If you’ve ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern philosophy to go by, a lens through which to understand a complex world, a foundation, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is as good as you'll find. He asked questions like: why are we so dogmatic? What makes us irrational? Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and others opinions.He was one of the first Enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was the first to really criticise the bible as just a text. He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the Jewish community where he lived.I look at Spinoza’s most influential text, The Ethics, look at what his ideas about god were and why he was a Pantheist, ask what substances, modes, and attributes are, and why he argues that the ‘many is one’. We look at the affects, the idea of conatus, the ‘free person’, rationalism, his stocism, and ideas of morality and benevolence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why Hasn't the Internet Fixed Democracy? How can we fix it? I use the latest 'drama' with Ethan Klein, Joe Rogan, Tom Pool, Vaush etc to see if we can find out...Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The nature-nurture debates inform almost every area of human life – from biology and botany to economics, literature, and history.To simplify, thinkers on the nature side have, in varying ways, argued that at least parts of your body and mind are behind an impenetrable skin, cannot be gotten to by upbringing, education, politics, or culture. Imagine a one-way street. For example, you have an innate eye color or a creativity that comes out of your DNA – nothing gets to it, its just in you. On the other hand we have empiricists. They believe in a two way street instead of a one way street.This video looks at some complicated sounding things: DNA, genetics, epigenetics, methylation, phenotypes, stress, twin studies, Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, and early intervention programs. But I want to avoid being technical, as much as possible, because most fundamentally, most simply, this box is about a fundamentally philosophical idea: freedom.The idea that we have a nature has been approached in countless ways – philosophically, psychologically, theologically – but the most persuasive, through the 19th and 20th centuries, the best place to start, is biology: the study of DNA and our genes.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does 'meta' really mean? What can we make of Facebook's change to 'Meta'? Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote about the decline of metanarratives in 1979's 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge'. Can we learn anything about Zuckerberg's aspirations from this classic postmodern text?Lyotard was prescient. He noticed in the 70s that quote ‘the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited.’ He also that ‘Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Douglas wrote that:‘There is no such thing as absolute dirt; it exists in the eye of the beholder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying, we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea.’Dirt is a human concept. There is no such thing as dirt in nature. The natural world is neither pure nor dirty. It just is. Everything is simply where it happens to be. Until litter is dropped and houses are built to exclude and chemicals are spilled and smog rises the idea that anything could be in the wrong place is absurd. And being human, dirt is a moral concept. Something that is right or wrong. Organized correctly or not. What can it tell us about ourselves? About order-making, about right and wrong, about 'dirty' people, about racism, and creativity?Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There were several reasons lynch mobs in Jim Crow America and soldiers and police officers in Nazi Germany were motivated to kill African-Americans and Jews. Historical forces like a sense of victimhood – both having lost wars – cultural forces and propaganda that depicted the victims stereotypically as inferior, greedy, or a threat, and economic forces – ‘the frustration of basic needs’ as social psychologist Ervin Staub puts it.They were motivated, in Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, by a moral culture made up of stereotypes, adverts, scientific literature, societal standards, norms, and sensibilities that all pushed the perpetrators towards killing.In both cases, the perpetrators had rationales, justifications, reasons for what they were doing, even if, with historical hindsight, we can see these to be incorrect.This begs an important question: how is resistance possible? How does one know when they’re being pushed by historical forces to do something that in retrospect we see as wholly immoral? How does one escape from under the hand of history – if culture, society, and the economy are all moving you towards acting in a particular way. Do we retain a moral sense?The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, for example, has asked whether there can be a ‘moral responsibility for resisting socialization.’Often, what makes people like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther notable, is not that they are shaped by historical forces, but that that the very same forces are felt by them as coercion and that they stand up to them, counter them, resist them.Can we find morality and ethics in history? I look at empathy and moral sentimentalism to find out.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Between 1889 and 1930 there were around 3,700 known lynchings in the US. The perpetrators ranged from single people to small mobs to huge crowds of 15,000. The reasons given were broad. While most were accused of murder of rape, many were lynched for simply being rude, for arguing, for taking the wrong job or having the wrong beliefs.Like during Holocaust, as I explored in a previous video, these were ‘ordinary men’ and women, and often even children. And as in my exploration of the psychology of the perpetrators' Holocaust, I want to try and understand the factors that led both to the violence of lynchings, but also ask how ordinary Americans justified their racism more broadly. I want to use lynchings to try and examine racism more broadly, taking an action, an event, and slowly zooming outwards, looking at the psychological, sociological, and historical conditions that led to it.We’ll look at a number of what I’ll describe in as ‘justifications, rationalizations, or causes’ – to try to understand what led to violence, and how the beliefs, attitudes, and psychologies of perpetrators were produced more broadly. We’ll look at propaganda, sexuality, scientific racism, nostalgia, economics, stereotypes, and first, the power of a feeling of defeat and victimhood, on the part of whites.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liberalism – the assumptions of which many of us live under – prioritises individual freedom – of thought, of expression, of movement. But at the same time we think of migration – which is free movement – as abnormal. We even mythologise a sedentary past – of villages, farmers, peasants, ‘tied to the land’, living and dying in the place where they’re from.Yet in the 17th century, around 65% left their home parish at some point in the their lives. We have, what philosopher Alex Sager calls a ‘sedentary bias’. The migrant is presented as a problem, alien, outsider, yet we move around our own countries – commuting, deciding to live elsewhere, holidaying, visiting relatives, making work trips – without thinking its in any way strange.We are, as a species, mobile, nomadic, built to move. IN 2020, you could count 280 million migrants and each year around a billion tourists. And the numbers are increasing. But so are the objects, ideas, and phenomenon – borders, passports, guards, barbed wired, nationalist rhetoric – that attempt to pin us in our place. Can we find a genealogy of our attitudes? A history of our present problem? To do so, we might start with the 18th century biologist Carl Linnaeus.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why We're Drawn to the Sea: A philosophical enquiry that looks at the sea as a cultural, literary, biological, evolutionary, and philosophical concept. The sea has long been a source of inspiration for some of our greatest thinkers – a great unknown to be explored, a passage to be used to transport goods, a place of relaxation, a dwelling place of monsters, a provider of sustenance. But could the nature of the sea – what it is, how it moves, what it represents – tell us something surprising about ourselves?Maybe Moby Dick, The Ancient Greeks, and the psychoanalysis of Sandor Farenzi can help us find out.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is Wokeism Civil Religion? A response to Carefree Wandering's take of Wokeism as civil religion + German-style guilt-pride. I look at Robert Bellah's article 'Civil Religion in America' and take a look at free-speech, dogmatism, cancel culture, and more.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.