Then & Now: Philosophy, History & Politics

The American philosopher John Rawls was the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and died in 2002, he’s responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy.In this introduction to Rawls, I look at A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus. It was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society would look like. I like at concepts like the difference principle, justice as fairness, and maximin.Before Rawls, the dominant political philosophy for at least the previous 100 years been utilitarianism. There were and are many different forms of utilitarianism, but they all have their foundations in a simple premise: the greatest good for the greatest number.For Rawls, utilitarianism didn’t adequately account for the intuition that people have inalienable rights that cannot be violated for the greater happiness of others.Rawls writes that the ‘higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society.’It’s this difference principle, also referred to as maximin – maximise the minimum prospects – that leads Rawls to his formulation of the two principles of ‘justice as fairness'.The principles are in lexical order; that is, that the first should always be prioritised over the second. They are:First, each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.The two principles might generally be summed up like this:‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.’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.

I look at the Black Lives Matter protests and the controversial debate around statues like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, and King Leopold II. What can the philosophy of history and civil disobedience tell us about this moment? What exactly is a statue for? What is public history? How do we think about them ethically? And when is Civil Disobedience justified? I look at John Rawls, W.E.B du Bois, and Malcolm X in particular for some answers.Statues are philosophical objects. They are clearly symbolic of something more than the material they’re cast in. They embody phenomena that philosophers often try to understand– publicness, memory, the nature of history, the abstract and the concrete. Across the world – from the coloniser Cecil Rhodes to slaver King Leopold III and confederate president Jefferson Davis - inanimate busts have become a battleground. To their more mainstream defenders, the argument is usually twofold. That first, these monuments are legitimate because they memorialise a past that, for good or bad, is our history. And second, that even if memorialising a particular figure was not legitimate, removing statues extrajudicially at the whims of the mob is itself unethical and, furthermore, has dangerous consequences for democracy.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.

I look at the history of the Spanish Flu of 1918 - the worst pandemic in history - asking what lessons we can learn. Avoiding a traditional approach to the story, I look at history’s worst pandemic from a number of perspectives. As a preface, I think about the memory of the flu and remembrance of World War One – why was the Influenza forgotten, while the war memorialised by poets like John McCrae? Then, institutional, looking at the two main institutions involves in the response: the military and the bacteriologists. Then, material, looking at the ways it spread and how quarantines were attempted to stop it. Third, ideologically, how did ideas of the time distort the response. I look in particular at cinemas, religion in Africa, and apartheid.Ultimately, there is a theme that runs through memories of the Spanish Flu: Failure.The historian Niall Johnson sums up Britains failure like this:‘the perception of disease, the fact that it was ‘only’ influenza, the relatively mild nature of the first wave in the spring of 1918, Imperialist or racist views and the ‘superiority’ of the English, the confidence in scientific medicine to find a vaccine, the quest for professional status of the profession, the power of ‘scientific’ medicine prevailing over preventive, and the rejection of state intervention. Many of these contributed to a delay in the reaction and recognition of the existence of a problem, particularly when the second wave arrived in the autumn of 1918.’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.

An introduction to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, and itself a revolutionary approach to the philosophy of science. The book was both influential and controversial.Born in 1922, Kuhn began his career as a physicist before turning to the history of science. He was interested in how scientists approach their daily work, and in thinking about the question of how science develops over time.Kuhn saw sciences progressing in two alternating phases: one he called normal and the other he called extraordinary (or revolutionary).Scientific development is traditionally thought of as simply moving faster when a discovery is made, like the discovery of bacteria, or the realisation that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.But for Kuhn, the normal and extraordinary phases of science aren’t just different speeds of discovery, but fundamentally different approach to scientific work.Normal science progresses under paradigms, but when anomalies appear, extraordinary science can lead to a paradigm shift that changes the fundamental underlying assumptions, norms and rules of scientific activity.We can see this in the chemical revolution, when Joseph Priestly and Antoine Lavoisier weighed burning chemicals and gases and overturned the reigning phlogiston theory of combustion, replacing it with todays oxygen theory of combustion.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos:https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JJ76W4CZ2A8J2Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel:https://amzn.to/2ykJe6L Follow me on:Facebook: http://fb.me/thethenandnowInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thethenandnow/Twitter: https://twitter.com/lewlewwaller Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In a follow up to the Fist of Modernity I look at the history of the police in England in the nineteenth century, particularly at David Churchill’s critique of the State Monopolisation Thesis which was influenced by Max Weber and articulated through the work of historians like V.A.C. Gatrell and his concept of the policeman state.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 foundations of modern policing are based not on justice, but on the punishing of poverty, the imposition of the status quo, the disciplining of the public, the constriction of liberty, and justified as the protection against an ugly, sinful, idle, greedy, and organised criminal class that has no basis in reality.In this video I look at the birth of the modern police force in Britain, what the historian V.A.C Gatrell calls ‘the policeman state.’The nineteenth century was a period of great transformation. Urbanization, industrialization, technologicalization , were all, at the heart, a change in the routines of humans. Modernity, at its simplest, was about efficiency, speed, production, of the maximizing of health, wealth and profit.It was about scientifically searching for those rules, those methods, those laws, that would bring about the ideal human order.The first modern, standardized police forced – the Metropolitan Police – was created in 1829, and continued to expand across the century, increasing from around 20k in 1860 to 54k in 1911.The preventative police were to be visible, wear uniforms, be of good physique, intelligence, and character – ‘domestic missionaries’ as historian Robert Storch called them.There was protest:The Gazette called it ‘a base attempt upon the liberty of the subject and the privilege of local government’ and that the purpose of the police state was to ‘to drill, discipline and dragoon us all into virtue’A parliament inquiry concluded that ‘such a system would of necessity be odious and repulsive, and one which no government would be able to carry into execution ...the very proposal would be rejected with abhorrence’And that ‘It is difficult to reconcile an effective system of police, with that perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference, which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country; and your Committee think that the forfeiture or curtailment of such advantageswould be too great a sacrifice for improvements in police’.In 1867 the commentator Walter Bagehot wrote that:‘The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual policemen was not liked;I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringement of freedom. If the original policeman had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order.’Despite all of this, the fist of modernity raised its clenched rational plan, and swung.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 is modernity? I look at this question through my previous video - the Shock of Modernity - and my next video - the Fist of Modernity - and ask how we can think about the vague term and how it applies to the current COVID-19 pandemic. I take a brief look at Foucault's comments on the Plague during the 17th century and its place in the genealogy of governmentality, while thinking about contemporary issues like Viktor Orban in Hungary and authoritarianism in Russia.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.

I take a look back at the introduction to Romanticism to see if it can offer any insights to current events, including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change and little issues like modernity, reason and industrialization. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is creativity? I take a look at the philosophy of creativity to try and find out. Plato said the inspiration is a kind of madness. To the Ancient Greek philosopher, creativity was a kind of divine inspiration – it came from outside the limited understanding of men – a burst of lightening not reducible to human reason.Almost 2000 years later, he mathematician Henri Ponclaire influentially argued that creativity felt like swarms of ideas combining randomly in his unconscious followed by the conscious selection of one of them according to aesthetic criteria.To Ponclaire then, unlike Plato, creativity came from inside the person, but was still guided by aesthetic criteria – trends, standards, social norms, histories - on the outside – determined by society.But how is that aesthetic criteria determined? What makes this a better example of creativity than this?Almost all psychologists and philosophers agree that creativity must be both original and valuable. This, although contested, is likely the best definition of creativity we have.I take a look at where value and originality come from, while building a tentative approach to creativity that includes Study and Knowledge, Activity and Industry, Tranquillity and Reflection, Tension and Opposites, and finally, always remember, to add a bit of randomness…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.

In this video, I take a look at what ‘trust’ is philosophically. When trust is in low supply in our societies, it’s a sign of a deeper issue. That’s why any social progress involves, in some way, an increase in trust. Trust is a difficult concept to define, but it is, ultimately, an optimism in people; which is why any positive social change should revolve around trust in some way.So much of our modern society relies on trust. We trust the food we buy is safe, the medicines we take aren’t poisonous, that drivers and pilots won’t crash us, that electricians won't poorly wire our houses…Many studies have shown that trust influences economic growth and societal prosperity. The economist Kenneth Arrow wrote that ‘virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust’Trust that a person can do the best job, shares your goals, won't scam you, trust is required to setup businesses, to deal with people and work in groups.Trust sometimes involves letting others make a decision for you. Believing that someone has your best interests at heart. Admitting that they’re better placed to understand a situation or to help with a goal.How might pandemics of the past, present, and future, be shaped by, and have an effect on, social trust?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.