.013 --> 00:32:09.282 Craig Wickstrom: I mean, yeah, I'm not an ethicist, so I don't know, you know, do you… can you define an ethics, this… this kind of an ethics, and that kind of an ethics, and… and so on, so… 244 00:32:09.633 --> 00:32:11.612 Craig Wickstrom: Anyways, that's a question. 245 00:32:11.613 --> 00:32:12.563 Paul Lewis: Yeah, I mean… 246 00:32:13.103 --> 00:32:24.522 Paul Lewis: I see Polanyi, you know, if the traditional classifications of ethics are deontological, teleological, or erotaic, you know. 247 00:32:24.523 --> 00:32:35.203 Paul Lewis: duty-centered, consequence-centered, or virtue-centered. I think Polanyi's better fits with a virtue ethic or a character ethic than anything else. But… 248 00:32:35.433 --> 00:32:47.052 Paul Lewis: Proponents of those ethics tend to all get all snobby and criticize each other. And I think Polani says it really helps us figure out hey, all of these things are important. Who we are is important. 249 00:32:47.433 --> 00:32:55.833 Paul Lewis: The principles that we discern are relevant to a situation are important. Calculating consequence is important. All this stuff is important. 250 00:32:55.833 --> 00:33:08.023 Paul Lewis: And it can't be decided in advance. It's got to be focused on finding what's the fitting response to whatever situation we're talking about. I think Polanyi helps. 251 00:33:09.273 --> 00:33:11.583 Paul Lewis: Bring about a more comprehensive ethic. 252 00:33:17.643 --> 00:33:26.352 Gus Breytspraak: Duane, and then, Mary, and then I have… I can't raise my hand, but I have a question, too, so… Duane? 253 00:33:26.633 --> 00:33:34.632 Duane Lookingbill: Yes, you know, Phil was talking about taking Polanyi seriously, and, I think another 254 00:33:34.903 --> 00:33:37.463 Duane Lookingbill: Aspect of that is, 255 00:33:37.993 --> 00:33:42.673 Duane Lookingbill: You know, you mentioned that Polanyi's difficult or complicated, but it's. 256 00:33:42.993 --> 00:33:47.732 Duane Lookingbill: Maybe he's more radical than we're prepared at first. 257 00:33:47.863 --> 00:33:53.112 Duane Lookingbill: to receive And, how do you… 258 00:33:53.773 --> 00:34:02.033 Duane Lookingbill: Is that a… is that a first foot forward radicality? Doesn't that… is that. 259 00:34:02.843 --> 00:34:07.532 Duane Lookingbill: An incite… an inciting of… of this convivial. 260 00:34:07.743 --> 00:34:12.293 Duane Lookingbill: Engagement, or is that… is that… Is that. 261 00:34:12.683 --> 00:34:19.803 Duane Lookingbill: to, obscure, or… I don't know that it would be fair to say it's off-putting, but… 262 00:34:19.983 --> 00:34:23.303 Duane Lookingbill: Is it… is the whole business that there's… 263 00:34:23.473 --> 00:34:27.423 Duane Lookingbill: Sort of like a loss of… of, 264 00:34:28.183 --> 00:34:40.702 Duane Lookingbill: what comes before us, and that when we only talk about what's come after what's come before us, we were sort of dislocated, displaced. And we don't really know 265 00:34:41.493 --> 00:34:44.902 Duane Lookingbill: What a radical approach to our situation. 266 00:34:45.483 --> 00:34:49.522 Duane Lookingbill: You know, is, and… and how do you… how do you communicate 267 00:34:49.713 --> 00:34:52.063 Duane Lookingbill: Something to someone if they don't know 268 00:34:52.243 --> 00:34:55.402 Duane Lookingbill: What it is, I mean, you can get them to question, what is it? 269 00:34:55.463 --> 00:34:59.783 Duane Lookingbill: But how do you… I mean, is there something… do you follow me at all? 270 00:34:59.823 --> 00:35:19.553 Duane Lookingbill: He's more radical, and that does something to us. And that's… I don't know if that's a problem or not. Certainly, war is a problem, but how do you get people to say, we have a problem with war? Why do we keep suppressing that, or why do we keep ignoring that, or why do we keep making light of that? 271 00:35:19.643 --> 00:35:23.233 Duane Lookingbill: And, you can get engagement. 272 00:35:23.433 --> 00:35:32.282 Duane Lookingbill: But… But the problem solving is going to be more complicated and more radical than I think at first. 273 00:35:32.453 --> 00:35:33.822 Duane Lookingbill: We're gonna take… 274 00:35:38.523 --> 00:35:39.653 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 275 00:35:40.693 --> 00:35:44.762 Paul Lewis: Although part of me wishes that we would just focus on. 276 00:35:45.313 --> 00:35:46.723 Paul Lewis: Problem solving. 277 00:35:47.733 --> 00:35:50.513 Paul Lewis: Right? We get too ideological. 278 00:35:51.043 --> 00:35:54.733 Paul Lewis: In, in many ways. 279 00:35:56.423 --> 00:36:04.172 Paul Lewis: And again, I don't remember if I mentioned it in this piece or somewhere else. I mean, Toulmin and Johnson, in their book, The Abuse of Casuistry. 280 00:36:04.773 --> 00:36:07.133 Paul Lewis: talk about. 281 00:36:07.853 --> 00:36:16.402 Paul Lewis: I'm guessing it was Johnson, I don't remember who it was, was on a national panel doing bioeth… setting bioethics policy. 282 00:36:16.493 --> 00:36:30.343 Paul Lewis: And the short version, at least my memory without looking at the text in a long time, the short version is, you know, this was a diverse group of people, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, religious, non-religious, all over the map. 283 00:36:30.973 --> 00:36:39.633 Paul Lewis: And if they… concentrated on solving a particular problem. They could come to agreement. 284 00:36:39.953 --> 00:36:57.272 Paul Lewis: Once they started talking about why they thought X, Y, or Z was the right course of action, then all hell broke loose, because then all these different, theoretical, philosophical, theological convictions came out, and none of them would necessarily cohere. So then you end up trying to 285 00:36:57.423 --> 00:37:05.833 Paul Lewis: convince everybody of the… of the specific ground, that, you know, we all have to agree theoretically in order to… to say, hey, look. 286 00:37:06.453 --> 00:37:11.333 Paul Lewis: We need to have a better way of, distributing water out west. 287 00:37:16.333 --> 00:37:17.373 Gus Breytspraak: Charlie. 288 00:37:19.023 --> 00:37:20.113 Charles Lowney: Yeah. 289 00:37:20.533 --> 00:37:26.682 Charles Lowney: I, I enjoyed reading your piece. I think it gives a nice, desiderata for. 290 00:37:27.213 --> 00:37:34.412 Charles Lowney: or what a systematic ethics would look like. I have been working on one. 291 00:37:34.413 --> 00:37:35.872 Paul Lewis: I know you have. 292 00:37:36.093 --> 00:37:36.513 Charles Lowney: And. 293 00:37:36.513 --> 00:37:37.773 Paul Lewis: I can't wait to see it. 294 00:37:38.203 --> 00:37:42.543 Charles Lowney: I've got the three papers that you described that start 295 00:37:43.123 --> 00:37:48.083 Charles Lowney: start with Polanyi and the idea of scientific communities, and 296 00:37:48.513 --> 00:37:57.363 Charles Lowney: the kind of base in Aristotelianism, because with the idea of tacit knowledge works a lot like phronesis, or practical wisdom. 297 00:37:57.363 --> 00:37:57.923 Paul Lewis: Yep. 298 00:37:58.123 --> 00:38:01.553 Charles Lowney: And the importance of the community and developing skills. 299 00:38:02.083 --> 00:38:05.793 Charles Lowney: And discovery and seeking answers through. Yep. 300 00:38:05.903 --> 00:38:08.393 Charles Lowney: convivial discussion. 301 00:38:08.863 --> 00:38:24.022 Charles Lowney: So with those three papers, I start… started with it, looking at from science, basically his roots in the scientific community, just like you say in your paper, this is an important piece of Polanyi where it needs to start. 302 00:38:24.633 --> 00:38:40.503 Charles Lowney: And then where it diverges, and I mean, I call it emergentist ethics, because I think, you know, you look for better ways of being and better ways of being together, and that's the moral discovery that you make. 303 00:38:40.653 --> 00:38:47.232 Charles Lowney: I've worked on it through another paper on authenticity and the reconciliation of modernity. 304 00:38:47.623 --> 00:38:57.543 Charles Lowney: That's, that's another piece of it. And my work on, on Rawls, and this idea of comprehensive moral doctrines as far as visions of the good. 305 00:38:57.543 --> 00:38:57.973 Paul Lewis: Hmm. 306 00:38:57.973 --> 00:39:00.342 Charles Lowney: That comes in as well. 307 00:39:00.623 --> 00:39:05.022 Charles Lowney: And my work on, spirituality and another 308 00:39:05.373 --> 00:39:14.672 Charles Lowney: Type of morality that complements the kind of developing conventional naturalist kind into a transnatural sort of. 309 00:39:14.833 --> 00:39:29.323 Charles Lowney: because of who we are as full human beings, there's this other… other approach, too, through not… not necessarily… and this… this goes to, what Mary said about words not 310 00:39:29.753 --> 00:39:37.752 Charles Lowney: Not latching on to the same meanings throughout, because if you're in one comprehensive moral doctrine and system. 311 00:39:38.533 --> 00:39:48.842 Charles Lowney: And it has… it has its… just in science, like in science, it has its anomalies, things that don't quite fit, and you discover a better way of being, like. 312 00:39:48.953 --> 00:39:55.703 Charles Lowney: all men are equal are, like, literally all men, right? And then you find out, wait a minute. 313 00:39:56.213 --> 00:40:04.602 Charles Lowney: all human beings are. You change the understanding of the word man and the doctrine with the new 314 00:40:04.733 --> 00:40:11.433 Charles Lowney: Comprehensive view, a comprehensive morality that, right, without necessarily changing the words, and that can 315 00:40:11.693 --> 00:40:22.373 Charles Lowney: That can increase ambiguity, just like the word love can mean different things. It can be a selfish love, it can be agape, it can be… Right? Depending on the moral system you're rooted in. 316 00:40:22.503 --> 00:40:24.522 Charles Lowney: So I have this idea of. 317 00:40:24.843 --> 00:40:27.763 Charles Lowney: of emergentism, and I'm putting together 318 00:40:28.043 --> 00:40:32.132 Charles Lowney: what I hope will be a systematic. 319 00:40:32.423 --> 00:40:42.653 Charles Lowney: Polanyi ethic based on tacit knowledge and emergentism that he… he does, and I mean, it provides a great meta-ethic, and maybe this is part of the… 320 00:40:42.833 --> 00:40:47.852 Charles Lowney: why people say, well, can you really have an ethic in Polanyi, because 321 00:40:48.033 --> 00:40:54.222 Charles Lowney: His epistemology gives us a meta-ethic, or how we approach and get to ethics. 322 00:40:54.563 --> 00:41:03.943 Charles Lowney: But he also has his own, as Bill mentioned, his own, and you mentioned, his own vision of what the human being is and looks like, and 323 00:41:04.433 --> 00:41:05.193 Charles Lowney: that… 324 00:41:05.363 --> 00:41:17.893 Charles Lowney: that morphs into a particular ethic. And I think, like Paul said, I think from Polanyi's perspective, when you take seriously tacit knowing, when you take seriously emergentism. 325 00:41:18.213 --> 00:41:22.662 Charles Lowney: And this idea of telec fields and forces pulling us forward. 326 00:41:22.783 --> 00:41:32.683 Charles Lowney: You've got, you've got a way where you understand how deontological ethics, duty ethics, the law. 327 00:41:32.923 --> 00:41:45.002 Charles Lowney: How, utilitarian ethics and consequentialist ethics, and how virtue ethics, and how even sentimental sentiment theory, right? 328 00:41:45.003 --> 00:41:54.192 Charles Lowney: all come together, and, like, you've got each piece of the elephants that have been separated into different systems of ethics, so I think 329 00:41:54.243 --> 00:41:57.812 Charles Lowney: I think Polanyi does give you a more comprehensive view. 330 00:41:58.193 --> 00:42:03.382 Charles Lowney: And, and I've been, you know, talking about this with the Kansas City group. 331 00:42:03.863 --> 00:42:07.563 Charles Lowney: And, they've been giving me some feedback about 332 00:42:08.383 --> 00:42:16.893 Charles Lowney: elements that need to be there in order to develop a complete systematic view, and I think Paul's piece also does that. It gives me… 333 00:42:17.123 --> 00:42:21.723 Charles Lowney: I look at, okay, I've got to discuss the moral vision, I've got to discuss 334 00:42:21.883 --> 00:42:26.932 Charles Lowney: other areas of the map. But, I'm working on it, and, and. 335 00:42:27.083 --> 00:42:32.443 Charles Lowney: I don't know if it'll be definitive, but I should have a systematic 336 00:42:32.833 --> 00:42:38.953 Charles Lowney: Ethics from Science to Spirituality is the… is the tentative name of the book. 337 00:42:39.263 --> 00:42:44.053 Charles Lowney: Hopefully before the… End of next year. 338 00:42:47.003 --> 00:42:47.423 Gus Breytspraak: So. 339 00:42:47.423 --> 00:42:48.663 Charles Lowney: Wow. 340 00:42:49.113 --> 00:42:50.823 Gus Breytspraak: Paul, do you want to? 341 00:42:51.133 --> 00:43:00.543 Gus Breytspraak: respond to that. I have a question while we're waiting for, for Charlie's book about. 342 00:43:00.903 --> 00:43:05.523 Gus Breytspraak: One that's out there, and whether it would be appropriate 343 00:43:05.883 --> 00:43:10.263 Gus Breytspraak: For newbies, but did you have anything to respond? 344 00:43:10.733 --> 00:43:12.792 Paul Lewis: I just, you know, I… 345 00:43:12.983 --> 00:43:20.362 Paul Lewis: I, salute Charlie that work. I see it very much akin to all of my interests. 346 00:43:20.503 --> 00:43:24.603 Paul Lewis: And like I said, I look forward to reading the finished product. 347 00:43:25.583 --> 00:43:26.363 Paul Lewis: You know. 348 00:43:27.323 --> 00:43:34.842 Gus Breytspraak: So, my question, Paul, relates to the second big category of, of. 349 00:43:35.553 --> 00:43:54.622 Gus Breytspraak: the moral agent, and whether it would be understandable to your, to your students any longer. But, what about… and because Mel isn't here, and he's written a couple of books on this, of course, but what about H. Richard Niebuhr and the responsible self? 350 00:43:54.773 --> 00:44:02.902 Gus Breytspraak: Not a sort of systematic, but a fairly systematic overview of the 351 00:44:03.043 --> 00:44:12.523 Gus Breytspraak: of the self as moral agent. Is that compatible with Polanyi, and would that be understandable today to today's students? 352 00:44:12.913 --> 00:44:18.472 Paul Lewis: It's interesting you mention that book, because I'm teaching it right now in our junior-senior colloquium. 353 00:44:18.843 --> 00:44:26.762 Paul Lewis: And it's a hard read, for the students. Yeah. But they… they do resonate with. 354 00:44:27.093 --> 00:44:33.073 Paul Lewis: His questions, you know, about unity of self, you know, the… the… the… 355 00:44:33.753 --> 00:44:36.943 Paul Lewis: The challenge is getting them to think that we're all not just 356 00:44:37.223 --> 00:44:51.043 Paul Lewis: socially determined, right? That, no, there's still an… there's still a self, there's still an I, there's still an agency there, with what… how we respond to things. And at least from the conversation so far. 357 00:44:51.343 --> 00:44:57.162 Paul Lewis: that seems to… I see some light bulbs coming on there, right? I have some… 358 00:44:58.063 --> 00:45:03.093 Paul Lewis: agency over how I respond to all the actions that impinge upon me. 359 00:45:03.933 --> 00:45:04.723 Paul Lewis: No. 360 00:45:05.103 --> 00:45:13.243 Gus Breytspraak: But also, incorporating the, man the maker and, man the, you know, giving, giving. 361 00:45:13.343 --> 00:45:17.812 Gus Breytspraak: The, the tradition and the, and the answers that have been. 362 00:45:17.963 --> 00:45:22.583 Gus Breytspraak: Been discovered, and incorporating that into the fitting response. 363 00:45:22.863 --> 00:45:23.433 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 364 00:45:24.773 --> 00:45:28.453 Gus Breytspraak: So it's fairly systematic in a sense. 365 00:45:28.993 --> 00:45:37.153 Paul Lewis: Yeah, yeah. And Niebuhr alludes to Polanyi in that book. I don't remember if he quotes Polanyi or cites. 366 00:45:37.153 --> 00:45:43.813 Gus Breytspraak: I think he does once or twice, but we know from, from Mel's. 367 00:45:44.193 --> 00:45:56.813 Gus Breytspraak: first-person experience with him in those last years, as well as his research, that he was, certainly, quite interested in Polanyi. 368 00:45:57.183 --> 00:45:59.602 Gus Breytspraak: As he was working on that. 369 00:45:59.903 --> 00:46:09.882 Paul Lewis: Yeah. And, you know, I'm probably more explicitly influenced by Niebuhr and Niebuhr's student Gustafson when it comes to ethics. 370 00:46:09.883 --> 00:46:10.483 Allen Dyer: you. 371 00:46:10.483 --> 00:46:19.192 Paul Lewis: than Polanyi, although I first read Niebuhr in… as a senior in college in Phil's class, and I, you know, as… 372 00:46:19.843 --> 00:46:31.432 Paul Lewis: he was helping me deprogram from a lot of stuff, and he kept saying, well, you know, Polanyi helps out with this, too. So, you know, Phil kind of snuck Polanyi in, as an undergraduate there. 373 00:46:32.143 --> 00:46:33.073 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 374 00:46:33.073 --> 00:46:39.142 Gus Breytspraak: Well, I'm glad to hear it's still being read in the college classroom. Alan, you getting ready to say something? 375 00:46:39.863 --> 00:46:58.802 Allen Dyer: Yeah, well, what I wanted to say, going back to my newbie question, and I think some light bulbs went off for me in this, is that the question underlying the whole question about ethics, systematic or implicit or tacit or virtue, is 376 00:46:58.813 --> 00:47:09.082 Allen Dyer: how do we think about people who want to be moral? And one of the things for people who want to be moral is how do we deal with people when the sociopaths 377 00:47:09.133 --> 00:47:19.622 Allen Dyer: are taking over, and we have to figure out how to deal with them. So, and I think the… these wonderful discussions about 378 00:47:19.833 --> 00:47:30.372 Allen Dyer: What you're all doing in classrooms is sort of an invitation to transcend self-interest with a broader vision of what morality is. 379 00:47:33.973 --> 00:47:41.862 Paul Lewis: Yeah, it… Again, this is… this is gonna sound… 380 00:47:41.993 --> 00:47:44.253 Paul Lewis: I don't know how this is gonna sound, but… 381 00:47:44.753 --> 00:47:54.113 Paul Lewis: I'm teaching this semester, I mean, liberal arts context, I teach a little bit of everything. So I'm teaching engaging the Hebrew Bible. 382 00:47:54.153 --> 00:48:06.393 Paul Lewis: But I've layered onto Hebrew Bible the psychology of moral development, and particularly the work of James Rest and Darshan Arvaez and others. 383 00:48:06.443 --> 00:48:09.352 Paul Lewis: to talk about, if you read the Hebrew Bible. 384 00:48:09.473 --> 00:48:19.103 Paul Lewis: in a naive sort of way, law, prophets, writings. It invites us into a process of moral development, to put aside self-interest. 385 00:48:19.103 --> 00:48:32.533 Paul Lewis: to start focusing on social norms, but self-interest tends to distort social norms and everything. And so, eventually, it points us towards wisdom. If you read the writings. 386 00:48:32.543 --> 00:48:34.422 Paul Lewis: It's the most… 387 00:48:34.653 --> 00:48:51.003 Paul Lewis: diverse, argumentative section of the Hebrew Bible. There's almost no agreement among the writers of the books or in the writings. And so I set it up as a series of debates. You know, what do we do? 388 00:48:51.463 --> 00:49:00.282 Paul Lewis: How do we respond to God after the exile? Well, I think in the book of Job, Job walks away from God at the end. Ecclesiastes. 389 00:49:00.743 --> 00:49:07.302 Paul Lewis: tip your hat to God, but just, you know, grab the most… get the most out of it that you can. 390 00:49:07.383 --> 00:49:21.362 Paul Lewis: Song of Songs ignores God completely, right? How do you connect to a god after you have, gone through a horrible experience like exile? Or, what do you do when people are out to get you? 391 00:49:21.903 --> 00:49:29.463 Paul Lewis: if you take the… just take the Book of Esther at face value, you outwit the system and kill the SOBs before they kill you. 392 00:49:30.193 --> 00:49:33.772 Paul Lewis: If you pay attention to Daniel, you. 393 00:49:34.063 --> 00:49:38.572 Paul Lewis: You practice non-violent civil disobedience and let God take care of it in the afterlife. 394 00:49:38.813 --> 00:49:44.673 Paul Lewis: All right? And this is all stuff that's coming out of the debates as the Jewish people 395 00:49:44.963 --> 00:49:53.333 Paul Lewis: are going under, they're under Persian rule, and especially under the Greeks, under Antiochus. 396 00:49:53.963 --> 00:50:04.952 Paul Lewis: epiphanies, which I think is when Esther and Daniel are written as competing voices, right? And so, in many ways, the writings tell us, okay, how do we live 397 00:50:05.093 --> 00:50:13.112 Paul Lewis: How do we live in a world in which we're getting all kinds of competing advice from all kinds of competing sources and incompatible sources? 398 00:50:13.903 --> 00:50:21.323 Paul Lewis: Well, if you back up to Proverbs, that's where wisdom says, Hey, I'm setting a banquet for you. Come listen to me. We need wisdom. 399 00:50:21.573 --> 00:50:27.333 Paul Lewis: To live in this cacophonous world where nobody seems to agree on much of anything. 400 00:50:27.913 --> 00:50:33.142 Paul Lewis: And maybe that's… Part of the way to just recognize that. 401 00:50:33.903 --> 00:50:37.303 Paul Lewis: we do… this is the world we live in, I think. 402 00:50:37.423 --> 00:50:45.632 Paul Lewis: you know, the… the Wisdom literature represents the culture wars, so to speak, of post-exilic Judaism. 403 00:50:47.033 --> 00:50:54.242 Paul Lewis: And how do we make sense of that, and start raising those questions? And it raises the epistemological questions of. 404 00:50:55.133 --> 00:51:07.802 Paul Lewis: You know, what is truth, and what to do if your truth is different than my truth, which is basically where most college freshmen are. They're just… one of my friends likes to call them rampaging relativists. 405 00:51:09.483 --> 00:51:28.133 Paul Lewis: Right? And I also tell them, at least according to William Perry's theory, it's only by your junior or senior year that you're maybe starting to be willing to consider that there might be truths and convictions out there that I have to affirm for my own integrity. 406 00:51:28.363 --> 00:51:30.373 Paul Lewis: In a messy world. 407 00:51:30.713 --> 00:51:34.143 Paul Lewis: So it's an interesting developmental process. 408 00:51:38.013 --> 00:51:39.033 Allen Dyer: Wow. 409 00:51:39.723 --> 00:51:40.313 Allen Dyer: the. 410 00:51:44.633 --> 00:51:45.173 Craig Wickstrom: Yeah. 411 00:51:45.663 --> 00:51:47.493 Allen Dyer: I'd like to sign up for that course. 412 00:51:47.493 --> 00:51:47.993 Charles Lowney: Okay. 413 00:51:49.723 --> 00:51:50.882 Charles Lowney: Sounds like a great one. 414 00:51:51.473 --> 00:51:55.763 Allen Dyer: I've just put your two books on, or two or three on my list. 415 00:51:58.773 --> 00:52:02.222 Charles Lowney: What's the name of the James Rest book that you use? 416 00:52:03.763 --> 00:52:17.382 Paul Lewis: There's not a particular book, but there's a… usually it's… actually, the book that I have them read a chapter out of about rest is Elizabeth Vazzola's. 417 00:52:17.833 --> 00:52:18.603 Paul Lewis: Both. 418 00:52:22.803 --> 00:52:25.753 Paul Lewis: called Moral Development Theory and Applications. 419 00:52:27.753 --> 00:52:35.052 Paul Lewis: She was here as a speaker, as a speaker at Mercer a few years ago. She and I had a fun conversation. 420 00:52:36.673 --> 00:52:51.072 Paul Lewis: And one of the things that strikes me about psychology, my undergraduate degree is in psychology, and moral development has been an interest to me for a long time. The people who do the psychology of moral development don't really talk to the people who are doing the psychology of wisdom. 421 00:52:51.543 --> 00:52:52.973 Paul Lewis: Right, 422 00:52:53.583 --> 00:53:02.042 Paul Lewis: Sternberg, Baltes and Stavenger, and, you know, a whole bunch of other people. It'd be really interesting to see more of that, and Vizzola thought, well, that's right. 423 00:53:02.152 --> 00:53:06.643 Paul Lewis: Because she sort of hints at that direction in this book. 424 00:53:07.413 --> 00:53:08.163 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 425 00:53:08.553 --> 00:53:10.783 Allen Dyer: So there's… there's one… 426 00:53:11.723 --> 00:53:23.832 Allen Dyer: cute little story, I think, about an exchange I had with James Rest a number of years ago, looking at moral development. And he talks about, and this is a question for education, is can 427 00:53:23.833 --> 00:53:34.883 Allen Dyer: Through reading philosophy and thinking about moral development, can you help people move from a more conventional stage to a more post-conventional stage, more based on 428 00:53:35.232 --> 00:53:41.403 Allen Dyer: universal principles. And… and there are two groups of 429 00:53:41.713 --> 00:53:50.543 Allen Dyer: people who score very high on RESC's defining issues test, based on Kohlberg theories. And one is. 430 00:53:52.133 --> 00:54:05.313 Allen Dyer: and I'm hesitating in terms of which to say first. One is Methodist ministers. They score very… they score very high, as you would hope they would. The other group is prison psychopaths. 431 00:54:05.703 --> 00:54:25.332 Allen Dyer: People who have sort of figured out, but not quite figured out, how to game the system by thinking about it. And of course, the thing that I would say in James Rest's defense, and I think that he said, you know, when I pointed this out to him, is that these are very small groups and small numbers of people. 432 00:54:25.333 --> 00:54:31.763 Allen Dyer: that the generalizations are well worth considering. But this is kind of a… 433 00:54:32.033 --> 00:54:40.793 Allen Dyer: Shall we say a paradox that these two such diverse groups of people end up scoring both scoring very well on the defining issues test. 434 00:54:41.023 --> 00:54:41.693 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 435 00:54:41.753 --> 00:54:59.542 Paul Lewis: It makes me think… I've read a reference somewhere, and I've never been actually able to find the actual article, if it exists, but somebody did a parody one time. Rest is based on Kohlberg's theory of moral development. Kohlberg has 6 stages and 3 levels. 436 00:54:59.543 --> 00:55:12.462 Paul Lewis: And, at least at some point, as I understand it, Kohlberg almost despaired of Stage 6, because there weren't very many people that scored it, or something like that. Yeah. But. 437 00:55:12.603 --> 00:55:19.613 Paul Lewis: Someone wrote an article, a parody article, that said, how to reason at stage 6 and still be a son of a bitch. 438 00:55:22.083 --> 00:55:27.583 Paul Lewis: You know, we can… we can always rationalize something. And this is… this is part of what 439 00:55:27.913 --> 00:55:31.353 Paul Lewis: As I understand it, motivated rest. I know… 440 00:55:31.693 --> 00:55:38.523 Paul Lewis: I know Darshan Arvaez, who was one of REST students, and then his, his wife. 441 00:55:40.313 --> 00:55:45.333 Paul Lewis: You know, how do we… how do we get this… how do we bridge this gap between. 442 00:55:45.813 --> 00:55:49.333 Paul Lewis: Really sophisticated moral reasoning and really bad behavior. 443 00:55:49.633 --> 00:56:03.602 Paul Lewis: And that's where REST's four-component model came in. It's not just reasoning, but you've got to have sensitivity, you've got to have awareness, you've got to have motivation, you've got to care, and then you've got to have certain character dispositions. 444 00:56:04.143 --> 00:56:13.313 Paul Lewis: you know, it seems to me that, going back to Charlie and Aristotle, I think the psychologists are figuring out that Aristotle is… is righter than. 445 00:56:13.573 --> 00:56:16.153 Paul Lewis: A lot of us thought for a long time. 446 00:56:20.483 --> 00:56:24.052 Craig Wickstrom: Mary, Mary had a had something a long time ago. 447 00:56:24.053 --> 00:56:25.713 marymoodey: It was Dick. Me. 448 00:56:25.713 --> 00:56:26.193 Paul Lewis: Oh. 449 00:56:26.193 --> 00:56:27.423 Craig Wickstrom: Oh, it was Dick. Okay. 450 00:56:27.423 --> 00:56:37.472 marymoodey: Yeah, I… people have been talking around this and saying, I want to put it more bluntly than what I think has been put so far, and that is. 451 00:56:38.253 --> 00:56:44.522 marymoodey: Even the best… system of ethics, whether it's Polanyian or not. 452 00:56:44.963 --> 00:56:49.962 marymoodey: has very little effect upon the actions that political leaders take. 453 00:56:50.373 --> 00:56:51.823 marymoodey: And… 454 00:56:52.133 --> 00:57:04.753 marymoodey: You know, Alan talks about the sociopaths among us, and one of the things that is characteristics of sociopaths or psychopaths is that they are much more strongly 455 00:57:05.023 --> 00:57:09.032 marymoodey: motivated to seek political leadership. 456 00:57:09.333 --> 00:57:11.353 marymoodey: than empaths. 457 00:57:12.183 --> 00:57:24.092 marymoodey: And so one of the things that we're looking at right now in the world is that we've got a lot of the lead, a lot of the political leaders in the world are functioning psychopaths or sociopaths. 458 00:57:24.323 --> 00:57:26.812 marymoodey: They don't care about ethics. 459 00:57:27.413 --> 00:57:27.933 Paul Lewis: Bye-bye. 460 00:57:27.933 --> 00:57:32.583 marymoodey: They simply don't care about ethics, and they have a tremendous amount of power. And, you know. 461 00:57:32.803 --> 00:57:48.802 marymoodey: I'm not disparaging the effort to write better ethical systems. I think that's important. I'm not putting that down. What I'm saying is that no matter how good they are, they're not going to have much effect upon whether or not we destroy our world, or whether or not people 462 00:57:49.393 --> 00:57:58.662 marymoodey: destroyed in Polanyi's terms, destroyed Europe. You know, those were political actions that destroyed Europe, not the result of not good enough ethical systems. 463 00:58:02.333 --> 00:58:03.513 Charles Lowney: Hi, Charlie. 464 00:58:03.903 --> 00:58:19.593 Charles Lowney: I would just say that, I agree with Dick, but as long as you can keep the political leaders accountable, then you have some chance of having them behave ethically, because they want to stay in power. 465 00:58:19.913 --> 00:58:21.043 Charles Lowney: It's when… 466 00:58:21.613 --> 00:58:34.052 Charles Lowney: Society develops to the point where they can stay in power without being accountable to the general population that might be persuaded by ethics as well as their own interests. 467 00:58:34.343 --> 00:58:41.653 Charles Lowney: that you can have some control over the psychopaths in power. I mean, they don't… They… 468 00:58:42.093 --> 00:58:48.643 Charles Lowney: They have to be accountable somehow, and the worry is that we're moving towards a kind of government with 469 00:58:48.843 --> 00:58:57.323 Charles Lowney: AI and propaganda that insulates the psychopathic leaders with their egoistic self-interest from 470 00:58:57.623 --> 00:59:03.253 Charles Lowney: Being accountable, because they can manipulate the situation in such a way where they can always 471 00:59:03.423 --> 00:59:09.063 Charles Lowney: Get their will instead of the moral will of the people instantiated. 472 00:59:09.413 --> 00:59:09.942 marymoodey: I agree. 473 00:59:09.943 --> 00:59:10.753 Charles Lowney: I agree. 474 00:59:10.753 --> 00:59:11.193 marymoodey: know. 475 00:59:11.193 --> 00:59:11.863 Paul Lewis: Yeah, and I… 476 00:59:11.863 --> 00:59:12.333 Charles Lowney: the. 477 00:59:12.333 --> 00:59:13.463 Paul Lewis: And I want to say that. 478 00:59:13.463 --> 00:59:14.163 Charles Lowney: the. 479 00:59:14.163 --> 00:59:20.913 Paul Lewis: You know, there are certainly any system has its limits, but to the extent that it gives us 480 00:59:21.513 --> 00:59:26.763 Paul Lewis: A vision of… Flourishing? Do you… going back to… 481 00:59:26.993 --> 00:59:32.722 Paul Lewis: kind of an Aristotelian language, you know, a vision of flourishing, a vision of, of. 482 00:59:33.033 --> 00:59:40.282 Paul Lewis: A universe, or at least an ecosystem that's working well so that all the parts of it can thrive. 483 00:59:41.623 --> 00:59:55.802 Paul Lewis: and can give a motivation to that, I think systems have value. No system will ever be able to give us an algorithm to say, this is the right thing to do at this period of time. So systems 484 00:59:56.113 --> 00:59:56.953 Paul Lewis: Yep. 485 00:59:57.123 --> 01:00:04.343 Paul Lewis: Steve Fehr & clearly have their limits, but I also think they have their value. I think, you know, talking politics right now, the… 486 01:00:04.783 --> 01:00:08.542 Paul Lewis: The thing that scares me, or worries me, or makes me… 487 01:00:08.693 --> 01:00:11.293 Paul Lewis: Wonder about all these things, you know. 488 01:00:11.623 --> 01:00:13.912 Paul Lewis: Why the checks and balances? 489 01:00:14.503 --> 01:00:18.543 Paul Lewis: That have been built into democracy, why they're… they're failing. 490 01:00:18.983 --> 01:00:25.663 Paul Lewis: And I wonder if part of it is, again, that we have not, adequately 491 01:00:26.303 --> 01:00:31.633 Paul Lewis: brought new generations into the virtues necessary to maintain. 492 01:00:31.773 --> 01:00:45.522 Paul Lewis: democracy, and Jeff Stout talks about democracy as a series of practices of, giving… asking questions and giving answers in convivial sorts of ways. And somewhere along the way. 493 01:00:45.693 --> 01:00:55.702 Paul Lewis: the institutions that fostered that have cracked and shattered, or at least cracked, maybe shattered, I don't know. Some of them maybe hold. 494 01:00:55.853 --> 01:00:58.342 Paul Lewis: That's why… Yeah, go ahead. 495 01:00:58.343 --> 01:01:01.562 mullins: John Hess has got his hand up and, 496 01:01:02.063 --> 01:01:08.312 mullins: I want to be sure he gets in there. Remember, John has lived in Poland for 30 years, and. 497 01:01:11.123 --> 01:01:18.663 jphess: Yeah, I guess what I was… thinking in… in the discussion. 498 01:01:19.513 --> 01:01:26.572 jphess: On… I'm going back to my dissertation and also my experience here in this part of the world. 499 01:01:27.623 --> 01:01:30.983 jphess: But… There were no systems. 500 01:01:32.033 --> 01:01:34.673 jphess: Accept absolute power. 501 01:01:35.023 --> 01:01:35.713 Paul Lewis: if we… 502 01:01:36.233 --> 01:01:42.182 jphess: When you read about the Hungarian Revolution and what happened in the years prior to that, it was 503 01:01:42.303 --> 01:01:47.033 jphess: The most devoted, maybe I should say devout communists. 504 01:01:47.633 --> 01:01:50.232 jphess: Who suddenly found themselves. 505 01:01:51.183 --> 01:01:52.523 jphess: In the can. 506 01:01:52.623 --> 01:01:55.393 jphess: And it was not very nice. 507 01:01:57.073 --> 01:02:00.282 jphess: And in that process. 508 01:02:03.063 --> 01:02:05.783 jphess: Some of them had lights come on. 509 01:02:08.123 --> 01:02:11.953 jphess: And when they got… when they got released later. 510 01:02:12.813 --> 01:02:16.993 jphess: on They began to connect with one another. 511 01:02:17.473 --> 01:02:22.752 jphess: But they had… they had, through this experience of the lights coming on. 512 01:02:23.323 --> 01:02:28.722 jphess: They had suddenly found freedom. It didn't matter about the political system. 513 01:02:29.333 --> 01:02:30.802 jphess: They were free. 514 01:02:33.873 --> 01:02:42.552 jphess: And… That kind of just went… It kind of had a. 515 01:02:42.963 --> 01:02:47.103 jphess: You know, a dynamo effect, you know, just the, the, they fell. 516 01:02:48.433 --> 01:02:51.952 jphess: And, When you read about 517 01:02:52.493 --> 01:02:59.293 jphess: You know, like, I think he mentions… Polanyi mentions this meeting that happened in front of the Congress of the 518 01:02:59.553 --> 01:03:01.443 jphess: of the writers. 519 01:03:01.553 --> 01:03:04.932 jphess: And thousands and thousands of people came there. 520 01:03:05.113 --> 01:03:08.572 jphess: And it's like the light was coming on. 521 01:03:10.213 --> 01:03:12.833 jphess: And, you know, I don't know how much. 522 01:03:13.453 --> 01:03:28.753 jphess: It's almost like they there was this exit, I can use the word existential experience people had where they suddenly rose above everything they had believed before because they were they hit the wall of reality. 523 01:03:31.483 --> 01:03:32.723 jphess: And… 524 01:03:34.483 --> 01:03:41.593 jphess: So my question is, how much of this goes down to, you know, elaborate systems and ethics and things like that, but… 525 01:03:41.973 --> 01:03:48.473 jphess: And they're in the in the long run, somehow people come up against moral reality. 526 01:03:49.223 --> 01:03:54.323 jphess: And I'm not going to define that, except I believe it exists. 527 01:03:57.193 --> 01:04:04.292 jphess: But that was really what happened. What happened in the Hungarian Revolution. But when we had the, you know, the. 528 01:04:04.763 --> 01:04:09.382 jphess: 89 autumn. It was just one right after the other. 529 01:04:09.493 --> 01:04:12.762 jphess: And I think people's lights came on. 530 01:04:13.983 --> 01:04:23.052 jphess: And they began to realize there's something… it wasn't that they saw the light, the lie, as much as they began to see the truth. 531 01:04:23.273 --> 01:04:23.833 Paul Lewis: you. 532 01:04:25.323 --> 01:04:27.032 jphess: That would be my remarks. 533 01:04:39.813 --> 01:04:42.542 Paul Lewis: That kind of makes me wonder. 534 01:04:46.783 --> 01:04:52.473 Paul Lewis: Are… are we at a… as a… culture. 535 01:04:53.353 --> 01:04:59.312 Paul Lewis: Is this part of the process of coming to what you call the wall of moral reality? 536 01:05:00.433 --> 01:05:04.863 Paul Lewis: And it… You kind of wonder. 537 01:05:05.913 --> 01:05:10.043 Paul Lewis: What's gonna happen when you get there, and how do you rebuild things afterwards? 538 01:05:13.393 --> 01:05:15.653 Allen Dyer: What occurs to me about 539 01:05:15.823 --> 01:05:26.403 Allen Dyer: that observation, John, and I think it's a very important one, looking back to the Hungarian Revolution and looking back to what's happened in Hungary more recently. 540 01:05:26.523 --> 01:05:38.363 Allen Dyer: Finally, after 16 years, getting rid of Orban. The way in which Polanyi might be helpful in terms of dealing with authoritarianism 541 01:05:38.843 --> 01:05:47.333 Allen Dyer: is the recognition… it's almost, to use a medical metaphor, it's almost like an inoculation. Once you have… have… 542 01:05:47.463 --> 01:05:55.713 Allen Dyer: imbued what Polanyi is trying to say, as a scientist, that the kind of objectivity 543 01:05:57.073 --> 01:06:07.752 Allen Dyer: is a false ideal, and we have to ask a more basic question. Why do we… how do we know what we know, and why do we believe what we believe? His reminder. 544 01:06:08.013 --> 01:06:09.053 Allen Dyer: that we… 545 01:06:09.163 --> 01:06:18.403 Allen Dyer: preface every declarative sentence with, I believe that, and when we see people doing just the opposite, trying to hoodwink us in some way or another with 546 01:06:18.893 --> 01:06:28.343 Allen Dyer: promoting things that we don't believe, and we don't think they believe, as if that's a reality. Then we're… 547 01:06:28.673 --> 01:06:32.073 Allen Dyer: We're more cautious, we're more skeptical. 548 01:06:40.563 --> 01:06:49.463 Charles Lowney: One… observation I had from the last time we, we, we met here with, Alan speaking. 549 01:06:49.683 --> 01:06:53.263 Charles Lowney: And we were talking about moral inversion, and the idea that 550 01:06:53.803 --> 01:06:57.793 Charles Lowney: It's not just on the right, it's on the left as well. 551 01:06:58.173 --> 01:07:05.162 Charles Lowney: Right? And there's kind of this battle of moral inversions, and they're the extremes, the extreme sides of both. 552 01:07:05.413 --> 01:07:15.123 Charles Lowney: And one, I think, key that I think Paul brought out when he talked about how no one can agree when we get down to the ideology part of it. 553 01:07:16.783 --> 01:07:17.833 Charles Lowney: Is that… 554 01:07:17.963 --> 01:07:29.993 Charles Lowney: There's a utopianism on both sides. There's the illusion of going to a nostalgic past that didn't exist, make America great again. Right? And that's a utopianism. 555 01:07:30.543 --> 01:07:31.603 Charles Lowney: That… 556 01:07:31.763 --> 01:07:42.043 Charles Lowney: Collects the moral passion on one side, and can lead to moral excesses, the undermining of democracy, etc, right? 557 01:07:42.803 --> 01:07:47.912 Charles Lowney: And on the other side, there's a utopianism of complete equality and equity. 558 01:07:48.163 --> 01:07:53.993 Charles Lowney: When we've got traditions and other things and limitations that need to be 559 01:07:54.183 --> 01:07:57.623 Charles Lowney: Limits on that, too, because, 560 01:07:58.113 --> 01:08:00.992 Charles Lowney: But if you have that utopianism and you don't… 561 01:08:01.243 --> 01:08:11.403 Charles Lowney: Don't recognize the value of the traditions that have values that are different, and allow them into the conversation, but want to override that, and just… 562 01:08:11.693 --> 01:08:29.572 Charles Lowney: push towards those ideals, and I think someone said it today, where DEI is considered a threat from the right side, and the, and I saw a car the other day with Dems are haters on it, driving down the highway, right? Then you… you can… 563 01:08:29.743 --> 01:08:45.093 Charles Lowney: use your moral passion on this side to override and say, well, we've gotta… we've gotta just eliminate that threat on the right, and tamp it down, and don't listen to them, and cut them off, and… and, what do you call it again when you don't… 564 01:08:45.293 --> 01:08:47.163 Charles Lowney: you, you… Oh. 565 01:08:47.633 --> 01:09:01.202 Charles Lowney: you diss them, or you cancel them, right? And that's the moral inversion threat on the left. So you've got moral inversion threats on the left and the right that need to be 566 01:09:01.893 --> 01:09:05.502 Charles Lowney: navigated in a morality that works. 567 01:09:08.143 --> 01:09:09.782 Craig Wickstrom: I think, I think that… 568 01:09:10.093 --> 01:09:19.123 Craig Wickstrom: The issue on both sides is, wanting to define reality in absolute terms. The idealism. You know. 569 01:09:19.123 --> 01:09:20.033 Charles Lowney: Oh, fine. 570 01:09:20.063 --> 01:09:20.703 Craig Wickstrom: Yeah. 571 01:09:20.703 --> 01:09:24.153 Paul Lewis: Or it's the ends justifies the means. 572 01:09:24.153 --> 01:09:24.583 Charles Lowney: Okay. 573 01:09:24.583 --> 01:09:32.432 Paul Lewis: You know, yeah, the utopianism, Fosters a kind of authoritarianism. 574 01:09:35.653 --> 01:09:44.353 Charles Lowney: Right? And one side sees it as, oh, the left are totalitarians, and the other side sees it, oh, the right are authoritarians. 575 01:09:44.573 --> 01:09:45.723 Charles Lowney: Dictators. 576 01:09:50.173 --> 01:09:51.443 Paul Lewis: The irony is that. 577 01:09:51.543 --> 01:09:53.993 Paul Lewis: You know, these days. 578 01:09:54.163 --> 01:10:03.062 Paul Lewis: The right wants to control speech just as much as they claim that the left wanted to control speech. And very few people appreciate the hypocrisy of that. 579 01:10:06.373 --> 01:10:14.432 jphess: I wonder… Two of a part of it is there needs to be… That whole sense of. 580 01:10:15.633 --> 01:10:19.823 jphess: Embracing the responsibility for our beliefs. 581 01:10:29.423 --> 01:10:33.123 marymoodey: I wanted to go back to something that Alan 582 01:10:33.223 --> 01:10:39.373 marymoodey: asked about long ago. I've been kind of keeping this in my back pocket, but I… 583 01:10:39.833 --> 01:10:42.352 marymoodey: He asked how to… how to… how… 584 01:10:42.893 --> 01:10:46.033 marymoodey: to induce introduce Polanyi to newbies. 585 01:10:46.973 --> 01:10:49.742 marymoodey: My experience in the classroom has been that 586 01:10:49.953 --> 01:10:58.772 marymoodey: Retelling the story that Polanyi tells about the called the paradigm of the traveler in sense giving and sense reading. 587 01:10:59.113 --> 01:11:03.342 marymoodey: is useful for introducing it. I retell it in terms 588 01:11:03.513 --> 01:11:07.762 marymoodey: Give the names to the traveler of Jack and the letter reader Jill. 589 01:11:08.103 --> 01:11:21.333 marymoodey: And so, when Jack travels to this new country and sees this, you know, hears church bells and sees villagers walking to a church, and then writes to Jill about this, when Jill reads his letter. 590 01:11:23.403 --> 01:11:40.382 marymoodey: she understands what Jack means by villagers and village church and hills and fields and that sort of thing, but the images that she has in her mind are not the images that Jack remembers from having seen them on that morning when he wrote. She has her own images, and so this is… 591 01:11:40.663 --> 01:11:48.663 marymoodey: This introduces people to tacit subsidiaries. The tacit subsidiaries that Jill uses to interpret Jack's letter 592 01:11:48.903 --> 01:12:02.552 marymoodey: are clearly different from the tacit subsidiaries that Jack used to… when he wrote his letter, and that this gets into, you know, the whole question of Polanyi's model of creating meaning. 593 01:12:04.943 --> 01:12:08.832 marymoodey: And students, students understand that that's it's simple. 594 01:12:09.723 --> 01:12:10.783 Gus Breytspraak: Good example. 595 01:12:12.403 --> 01:12:13.173 Gus Breytspraak: Oh, Mary. 596 01:12:13.173 --> 01:12:15.492 marymoodey: I yeah. I have a question. 597 01:12:17.343 --> 01:12:21.933 marymoodey: for Paul, and it goes back. 598 01:12:22.163 --> 01:12:30.433 marymoodey: To your working with students, freshmen, on self-awareness and… 599 01:12:30.553 --> 01:12:33.333 marymoodey: Could you… 600 01:12:33.533 --> 01:12:38.443 marymoodey: repeat that, because I just had an idea. 601 01:12:38.773 --> 01:12:44.212 marymoodey: I'm connecting the sense of self, but also self 602 01:12:44.353 --> 01:12:49.432 marymoodey: within the community or self as part of the community. And I, 603 01:12:49.933 --> 01:12:52.373 marymoodey: If I understand what you said. 604 01:12:53.153 --> 01:12:59.242 marymoodey: I just want to make sure I understand what you said in terms of your freshman students. 605 01:13:01.553 --> 01:13:11.543 Paul Lewis: I'm not sure I can remember exactly what you're talking about. I remember I said, you know, they, at least verbally, they talk as if they're rampaging relativists. 606 01:13:14.353 --> 01:13:16.903 Paul Lewis: And I… at different points. 607 01:13:17.033 --> 01:13:24.002 Paul Lewis: You know, I'll try to challenge their views and… and… and… 608 01:13:24.283 --> 01:13:27.923 Paul Lewis: Not in an… hopefully not in an. 609 01:13:29.543 --> 01:13:34.052 Paul Lewis: In a destructive sort of way, but just help them sort of think through now, okay. 610 01:13:34.603 --> 01:13:38.802 Paul Lewis: You think this is right, but isn't the person who you disagree with, aren't they. 611 01:13:39.093 --> 01:13:52.292 Paul Lewis: free to have their same beliefs, et cetera, et cetera, and then people usually go into, well, as long as it doesn't hurt you, well, what does it mean to hurt somebody? You know, there's a huge rabbit hole to go down. 612 01:13:53.033 --> 01:13:56.092 marymoodey: I was just thinking in in terms of 613 01:13:56.353 --> 01:14:00.062 marymoodey: what you said, Phil then asked 614 01:14:00.243 --> 01:14:05.972 marymoodey: I talked about moral agency and the idea of unity of self. 615 01:14:06.773 --> 01:14:21.302 marymoodey: And I was thinking, in reaching especially this generation of students For them, to understand, to have self-awareness. 616 01:14:21.693 --> 01:14:23.562 marymoodey: and be responsible 617 01:14:23.753 --> 01:14:34.852 marymoodey: take responsibility or accountability of self, but also put the self, not selfishness, but in the broader context of self within the community. 618 01:14:35.593 --> 01:14:46.743 marymoodey: One way they could retell these stories with sense giving and sense reading is if you were and I know you, you know, take out the. 619 01:14:47.293 --> 01:14:49.703 marymoodey: The computer in the class. 620 01:14:50.303 --> 01:14:54.823 marymoodey: But have an assignment where they all take selfies. 621 01:14:55.083 --> 01:14:57.802 marymoodey: But then they've got to create 622 01:14:57.973 --> 01:15:08.802 marymoodey: a selfie within the community? And then how do they weave these selfies together into a broader montage? 623 01:15:09.043 --> 01:15:09.643 Paul Lewis: Hmm. 624 01:15:09.643 --> 01:15:24.383 marymoodey: of self within a broader context, within the community, within the world, with taking responsibility of what one believes, but acknowledging the belief for the stories of the other. 625 01:15:24.533 --> 01:15:28.242 marymoodey: Because so much a part of under… 626 01:15:29.423 --> 01:15:35.693 marymoodey: understanding students and where they're coming from is to get to know their stories. 627 01:15:35.813 --> 01:15:36.653 marymoodey: And. 628 01:15:36.783 --> 01:15:47.582 marymoodey: And… especially when you're teaching in an environment so different from what you were raised in. 629 01:15:47.953 --> 01:15:51.492 marymoodey: Or what you're familiar with. 630 01:15:52.223 --> 01:16:01.713 marymoodey: when I taught at University of Pittsburgh there were. I had students who had never Pittsburgh is very neighborhoody. 631 01:16:01.863 --> 01:16:07.662 marymoodey: And… There were students who had never left their own. 632 01:16:08.243 --> 01:16:12.973 marymoodey: neighborhood within Pittsburgh until they came to the University. 633 01:16:13.543 --> 01:16:18.583 marymoodey: And that to me was just mind blowing that they hadn't stepped out of that. 634 01:16:18.883 --> 01:16:22.193 marymoodey: And so the… It. 635 01:16:22.303 --> 01:16:42.162 marymoodey: But that was an important story for me to understand, as well as then becoming a teacher of students in the inner city and knowing their stories and getting to understand them through their stories. It makes the self. 636 01:16:42.393 --> 01:16:43.253 Craig Wickstrom: Okay. 637 01:16:43.943 --> 01:16:45.263 marymoodey: Much broader. 638 01:16:45.263 --> 01:16:45.873 Paul Lewis: Who? 639 01:16:47.573 --> 01:16:48.343 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 640 01:16:49.953 --> 01:16:50.573 Charles Lowney: Yeah. 641 01:16:51.213 --> 01:16:52.133 Charles Lowney: I think… 642 01:16:52.433 --> 01:16:59.803 Charles Lowney: I don't know, hand raise, but I like what you said, Mary, and I think story is in… 643 01:17:00.033 --> 01:17:07.582 Charles Lowney: Parable, right, of the, of the… was the wanderer, the traveler. 644 01:17:08.343 --> 01:17:11.953 Charles Lowney: stories and parables, I think of the way 645 01:17:12.133 --> 01:17:20.872 Charles Lowney: to really connect, like Paul said, when you talk about practical issues, then you can get agreement, but the ideologies, diverge. 646 01:17:21.423 --> 01:17:23.693 Charles Lowney: With stories, we… 647 01:17:23.763 --> 01:17:38.313 Charles Lowney: I think it's Polanian to provide parables and stories, because they give you subsidiaries that you don't get in the ideology. They give you the form of life and way of being of a person where you can now understand 648 01:17:38.313 --> 01:17:44.222 Charles Lowney: the significance of the moral of the story in a better way. And so. 649 01:17:44.913 --> 01:17:49.573 Charles Lowney: I think… Bateson says… says this, but when we. 650 01:17:49.823 --> 01:18:06.352 Charles Lowney: when we see something as beautiful, it's because we share in the story of the other, right? We've got this idea of information, differences that make differences, and these information builds to stories, and stories and communication. But when we… I… when we connect with someone and see 651 01:18:07.123 --> 01:18:11.473 Charles Lowney: Resonate with their story, then… then, we're… 652 01:18:12.193 --> 01:18:16.883 Charles Lowney: We're open to hearing the other, and we're open to seeing 653 01:18:17.303 --> 01:18:27.893 Charles Lowney: that their story is something that we share as well, right? And that community idea that we're all part of the same story, rather than them being the out-group, right? 654 01:18:28.163 --> 01:18:32.593 Charles Lowney: So, and I think this is one of the reasons why that 655 01:18:32.823 --> 01:18:37.173 Charles Lowney: International, sort of, diplomacy by sharing arts. 656 01:18:37.463 --> 01:18:43.393 Charles Lowney: Is important, because that shares the stories of the culture, and you get to see them as people with values like us. 657 01:18:43.633 --> 01:18:51.743 Charles Lowney: Rather than as, as, as completely Foreign and alien and unknown. 658 01:18:52.793 --> 01:18:53.663 Charles Lowney: Okay. 659 01:18:56.443 --> 01:18:57.133 Gus Breytspraak: Appeal. 660 01:18:57.133 --> 01:18:57.883 Charles Lowney: Beautiful. 661 01:18:58.053 --> 01:19:04.963 mullins: One thing that I think Polanyi might be helpful for… 662 01:19:05.053 --> 01:19:17.952 mullins: The discussions of sort of moral and political matters in our time and culture is that Polanyi, of course, is terribly interested in the passions, and he has a lot to say about. 663 01:19:18.043 --> 01:19:29.623 mullins: moral passion, and he has a lot to say about intellectual passion, and if you press the matter, I'm not… I'm not really real sure how those two fit together, or if they're… 664 01:19:29.703 --> 01:19:44.882 mullins: different. Sometimes I think that intellectual passions are a species of moral passions, and sometimes I think that moral passions are a species of intellectual passions. It could go either way, but certainly they're important. 665 01:19:44.883 --> 01:19:51.412 mullins: And, that is something that seems to me, really is… 666 01:19:51.733 --> 01:19:56.452 mullins: Now, very much central to discussion 667 01:19:56.753 --> 01:20:12.492 mullins: Two Zoom meetings ago, we had Donovan Schaefer, and he was a figure who's mining Polanyi. And what he really liked in Polanyi is that Polanyi is quite straightforward, that passion is the center of things. 668 01:20:12.493 --> 01:20:25.473 mullins: So it seems to me that we need to do some work on moral and intellectual passions, and maybe that might be useful for the broader discussion in our culture. 669 01:20:32.943 --> 01:20:36.622 Paul Lewis: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the interesting things is, is that 670 01:20:37.413 --> 01:20:45.203 Paul Lewis: The conservative side of things seems to do a better job of stirring up passions. 671 01:20:45.283 --> 01:20:56.603 Paul Lewis: than progressives sometimes, right? The notion of threat. I mean, I'm thinking specifically about living through the. 672 01:20:56.633 --> 01:21:05.523 Paul Lewis: what happened with the Southern Baptist Convention back in the late 70s into the 80s, right? Where a certain group of people 673 01:21:06.283 --> 01:21:07.673 Paul Lewis: started yelling. 674 01:21:09.203 --> 01:21:16.232 Paul Lewis: seminaries teaching not to believe the Bible anymore. The worst thing you can say to a bunch of Baptists is, oh, he doesn't believe the Bible. 675 01:21:16.663 --> 01:21:26.362 Paul Lewis: And the moderates to defend themselves, no, we believe in Baptist polity. Well, what's going to win, Bible or polity, right? 676 01:21:26.963 --> 01:21:39.083 Paul Lewis: And that group of conservative… the conservative resurgence, if you're on that side, or the fundamentalist takeover, if you're on the other side, you know, the… 677 01:21:39.583 --> 01:21:40.902 Paul Lewis: the, the right 678 01:21:41.933 --> 01:21:55.022 Paul Lewis: looked at all the constitutions and bylaws of all the organizations, and slowly and systematically put people in place that they finally took over power. 679 01:21:55.313 --> 01:21:56.463 Paul Lewis: But again. 680 01:21:57.323 --> 01:22:12.953 Paul Lewis: activating the passions, activating the right passions in the right way, I think, are… are… it's really important, but then it gets hard, okay, what's… what's the right passion, right? Obviously, it's… because we all want to say, oh, it's what I believe in. 681 01:22:13.483 --> 01:22:14.403 Charles Lowney: Not fear. 682 01:22:14.403 --> 01:22:18.543 Paul Lewis: Yeah, fear is not the right. Fear is going to trigger the threat. 683 01:22:18.653 --> 01:22:21.483 Paul Lewis: But it also gets people active, too. 684 01:22:21.763 --> 01:22:22.303 Charles Lowney: How. 685 01:22:22.303 --> 01:22:23.663 Paul Lewis: I don't know. 686 01:22:23.663 --> 01:22:31.262 Charles Lowney: I think that might be why the right is so riled up, because they take it as a personal threat. You're trying to end 687 01:22:31.263 --> 01:22:46.862 Charles Lowney: my way of existence, my nationality, my culture, right? It's a personal threat, whereas on the left, you're usually fighting for other people, right? The rights of trans, the rights of immigrants, the right… right? So it's… it's not… 688 01:22:47.033 --> 01:22:49.502 Charles Lowney: As deep a personal threat. 689 01:22:49.833 --> 01:22:50.413 Paul Lewis: No. 690 01:22:53.623 --> 01:22:57.703 marymoodey: Lonnie also talked about the passion to persuade. 691 01:23:09.363 --> 01:23:11.863 Gus Breytspraak: Well, Alan and Paul, we 692 01:23:12.093 --> 01:23:15.052 Gus Breytspraak: Appreciate, both of you. 693 01:23:15.173 --> 01:23:24.032 Gus Breytspraak: getting us started and continuing here. Do either of you have, final thoughts as we're drawing close to our ending time? 694 01:23:26.233 --> 01:23:26.783 Paul Lewis: Okay. 695 01:23:28.903 --> 01:23:39.003 Paul Lewis: I don't have anything definitive. I just have appreciated in in the discussion. I think Alan's raised some good questions. We only managed to get to a couple of them. 696 01:23:39.493 --> 01:23:54.673 Allen Dyer: Yeah, I would say I very much appreciate the discussion. I appreciate the stimulus for the discussion, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which I consider it a real privilege to be part of this discussion. So thank you very much. 697 01:23:57.293 --> 01:23:59.322 mullins: Okay, well, it's 12:30. 698 01:23:59.323 --> 01:24:03.833 Craig Wickstrom: Steven Turner, do you have something to say? 699 01:24:04.103 --> 01:24:19.862 Stephen Turner: No, I enjoyed this. Now I'm thinking about ethics and, thinking about, Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics, which I think actually might be closer to Polanyi than, systems of ethics, but… 700 01:24:25.793 --> 01:24:28.493 Gus Breytspraak: Eduardo, you've been very quiet. 701 01:24:33.573 --> 01:24:35.273 mullins: You're muted Eduardo. 702 01:24:35.573 --> 01:24:38.233 Gus Breytspraak: Maybe that's why you're quiet, you're muted. 703 01:24:43.543 --> 01:24:51.672 Eduardo Beira: Yeah, I appreciate discussion, but I don't have nothing special to add. Anyway, thanks. 704 01:24:52.093 --> 01:24:53.282 Gus Breytspraak: Good to see you. 705 01:24:53.893 --> 01:24:54.883 mullins: So. 706 01:24:55.693 --> 01:25:05.872 mullins: We will put together probably some more of these, so just watch your email, and if you have suggestions about things we could. 707 01:25:06.013 --> 01:25:12.173 mullins: Have a good discussion on please send them along to Gus and me. 708 01:25:12.613 --> 01:25:14.943 mullins: Otherwise, we'll see you next time. 709 01:25:15.223 --> 01:25:28.223 Gus Breytspraak: All right, one final word. Our new book editor for Tradition and Discovery, Stan Scott, is looking for books to be reviewed. If you have suggestions. 710 01:25:28.253 --> 01:25:43.102 Gus Breytspraak: for, books to be reviewed in the Polanyi Society. I'll put something about that in the… when I send out the link, but he's, kind of put out an appeal for ideas for books to be reviewed. 711 01:25:43.303 --> 01:25:46.413 Gus Breytspraak: And also, volunteers to review them. 712 01:25:46.413 --> 01:25:47.063 Stephen Turner: Yeah. 713 01:25:47.063 --> 01:25:47.983 Gus Breytspraak: So. 714 01:25:47.983 --> 01:25:49.192 Stephen Turner: That's the hard thing. 715 01:25:49.193 --> 01:25:50.123 Gus Breytspraak: Yeah. 716 01:25:50.323 --> 01:25:50.883 Paul Lewis: Yeah. 717 01:25:51.403 --> 01:25:54.542 Gus Breytspraak: All right, we'll see you again next time. Good to see everyone. 718 01:25:54.783 --> 01:25:55.873 Craig Wickstrom: Okay, bye. Bye. 719 01:25:55.873 --> 01:25:56.313 Charles Lowney: Right. 720 01:25:57.653 --> 01:25:58.463 Duane Lookingbill: Thank you.