War tends to bring out the human propensity for atrocity. Nobody likes indiscriminate killing, torture and so on. What to do about it? One response is to avoid war altogether. According to Yale prof Samuel Moyn, that’s what most people wanted after World War II and after Vietnam. But more recently, he’s noticed a shift. Now, politicians, especially in America, are focussing on making more humane. Leaders like Obama say they’ll make war as ‘clean’ as possible by using drone strikes and special forces and minimizing civilian deaths and secret torture programs. That’s all well and good but Moyn sees a danger: making war more humane makes it easier to justify. If war is ‘clean’, why not wage it forever?

Samuel J. Huntington’s 1993 “The Clash of Civilizations?” is the most assigned article in American political science. It predicts a worldwide culture war (but not the kind you're thinking of). The book became a massive bestseller, Huntington was all over TV and his theory is still talked about all the time. This theory made him a press darling but is reviled by his fellow academics. Think of "Clash" as a dark rejoinder to Fukuyama’s already-pretty-morose “End of History.” Instead of a peaceful but boring post-history, Huntington thinks that the end of the Cold War heralds a new era of worldwide civilizational conflict not only because of the Muslims (but also because of the Muslims).

Americans hate when the state tells them what to do. They’ve got freer speech, freer access to guns and less regulation on business than any other rich country.

But they let their work bosses walk all over them. American workers have less rights and worse conditions than workers in any other developed country. Employers can fire employees at will, impose arbitrary schedules and prevent them from forming unions. They tell them what to wear, what they can publicly say and even when they can take a shit. Why do freedom-loving Americans stand for this?

Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher at Michigan State University, Ann Arbor. She thinks her country is in the grip of free-market ideology AKA “libertarianism” AKA “classical liberalism.” According to this viewpoint, any interference by the state in the private sector is a violation of freedom. But when the state won’t defend workers’ rights, they allow employers to subject their employees to a tyrannical form of “private government.” Freedom for the boss means servitude for the worker.

We talk about the history of this ideology, the consequences for American workers and how the tide may finally be starting to turn.

Matthew Stewart is a philosophy PhD and author. He’s also a Princeton guy and former management consultant so he knows rich people.

His new book, The 9.9%, is about them. Not the super-rich, but the doctors, lawyers and managers that go to good colleges and live in nice neighbourhoods. The “nearly rich and not-famous,” as he puts it.

We talk about how these people raise their kids, get their money and block the poorer element from their neighbourhoods. Matthew reckons the 9.9% are a new kind of aristocracy that’s entrenching inequality and making everyone hate parenting. In the end, it’s not really the white collar player he hates; it’s the game of inequality. Though he doesn’t sound very fond of the players either.

Big tech companies tell us they’re our servants, existing to fulfill our desires more cheaply and conveniently than ever. Alfie Bown doesn’t think so. He thinks Deliveroo, Tinder, Pornhub etc. aren’t just giving us what we want, they’re shaping what we want. He reckons our tech overlords are secretly remaking humankind on the level of desire.

We chat about Chinese cars that know what you want to eat and why time travellers don’t get horny.

Bown is the author of a new book called Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

Is democracy really the worst form of government except for all the other ones or is it just the worst?

This is a crossover with the delightful Morality of Everyday Things podcast. Jake and Ant and I discuss what liberal democracy is, the arguments in its favour, and some big critiques. Episode includes Plato, Nazis and Lizards. Enjoy!

Rhetoric is supposed to inspire. Imagine Cicero exhorting the Roman people, Churchill vowing to “fight on the beaches.” Yet, when politicians speak today, it’s almost always boring or obnoxious. Why?

Prof. Rob Goodman, author of Words on Fire: Eloquence and its Conditions comes by today to talk about the history of rhetoric, what Cicero knew that we don’t, and the political speech styles of Trudeau (boring), Trump (obnoxious), and X González (pretty great, actually).

It’s the holidays again, and Theory Elf Sep comes on to help celebrate them! We talk about the past year of working on the pod, how she makes the episode art and what we have planned for the coming year. We also call Rebecca!

Grizzly bears are scary. But what about zombie grizzly bears? What’s makes something horrifying rather than just frightening?

Paul has a theory. It turns out that humans have a psychological way of organizing the world that also creates the possibility of getting really creeped-out. It helps explain the horror of the zombie grizzly why the old Dracula was creepier than Twilight and how war propaganda can turn enemies into monsters.

This episode is about Wolf’s “Moral Saints,” Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” and Larissa Macfarquhar’s Strangers Drowning.

Susan Wolf thinks that devoting your life to helping others would be a real drag. It’d interfere with playing tennis and reading Tolstoy.

True enough but some people might have philosophical and personal reasons to do it anyway.

For example, Peter Singer argues that, if you think a child’s life is worth more than your shoes, then you’re morally obliged to give away all your money to charity.

Larissa Macfarquhar helps out with the personal reasons. She’s written a book that profiles a whole bunch of real-life do-gooders. And it turns out that even though the saintly life is tough, the saints are getting something out of it. And from their perspective, a life of Tolstoy and tennis might not be a great as Wolf makes it out to be.

This episode is about Susan Wolf’s 1982 article “Moral Saints.”

You’re probably a moral enough person. But have you ever had that nagging feeling that you should be even better? That if you were really good, you would devote your life to the cause, whatever cause that might be? That you should become some kind of moral saint?

People who devote their entire lives to being as morally good as possible are held up as objects of admiration, as a kind of saintly standard that the rest of us feel vaguely guilty for not living up to.

Susan Wolf says we shouldn’t feel bad about not being saints because no rational person should want to be a saint in the first place. In this episode, I explain her argument for why it makes more sense to be cool like Paul Newman than good like Mother Teresa.

Today I speak with Earl Fontainelle of the Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (SHWEP).

I don’t understand Plato. Partly this is because he never writes in his own voice and partly it’s because I can’t even always tell when Socrates is joking or even what he’s talking about. The divided line? The Myth of Er? The tyrant being exactly 729 times less happy than the philosopher? These are all weird things in the Republic that are still mysterious to me.

Earl suggests that perhaps the reason Plato is so difficult to understand is because he was writing esoterically. Perhaps the dialogues contain secret messages directed to an initiated few and the weird passages I complain about actually contain wisdom of a higher order. Perhaps.

In this long and wide-ranging conversation, we talk about why so many readers of Plato believed he wrote esoterically, the secret meanings he may have been hiding, and a lot of the mysterious Plato math that I complained about in the Republic series.

In the episode, I talk to Phillip Cunliffe and George Hoare about their new book The End of the End of History.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama predicted a boring eternity of liberal capitalism and for nearly 30 years, it looked like he might be right. We had Clinton and Blair. Globalization and apathy. Kurt Cobain. According to my guests, the end of History wasn’t just about politics, it was a whole vibe.

But since 2016, things have started happening that don't quite fit the pattern and the pundits are losing their minds. Do Brexit, Trump, and the new politicization signify the end of the end of History?

We chat about how the political zeitgeist has changed in recent years and what that may hold for the future.

Phillip Cunliffe and George Hoare are, along with Alex Hochuli, co-hosts of the Aufhebunga bunga podcast and co-authors of The End of the End of History: Politics in theTwenty-First Century.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama was a foreign policy expert with an interest in Hegel. He published a little essay called “The End of History?” in which he argued that the Cold War was more than a rivalry between two superpowers or an experiment to find the most efficient way to organize an economy. Fukuyama thought it was the final chapter in a millennia-long struggle to find a way of life that satisfies our deep spiritual need for freedom and equality. Therefore the end of the Cold War would mark the end of History as such.

To argue that all of human history was coming to a conclusion was always a wild swing-for-the-fences argument but this one connected.

Today, Paul Sagar and I get into utilitarianism. We talk about thought experiments that involve: drowning kids, ruined loafers, death squads and bioweapons.

The drowning children are from Peter Singer. He's a utilitarian that thinks that we rich first-world types should be giving away all our money to save the global poor from starving and malaria.

Paul disagrees. He brings in another philosopher (Bernard Williams) to argue that worrying about starving children all the time would violate his integrity. As usual, he tries hard not to offend anyone (until he gets to Hiroshima).

This episode covers the last bit of book 10 of Plato’s Republic.

Imagine you get to choose your reincarnation. You can come back as a tyrant, a sports star, a swan, whatever you want. What do you pick? And what do you have to know to make a good choice?

Socrates has some advice. In this final episode of Republic, tell the story of a man who travelled to the afterlife and came back to tell the tale. This puts a didactic bow on the all-night conversation they’ve been having and demonstrates how Socrates thinks poetry should be written.

Socrates thinks that poetry is like candy: delicious but bad for us. If we consume too much, it’ll rot our souls. That’s because the poets just pander to our passions with no concern with or knowledge of the truth.

But pandering poets aren’t the problem. It’s us. Socrates thinks that humans have a poetic sweet tooth that makes certain kinds of stories irresistible to us. We let ourselves get carried away by them and start to believe that they’re true. Following our natural taste for art undermines reason and makes us into worse people. So how do we live if we can’t trust our taste?

This episode covers book 9 of Republic.

In this episode, Socrates is going to finally answer the question that started it all. Back in book 2, Glaucon and Adeimantus challenged Socrates to prove to them that it’s worthwhile to be just. To them, the life of injustice looks pretty good, if you can get away with it. Money, sex, power, what’s not to like?

Socrates has been building up his answer since episode 4 of this series. He’s built an imaginary city, and education system and a group of superhuman philosopher kings to rule it all.

In this episode, he’s going to finally explain what’s wrong with injustice. While the tyrant’s life may look fun from the outside, Socrates says it’s not so great when you get behind the music. According to him, the tyrant’s life is desperate, paranoid, and miserable. Not only is the philosopher king happier than the tyrant, he’s 729 times happier!

How does politics affect personality? In the ideal city, the perfect laws and education create philosopher kings. But what about everywhere else?

In this chapter, Socrates gets down to some real-world political science and analyzes the four kinds of regime that actually exist in the Greek world. And because the city matches the soul, each of the regimes has its own distinctive personality type.

Socrates reckons that living in a state like Sparta will make you spirited and proud; living under oligarchy will make you cheap; and living under democracy should chill you right out. Unfortunately, chilling out is the last thing you’ll do before the tyrant takes over the city and enslaves you. Easy come, easy go.

This episode covers book 8 of Plato’s Republic.

This episode covers book 7 of Plato's Republic.

Socrates is what I call a “philosopher of desire.” He cares more about the questions than the answers, the journey than the destination, the boner than the nut. And he brings that energy to his teaching.

In this episode, Socrates tells the boys that the “form of the good” is the one thing that anyone who wants to live a good life absolutely needs to know about. So what is it? Glaucon wants to know so badly he yells out to Apollo and begs Socrates to tell him. But Socrates won’t go all the way. Instead, he teases Glaucon with the analogies of the sun, line and cave which also happen to tell us about: the invisible forms; the nature of human knowledge; and why STEM subjects should only be used as prep for philosophy.

Get your goggles on, because this is a deep one.