Matthew Crawford On Antihumanism And Social Control

17 snips

Nov 24, 2023

Matthew Crawford, a writer and philosopher, discusses his background growing up in Berkeley, his time in an ashram, and his career journey as an unlicensed electrician. He explores the impact of administrative control and regulations on individual agency, the concept of anti-humanism, and the distrust of the body. The podcast also touches on topics such as the trans debate, queering, and the ancient Greeks' discovery of the idea of nature.

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Matthew's Background and Life in an Ashram

04:28 • 8min

Career Challenges and Unlicensed Electrician Work

12:43 • 2min

The Impact of Administrative Control and Regulations on Individual Agency

14:20 • 22min

The Concept of Anti-Humanism and Its Implications

36:47 • 4min

Distrust of the body, trans debate, and the pressure to change oneself

41:12 • 3min

Exploring Queering and the Idea of Nature

44:11 • 2min

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com

(The main Dish and VFYW contest are taking a break for the holiday; we’ll be back with full coverage on December 1st. Happy Thanksgiving!)

Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He’s currently a senior fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia.

This episode was recorded on October 17. You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the antihumanism of Silicon Valley, and the obsession with kid safetyism — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Matthew’s birthplace in Berkeley; his dad the physics professor and jazz player; his mom the New Age “seeker type”; Matthew taken out of school at age 10 for five years to live in an strict ashram and travel to India; he left to join “the great bacchanal” of high school where he “didn’t learn much”; did unlicensed electrical work and studied physics in college; he believes bureaucracy “compromises the vitality of life”; Hannah Arendt; Tocqueville; Christopher Lasch and the close supervision of kids’ lives; Johan Huizinga and the spirit of play; Oakeshott’s metaphor of a tennis match; Enoch Powell; behavioral economics; William James; Nudge and choice architecture; Kant; TS Eliot; Nietzsche; gambling addiction and casino manipulation; Twitter and “disinformation”; self-driving cars; plastic surgery; kids and trans activism; the Nordic gender paradox; nationalism; why the love of one’s own is suspect on the political left; how “diversity is our strength” decreases diversity; Hillary’s “deplorables”; Matthew’s book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction; brainy people not understanding practical ones; knowledge workers threatened by AI; the intelligence needed in manual work; why Americans are having fewer children; liquid modernity; the feminization of society; Bronze Age Pervert; Ratzinger; Matthew’s recent conversion to Christianity; and gratitude being the key to living well.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.