Words vs. Concepts: Tracing Meaning Over Time

Why is historical context so important when looking at topics from the past? What role does a broader appreciation of the humanities play in understanding contemporary issues?

Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Dartmouth College and the author of several books. Recent titles include Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea and the Divine Fury: A History of Genius book.

Greg and Darrin discuss Darrin’s intellectual journey and his approach to longue durée intellectual history. Darrin provides insights into his books on happiness, genius, and equality, exploring themes like the evolution of concepts over time, the intersection of words and ideas, and the roles of intellectual historians. Their conversation examines the connections between religious traditions and modern concepts, the interplay of born versus made attributes, and the historical perspectives on the concepts of happiness and genius. 

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Episode Quotes:

Are genius, happiness, and equality born or made?

41:06: Are geniuses born, or are they made? You know, can you play the guitar for 10,000 hours, à la Malcolm Gladwell, and become a Beatle? Or, you know, is there just something in you? And that turns out to be a kind of central conflict all the way back to the ancients. Same, as you say, with happiness, right? Is happiness just in our genes? We know some people are wired to just be cheery in the morning. Right? I'm not one of those people. Or does it happen to you? Right? Or can you make it? Right? Can you control your life in such a way so that you can bring about happiness? And the same with equality, right? Are we born equals? Are we made equals in political circumstance? Are we intended to be equal? This too gets tied up with debates around it, around the concept from very early on. And they never really entirely go away. So again, it's a nice way of kind of pointing out continuities, but then also marking points of departure and change.

Why equality creates inequality

29:37: Equality always serves, or always brings into being, new forms of inequality. That very assertion of equals then creates the space then for thinking or measuring others against that standard, and relegating to place.

Intellectual history teaches us how to love

49:28: Intellectual history teaches you to get inside the minds of others who see the world in radically different ways from how you do. And that is what love is all about: trying to get inside the mind of a person who sees the world differently from you, and to empathize even when you do not agree, to understand even when you do not condone. That is crucial. It is a crucial human endeavor, and I think intellectual history teaches that very well.

The arc of equality isn't as straight as we think

30:29: Equality leads to us, and then it's going to spread, and, you know, spill down to more and more people. It will expand and get wider. I grew up in California. I was born in 1965 with that kind of vague idea, and no one said it was going to be easy. Martin Luther King certainly knew it was not going to be easy, and yet, as you say, the arc of history bends towards justice, bends towards equality. We're gradually extending equality to wider and wider circles of people. And that's just how it will go. And I think we were deceived by our own rhetoric. And it was really a rude awakening in 2016 to wake up and realize, oh gosh, you know, it does not quite work that way. And as rude an awakening as that's been, I think it also provides an opportunity then to go back and examine a concept like equality that we thought we knew in some ways, but that really turns out to be much more complicated and fraught than I think we fully appreciated.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Longue Durée
• Robert Darnton
• Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
• Anglo-Saxons
• Plato
• Subjective Well-being
• Jeremy Bentham
• The Happiness Hypothesis
• Age of Enlightenment
• Socrates
• Daemon
• Doctor Faustus
• Michelangelo
• Michel Foucault
• Memento Mori
• Fasces
• Teresa Bejan
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Tall Poppy Syndrome
• Christopher Boehm
• Branko Milanović
• Karl Marx
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Thomas Carlyle
• Augustine of Hippo
• Presentism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Dartmouth University
• DarrinMcMahon.com
• Wikipedia Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
• History and Human Flourishing
• Divine Fury: A History of Genius
• Happiness: A History
• Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity

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