I hate affirmative action.
I don't just disagree with it.
I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment.
I hate it.
The hatred comes from an understanding
that it is a band-aid, that it is a substitute
for the actual development of our capacities,
of our people to compete.
They want to tell African-Americans
to pat us on the head.
We're gonna have a separate program for you.
We're gonna give you a side door that you can come into.
That doesn't make us any smarter.
It doesn't make us any more creative,
and it doesn't make us any more fit
for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
The following is a conversation with Glenn Lowry,
Professor of Economics and Social Sciences
at Brown University.
He is one of the great minds and communicators of our time,
writing and speaking about race and inequality.
I highly encourage you to listen to his show on YouTube
and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Lowry.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech,
I think is the greatest speech in American history.
If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it.
Sure.
And ask you a question about this dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its creed.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,
the sons of former slaves
and the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together
at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi,
a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,
sweltering with the heat of oppression
will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children
will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
First of all, damn.
I mentioned to you offline, I immigrated to America
and this is why I love this country.
This is one of the great speeches
that represents what this country is about.
So what is this ideal of equality
that we should strive for as a nation,
that all men are created equal?
What does that mean to you, this equality?
Well, if we put this in historical context,
King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.
It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln
signs the Emancipation Proclamation
declaring the enslaved people to be free.
They're not yet citizens in 1863,
but the end of slavery has become
the position of the federal government
when Lincoln issues that Emancipation Proclamation.
So putting it in context,
enslaved people, four million or so,
African descended enslaved people.
How do they become citizens?
How do they become in this status of subjugation
and domination and stigma and exclusion?
How do they become citizens?
It seems to me that that's the heart of it.
The equality that King is talking about
is an equality of status as members of the nation
as free and equal citizens within the republic.
Now, I think it's really important to understand
that slavery was not merely a legal order,
but it was also a social system
that had the symbolism attached to it.
They had a big journey to make
from their subjugated status as serfs,
as landless people, as uneducated,
unfit for citizenship really in the minds of many.
So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later,
that King is appealing to this idea
that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration
of Independence writes these words,
all men are created equal and endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights.
He didn't, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner,
didn't have in mind when he wrote those words,
the people who were slaves.
But by the time you get to 1963,
King is invoking this idea, all men,
and of course he means all persons,
he doesn't only mean men,
he means men and women are created equal.
He wants this idea to be embraced by the country
in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.
That's his dream, that's his idea.
The legacy of slavery would be erased
that the position of African Americans would be equalized
within the political community,
which is the United States of America.
That's my sense of it in any case.
So on a very basic level,
the worth of a human being is equal.
It's just literally the worth of a human being.
So I mentioned to you offline
that I came from the Soviet Union.
My grandfather fought in World War II
and for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person
as they were captured, there's different numbers,
but it's in the hundreds to one German
in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.
So he wanted Germany to expand
and conquer a large part of the world.
And within that future world, that third Reich,
the worth of a Russian or a Slavic person
is 100 or 1000s of a German person,
of a pure German person.
So that has to do with not some kind of public policy
or politics or all that kind of stuff.
It has to do with the basic worth of a human being.
And that's what Dr. King is speaking to,
that all people on some kind of deep level
are worth the same.
If you're somehow weighing the value of a person,
we're equal in that basic fundamental worth.
Yeah, I think that's correct, I think that's very well said.
I don't know that he had in mind the position
of Slavic people in central Europe
in the middle of the 20th century
or the first part of the 20th century, King.
I don't know that he had that in mind.
He might well have done, but certainly that's the idea.
So you don't think he was really thinking
about this particular civil rights struggle
in the particular struggle against the backdrop
of the history of slavery in America
and thinking about African Americans.
He wasn't thinking about the basic,
he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.
No, I don't mean to say that.
The speech in Washington.
The dream.
In 1963 at that March was within the context
of the United States and it was within the context
of the civil rights movement.
There was a movement that was going on.
He was an actor in a political drama that was American
that had to do with the fight over equal rights
for voting, for housing, for employment,
for citizenship of blacks in America.
But King was informed, I think,
by a much broader Christian ethic
of the equality of all persons.
I mean, he gets killed in 1968.
The five years after that speech in Washington,
he spends developing his worldview
and the things that he had to say,
for example, about the war in Southeast Asia
that was going on at that time,
made appeals to universal principles of equality.
He was a pacifist to some degree.
He was against war.
He was a socialist to some degree.
He might not have worn that label publicly,
but he believed in a decent society
where the poor would not go untended,
where healthcare would be available
to people who needed it and this kind of thing.
A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life
was not dependent upon the color of the skin,
upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken,
upon whether male or female.
All persons are created equal.
This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King
on my understanding.
Broadly speaking,
what do you learn about human nature
by looking at the history of slavery in America?
Oh my.
So what does that tell you about people?
Well, I think of two things right off the top of my head.
One is about the capacity of people
for looking the other way in the face of unethical
and morally profoundly problematic practice.
So I mean, slavery was controversial.
It was controversial going all the way back
to the founding of the United States of America.
The country was founded on a compromise
where half of the country thought that slavery
was abhorrent and would not have had a countenance
in the constitution. The other half of the country were steeped
in the dependence on the labor of these African captives
and their descendants, the economy depended upon it.
They owned them as property. That was their wealth.
Their wealth was invested to some degree
in the value of these human beings.
And in order for the United States to come together
as a confederation of the several colonies,
there had to be a compromise made. And it was made
where slavery was allowed to persist.
And the people who were against it
or who thought it morally problematic
were able to countenance the practice
in the Southern States where slavery flourished.
And that went on for 75 years after the founding of the country
until the crisis of the late 1850s
that led to the Civil War and ultimately to the Emancipation.
So one thing I think about human nature
from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people
to live with terrible, morally questionable practices
and have that as a part of their institutions,
it took a movement of the United States
a massive movement of abolitionists
struggling against slavery for the better part of a century
before that practice could be eradicated.
But the other thing about human nature that I see
is the ability of people to sustain their humanity
under the most awful, oppressive conditions.
The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children,
I mean, they were chattel, they were button sold like horses
or cattle, and yet their humanity was not destroyed by that.
And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree
in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive,
the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved
and who were set free, were able to,
over the following decades,
build a foundation for the development of African-Americans
within the context of American society
that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement
of the middle of the 20th century and has led us
into the present day.
So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil,
but human nature can also survive in the face of terrible evil.
That's what I take from slavery.
That survival, that flame can burn
even when the world around it tries to put it out.
There's still a little flame of human consciousness,
of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is
that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful,
that lives on.
That's what everyone said.
Yeah, I think you put it very well.
There's got to be some poetic way of expressing that.
Leave it to the poets.
What about the people that look the other way?
How many people do you think just regular people
knew that something is, this is wrong?
Or do people through generations convince themselves,
most people, most regular people,
convince themselves that there's nothing wrong?
Yeah, I asked this question because I wonder
what we're looking the other way on today also.
Because you have to kind of,
you have to ask yourself these difficult questions
of assuming we're the same people we were back then.
We can be flawed in that same kind of way.
We can look the other way just as others have in history.
Yeah, you spoke of the European context
and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people
had to be looking the other way
when the massive crimes that were committed by that regime
were being undertaken.
Railroad cars full of human beings
being taken off to be slaughtered
or to be worked to death and labor camps or to be gassed, etc.
A lot of people had to know about what was going on
and look the other way
or enthusiastically supported the persecution of the Jews
and the Gypsies and so on.
And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840.
My sense of the matter is that
like many practices that are unjust,
most people thought that's just the way it is.
I mean, that's the world that they inherited.
They were not moralists.
They were not revolutionaries.
They just wanted to go along.
Some people might have been troubled by it
but thought there's nothing that can be done.
Some people might have thought,
well, they're these black Africans.
They're not really like us and, you know,
they are lucky to be here.
If they were in Africa, they'd be worse off still.
Some people might have thought that.
Some people might have been disturbed
but not been able to see what it is that they could do about it.
They might have thought, oh, this is, you know,
this is disgusting.
This is, you know,
not something I wouldn't want to have anything to do with
but not knowing whether there's any practical way of opposing it.
That's why you need a movement.
You need for the people who are troubled by the practice
to know that there are others like themselves equally troubled
and as they gather together collectively,
they can exert their influence.
There were debates about the wrongness of slavery.
As I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.
There were abolitionists and there were people who opposed
the compromise that led to the framing documents
and institutions that created the United States of America
opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.
It took a while before that could come to a head
and produce the crisis which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery.
I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States.
It's not unique to the Western Hemisphere.
The enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel
is something that one sees on a global basis.
One sees it going all the way back to antiquity.
We might ask how is it that people finally came to turn their backs
and eradicate the practice?
That might be the thing worth really trying to understand
because the practice itself is...
There's a wonderful book by the sociologist Orlando Patterson
called Slavery and Social Death that was published in 1982
which is a comprehensive history and social analysis
of the institution of slavery over 2,500 years.
Going back to the classical Greek and Roman civilizations
finding slavery in Africa amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East,
finding slavery in the Far East, finding slavery in South Asia,
the enslavement of people, the practice of taking someone as a captive in war
and then instead of killing them what you could do,
making them into your property was a very, very widespread in human culture.
I like to make this point sometimes when people are talking about how wrong slavery was
without any question that the practice was profoundly morally problematic
but I like to make the point that given how wrong it was
think about how impressive was the accomplishment of the eradication of slavery.
That was something, there were 600,000 dead in the war between the states 1861 to 1865
in a country of 30 million people.
That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives not to eradicate slavery
and every instance probably most of them were just fighting for,
they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces and they fought and they died
but the net effect of their having fought and died was to push along a process
that led to the eradication of slavery, that's an amazing achievement.
The slaves themselves were largely uneducated and backward in their,
of course what else could they have been, they were kept in captivity,
they were prevented from developing their human potential
and yet after the end of slavery that population,
that 4 million plus African descended people became the foundation
for what a century later leads to Martin Luther King standing
in the Washington Mall and giving that great speech
and now here we are 150 years down the road
and Barack Obama is president of the United States.
He did not descend from slaves, I think we must not lose track of that
but he identified as an African American and was a part of the population
that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves
and we are, we African Americans are for all practical purposes
fully equal citizens of this great republic.
That has happened within a century and a half
and I know that you can find any parallel to that kind of transformation
in the status of people from human chattel to full citizens of the republic
anywhere in human history, it's certainly worth celebrating
the achievement of the eradication of slavery I would say.
And it probably started with a few people that inside their mind dared to rebel.
It's interesting to think about how it all started,
how in the state of injustice the revolution percolates like where it starts.
You said people that see something is wrong find each other.
It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals
that not only know that something is wrong but are able to tell others about it
and be convincing and then together gather and rise up.
It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress
from slavery to where we are today to live out the ideal of this all men created equal.
The power of individual because I don't know what you think about it
but I tend to think that a few small individuals probably originated this.
It's the power of the individual because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world
what can I possibly do?
I tend to think one person can be the seed of starting to fix the injustice.
Sure, one person here, one person there.
Yeah, one thinks of course of Frederick Douglass, the massively significant figure
who was born in slavery who stole his freedom
and because he was property and he decided he was not going to be property anymore
and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally
and who became an educated, powerfully articulate, massively influential person
in the United States and in England going around presenting himself
as an embodiment of human dignity and commitment to ideals of equality
and I mean he's just one person but there were others like him.
Just one person, all it takes is just one person.
So here we are on this topic of equality in the 21st century.
So what does equality mean today?
If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome or the injustice of inequality
at which point does equality of outcome is just, at which point is it unjust?
Sort of looking at our world today and looking at inequality.
How do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice and some is the way of life?
So what does equality mean when we look at the world today different from Dr. King's speech of the basic humanity?
I don't think King's speech, I have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged
not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character
that requires equality of outcome.
He says his children will be judged by the content of their character.
That's a conditional statement.
That is the judgment will depend upon the content of their character, not the color of their skin
but it doesn't follow from that that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth and economic power
position within the society, representation in the various professions, the various measures of social achievement
doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and that color of skin
that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes that they will be equal across the different groups.
In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all the various social outcomes
that they will be equally successful in business that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions
that they will have the same educational achievement that the occupational profiles will look the same.
If they are in fact distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices with their own ideals and norms
various immigrant populations, people coming to the United States of America from all corners of the world
the descendants of the African slaves, the black Americans here today who are ourselves various with different origins and so on
the different religious practices and commitments that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever
however we parcel up the total population into the various groups, these groups are themselves different from one another
they have different norms within their own cultural practice.
How would we expect if in fact we recognize that the groups are different from one another
that in a world that is fair they would all come out equally represented in every undertaking.
They're not equally represented and that fact I'm arguing is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion
that they're not somehow being fairly treated.
Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture,
their practices, their norms, their traditions, their beliefs, their ideals and so on.
The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs, cultural orientations and ideals will have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes.
So I just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think fairness of treatment implies equality of outcomes.
It does not.
Is the process by which we're speaking now in the midst of the National Basketball Association's playoffs.
I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan.
I mean, I'm just, it's a very good team and I'm excited about my Celtics.
We defeated the Brooklyn Nets.
I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and Company in a playoff series.
We whipped them and we're on our way to, you know, the Eastern Conference finals and we're on our way to the NBA finals.
And I'm, you know, if I were a betting man, I'd put down a few bucks that the Boston Celtics underrated as we are, have a very good chance of winning the NBA finals.
Okay, so that's the NBA.
That's the National Basketball Association.
I'm a sports fan.
I like basketball.
Slightly biased prediction, but yes.
Yeah, it is somewhat biased.
All I'm saying is if you take a look at who the star players are in the National Basketball Association, you're going to find that there's some Eastern Europeans.
You know, there's some really good basketball players coming out of Eastern Europe and more power to them.
And there are a lot of African Americans.
We're overrepresented.
They're not that many Jews, as far as I know.
No offense intended their legs.
But I mean, the NBA is not equally representative of all of the different populations in the United States.
Now we could go into the reasons why, but I'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.
If you can play, you can get on the court.
All they're looking for is people who can play.
I think something like that is true in many different venues.
I expect if you're a really good technical engineer companies are going to employ you.
And if you can make money, they're going to advance you and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.
I expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions who are actually making bets on the market by and large are the people who are good at that activity.
And if you're good at that activity in this world, in this modern world, you're going to rise to the top.
I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.
Of course, there are of many different sorts.
But I'm saying that to expect that there would be, okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code.
Let's look at who's actually trading bonds.
Let's look at who's actually starting businesses and so on.
To say that in a fair world, I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population, they'd be 10% of every one of those things.
But what I would expect is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in one or another activity.
How do you know if the difference in culture accounts for the difference in outcomes or it's the existence of barriers, especially barriers early on in life of discrimination that are racially based.
So if you think about affirmative action, in which ways is affirmative action empowering, in which ways is it limiting for these early development of the different groups, but let's just speak to African Americans.
We should say that you went to some no-name Northwestern University at first, but then you ended up with a great university of MIT.
So that's your, not early but middle development.
So speaking of the development, the opportunities, the equality of opportunity, how do we know we got that equality, right?
Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that.
We were talking about results, now we're talking about opportunity.
I was taking a position that when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin.
We're talking about opportunity, not about results.
But opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are. Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions in which people are raised, the social and economic conditions.
So the child of a poor family that has no resources doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential.
You asked me how can we tell whether or not a difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity or it's a reflection of differences in culture and interest and practice.
And I don't know that there's a single answer to that question, but I think one wants to look at the data.
One wants to try to measure, you know, as a social scientist, I would say what you want to do is you want to estimate the significance of various factors for determining the outcome.
If the outcome is how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market so you look at their wages and you think, well, that depends upon a number of things.
It depends upon how educated they are, what kind of skills they have, what kind of work experience they have, and so on.
And those things are all legitimate factors that might determine how much they end up making in the labor market.
But you also want to perhaps controlling for those things, see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are Latino or whatever, fact that they are male or that they are female, the fact that they do or do not speak English as their native language,
this kind of thing, whether those factors also are implicated in determining how successful they are in the labor market. And if you find that after you have controlled for the things that are legitimately determining success and failure in the labor market,
like skills and education and experience, having controlled for those things, the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of a Latino background also affects their earnings,
then you might conclude that to that extent, they are not getting equal opportunity in the labor market, that kind of idea.
But I want to focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis, irregardless of the workers racial or ethnic background.
One opportunity issue, but that's at the end of the development process. They are now presenting themselves to the market, trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage.
That's the end of the line. What about the developmental opportunity, the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place.
That goes all the way back. That goes all the way back to birth. It even goes back to before birth. The mother carrying the infant in the womb, she has certain nutritional practices and she might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that.
I'm not saying she is. I'm not saying she isn't. I'm just saying whether she isn't will affect the development of the fetus, the newborn.
Now there's a question of environment. There's a question of the development of their neurological potential. Do they learn how to read?
Are they stimulated verbally? How many words have they heard spoken? Are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential?
What about the peer group influences? What about the values and norms of the surrounding human communities in which they are embedded?
Do they encourage the young person to apply themselves in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential?
So development is not only something that is controlled by the society's practices. It's also something that is influenced by the cultural background of the individual.
And those things are not equal. Those things vary across groups in a very significant way and that too will be a factor determining disparities of outcome.
So when I see outcomes that are different, I see wealth holding that's different. I see educational achievement that's different.
I see representation in the professional schools and law school and medical school that's different between groups.
One question is, are the institutions treating people fairly? But another question is, do the background in social and cultural influences equip people in the same way?
I know that the answer to that, not in every instance, do they equip people in the same way? And so it makes the judgment, the moral judgment that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated.
Inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree, but it is also a cultural factor to some degree, I want to say. And that's controversial. I know a lot of people, they think of themselves as being progressive.
They want to point a finger at society whenever they see a disparity. But I think that that's a mistake. I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem.
You think that if you get the right law, if you have the right public policy, if the right politicians are elected to office, suddenly those disparities will go away.
And I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope. And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.
But I mean, we could go into that. You were talking about affirmative action, which is something else altogether. And you were talking about me and my education, which is also something that's a little bit different.
And I'm happy to talk about those things. Northwestern University, by the way, was a great university.
I'm just joking. It's one of the great universities of the world, yes.
And I studied mathematics at Northwestern University, which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place. And I got a very good technical training in mathematics when I was at Northwestern.
You love both mathematics and human nature, which is why you ended up going into economics at one of the great economics programs in the world at MIT and getting your PhD there.
So one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist, which allows you to think systematically and rigorously about the way the world and the way humans work at scale, trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans, like a psychology perspective economics allows you to do.
Well, economics is one of the social sciences. I think there's value in psychology and in sociology. There's a lot to know that doesn't come up within the study of economics.
We study markets and dynamics of economic development and trade and so on.
But yeah, speaking personally, as I was coming along, I was fascinated by mathematics. I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern and took a lot of courses there and, you know, functional analysis and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems and stuff that I ended up employing in my graduate studies in economics.
But you're right, I was not satisfied simply to be proving theorems. I wanted to be addressing issues of social significance and economics.
I discovered, to my delight, was a field of study that allowed me both to develop rigorous analytical frameworks, you know, modeling and precision of logical, you know, deduction and inference.
On the one hand, satisfying my mathematical interests, but on the other hand, could address questions of social significance, like why does racial inequality persist?
Why are some countries prospering and growing and others less so?
Why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth? And I ended up falling in love with the application of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues.
What do you use beautiful about? Mathematics, about mathematical puzzles, about logic, all those kinds of things, because it's still there. The love for math is still there for you. So is there something you could speak to? What is the kernel, the flame of that love?
It's like magic. I mean, you know, being able to prove something and, I mean, you know, I think of offhand, you know, there's no, there's no largest prime number, okay, so.
How would somebody know that? Okay, what's a prime number? So a prime number is a number that has a whole number that has no divisor other than one.
There are no divisors of the number that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37, whatever, okay. So they're prime numbers.
There's no largest prime number. They're infinite number of prime numbers. There's no largest prime number. Okay, that's an idea. You can get your mind around it in an instant.
It doesn't take a whole lot of depth to see the question. There's no largest prime number.
I wonder if prime numbers show up in economics. I mean that. Oh, they don't show up in economics, except cryptography, I understand. Yes, yes, yes.
For code, you know, in coding stuff. And that shows up in economics. But in terms of models, yeah, probably not. That's, that's, so prime numbers are little, you know, in abstract algebra.
It's like, they show up in all these places, they're just like beautiful mathematical puzzles that don't immediately have an application, but somehow maybe challenge you and as a result, push mathematics forward.
Like for Maslow's theorem, you know, as far as I know, no obvious real world application, but it has challenged mathematicians throughout the centuries.
Indeed. And somehow indirectly progressed the field. But the rational numbers are countable. They can be put in one-to-one relationship with the integers and, you know, but that the real numbers are not countable.
There's a lot more real, quote unquote, more real numbers. These are orders of infinity. This is Kantor, Georg Kantor, and all that kind of, that kind of stuff. Or Goethe's theorem.
I studied this as an undergraduate, you know, the incompleteness theorem that there are propositions within any logical system that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic.
There are going to be propositions that you can formulate that are true, but that you cannot prove to be true.
So the idea that you could systematically develop a logical framework for mathematical inquiry that could demonstrate the truth or falsity of any proposition is not a feasible goal.
This was Hilbert's project, as I understand it, and Gertl showed that there was no hope ever of being able to demonstrate the closure of logical systems that were rich enough to accommodate the real numbers.
They gave an existential crisis to all mathematicians and scientists alike and humans, because maybe you can't prove everything.
I remember, you know, when I was a junior college, a community college student before I transferred to Northwestern, and I took a calculus course, and it was a lot of fun.
And it was differentiating algebraic expressions and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions, and it was a lot of simple problem solving.
I get to Northwestern, I take a course in differential equations. And again, it was a lot of formulaic, you know, applying if you get a differential equation of this structure, like if it's linear, you got exponentials, etc., you can solve it.
And then I took a course that showed me, you know, where the question was not how to solve any particular functional expression, but it was proving the existence of a solution to a differential equation, where it was like x dot equals f of x and t and f is just some arbitrary function.
What do I have to assume about the function f in order to know that there exists a solution to the differential equation, dx dt equals f of x and t.
And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition, it's a condition about the bounding of the slope of the function f as a function of x that it doesn't, that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope on that function and then you can use a iterative process to show that the sequence of, you know, partial
thing converges to something that's a solution to a real thing. Anyway, again, I'm not not going to bore you or pretend that I'm a mathematician, I'm not. But what I'm saying is the difference between a specific algebraic formula that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand, and
an abstract question of whether there exists a solution in the general case is like a huge, was like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics and the techniques that you have to employ to address these larger questions and so on.
I, you know, when I was an undergraduate I took the first year PhD sequence and math analysis at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician named Avner Friedman, and learned about measure theory and, you know, learned about some some early functional
ideas. And when I saw that those ideas were being applied by advanced study in economics, I was delighted I found an intellectual home.
So that one of the fascinating challenges in mathematics is to think how can you construct, which echoes the challenge of economics. What are the properties of an equation that allow you to say something profound and say it's simply. And so the question of economics is how do you construct a model where you can
generalize nicely and say something profound and say it simply. So one of the questions, one of the challenges of economics is macro versus micro economics is, you know, the world is made up of individuals.
So there's a connection to this our discussion of, of race and discrimination and outcomes and all those kinds of things. The world is made up of individuals. But in order to say something general, we have to construct groups.
In order to analyze the data, we have to aggregate that data somehow, we have to make an average over some set of people. So what are the pros and cons of looking at things like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, based on groups versus based on
individuals. And what are the groups, if there's any pros to looking at groups that we should be looking at.
Okay, those those are big questions. I mean, in economics, you're right. I mean, micro you have an account of how individuals make decisions about spending their money on this consumption side and about how enterprises make decisions about
what to produce, how much of it, what inputs to use, what techniques of production and so on, individual firms, individual consumers. And then you want to aggregate. So there's a theory of so called theory of general equilibrium where, you know, you think supply and demand and a bunch of markets.
You think prices that move to equilibrate, but you recognize that the price in one market affects people's behavior and another the markets interacting with each other. You realize that the behavior one individual affects the supplies and available resources and for other
individuals so they're knitted together in some kind of systematic way. And you want to try to demonstrate the fact that notwithstanding all these interdependencies, there exists a solution to the system of equations that equates demand and supply across all the
markets. This is the existence of general equilibrium. Then you want to try to say something about the properties of an equilibrium if it exists. Is it efficient? Well, what do you mean by efficiency? Well, the idea of so called Pareto efficient outcomes
these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon. Everybody can't be made better off by an alternative outcome. You want to demonstrate the efficiency of competitive equilibrium. What do you mean by competition? You mean that people take their actions to do the best for
themselves that they can, profits of firms, well-being of consumers, they try to do the best for themselves that they can. But they do so in reference to a set of prices that they believe they cannot control. That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance.
So does a competitive equilibrium exist? Do there exist a set of prices which if everybody recognizes them as given and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest, the outcome will be supply,
equaling demand in all the markets where people are interacting with one another. And that requires the use of some concepts in topology, fixed point theorems and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics, not very deep mathematical results but important to economics. That's all about general
equilibrium and whatnot. But you ask about groups. By the way, amazing world win summary of all of economics, but yes, go ahead. That was great. Markets of competition, of Pareto efficiency, anyway, but yes, groups. And prices.
And by the way, there are some very beautiful formalizations of everything that I'm saying here. You end up in vector spaces, you end up with sets of bundles of consumption and production, you end up with convexity, you end up with hyperplanes, which are,
you know, in this finite dimensional vector space, which are, you know, all of the bundles that have the same value at a certain price value, you end up with inner products, you know, and, you know, it's just, it's very pretty.
Yeah, but you almost forget that it's just a bunch of humans transacting with each other, that markets are made up of individuals.
Markets are made up of individuals. And in order to carry out this formalization, you have to make assumptions about the individuals. And the end result is true in a formal sense, but may not be true as a representation of the reality, because it depends upon assumptions that themselves may not hold.
But at least you know what it is that has to be true in order for your formal framework to be relevant, which is already a step in the right direction, I think I mean the formalization is better than the intuition.
There aren't chair intuition where we sit back and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way. I'm in favor of the formalization people.
They think what is mathematics and the social sciences after all we're dealing with people people are not automata. I agree with that.
But the analysis of the interaction of people, I think to be rigorous requires us to be specific about what we're talking about about markets about consumers about firms about profits about technology about preferences.
And that's the language of economics. But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life with depends upon their goals and their objectives.
Those things are at play. They can be pushed this way or that.
So, I mean, you know, nationalism, fighting and dying for your country, religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal of the good or of, you know, what is the human situation and what is the meaning of life.
Economists have to assume that these things are some particular thing before they can turn the crank on their machine to analyze the outcomes of human interaction. And yet these things believe in my identity.
But the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die for purposes of life that I affirm and pass on to my children are important preconditions for actually carrying out any economic analysis. And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time.
And that's not something that economics has a whole lot to say about.
Well, is there some general things that are really powerful in terms of you said nation, religion? Those are groups.
Can you group people nicely in helping you understand human nature? So group them into nations based on their citizenry. That's geography, right?
The geographic location of your birth or your long term residence or maybe religious belief, what religion you believe over time. Is there groups like that? And then race.
Is that useful? What are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes based on these kinds of groups? Race in particular.
I think they're pros and I think they're cons. I mean, I am myself. Glenn Lowry sits before you right now.
A black American, an African American, I quote, unquote, I identify as, you know, that's the way they talk about it nowadays. I identify as a black American.
My skin is brown. My hair is coarse. My nose is broad relative to the way other people's noses look. My lips are thicker. That's a consequence of my ancestral descent from the human population resident in the African continent in millennia past.
My race. Here in the United States, we have various quote unquote races defined crudely in the way that I just tried to define myself.
You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument that these are superficial differences.
I mean, really, why should it matter that your eye color or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face or the color, the tone of your skin, the amount of melanin, how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation in terms of your skin?
What is that to be the basis of anything? I mean, that's arbitrary. That's not meaningful. Could there really be meaning in these superficial differences among human beings?
Isn't that a archaic or barbaric way of thinking about ourselves to look at each other's skin color or hair texture and then to decide, oh, that's a black or that's a white or that's a Latin or that's an Asian or that's a whatever. That's something that we should outgrow.
A person might say, that's a relic of a kind of tribal society of a kind of pre-modern society where we built real structure on the basis of such superficial difference. A person could say that.
On the other hand, I am a black American. I mean, that's part of my identity. That's part of my heritage. It's part of the stories that I tell myself about who my people are.
Why do I need a people? Why do I need a narrative of descent in which I affiliate with a racially defined people? Do I really need that?
And I think that's an important question. In fact, this is a confession. Think of myself as black. I could think of myself as simply human. I could not identify specifically as black.
I could say, my eyes are brown too. So what? I'm a brown eye. I'm going to invent a group based on my eye color. I weigh 290 pounds. I'm going to have a body size group. I'm a plus 200 and that's quote who I am, close quote.
I don't do that. I came from Chicago. Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown. I'm a Chicago born person, but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979.
That's a long time. I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly. I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland or St. Louis and fight to the death with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person based upon the fact that we come from different cities.
And you have even abandoned in your heart the Chicago Bulls.
There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose, but it's not, it's not very deep. It's not quote who I am anymore. And I'm wondering, I hear I'm trying to pose a question of why is it that being a descendant of African slaves should be who I am?
So there's some answers. One answer is people will look at me and deal with me differently based upon what they see. I don't have control over that.
I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group, whether or not I elect to affiliate myself with that group or not.
Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact that regardless of what my internal orientation is, the world will perceive me in a particular way and will perceive me differently based upon the color of my skin.
And so a police officer who stops me at two o'clock in the morning because my tail light is out and ask me for my automobile registration and I reach quickly to the glove compartment to get my registration.
And the police officer says, show me your hands. And I don't quite hear what he says or I ignore what he says as I'm getting my document out of my glove compartment, but the police officer thinks because I have not responded to his demand to show my hands that I might be reaching for a weapon.
And the police officer sees that I'm black and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon is higher because in that town at that time, a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car happen to be black and male and so on.
And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it and I'm bleeding out there and I'm dead now. And all of that is a possibility that's very real and is based upon the color of my skin and therefore when he stops me, I keep my hands on the steering wheel and I don't go to the glove compartment and I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me for a criminal etc.
Or I walk into a high end store clothing store. I see you're nicely dressed there legs. I'm not, but that's okay.
I do have some good clothes at home. I just didn't wear them here today.
But you know what I mean and the clothing, the salesman in the clothing store either treats me like, you know, an old friend and is warm and welcoming and what can I do for you sir and let me show you this and that and what are you looking for and what because he thinks I'm going to spend $1,000 there that day and he's going to get a 5% commission or whatever it is and, you know, he either does that or he ignores me and looks at me with suspicion and
maybe trying to shoplift something or thinks I'm only going to spend $50 and not $500 and therefore I'm not worth his time.
And I'm aware of the fact that when I go into the clothing store, especially the high end places where I can buy some buy a good suit or, you know, buy some really good dress shirts or slacks that fit me well and so on.
I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously by the salesman based upon the fact that he's looking at me and he sees a black person and therefore I dress up before I go to go out to buy clothes to get you know because I want to present myself as not someone who just walked in off the street but as one of those
black people who is really prepared to spend some money in the store so that I can be treated with respect and I have to carry the burden, such as it is, of knowing that I need to earn the being taken seriously by overcoming the supposition that people may have
on me based upon the color of my skin, something like that. Or I ask myself, what am I going to teach my children about who they are and where they come from what stories am I going to tell them about their ancestors who are their ancestors.
Every African American has European ancestors. Every black person in the United States of America.
I can say that almost without exception. We could go to 23 and me and look at the DNA. They have European ancestors. They're not purely African.
That's a fact and that's a consequence of the experience of African descended people because it's a mixed population.
My name is Lowry, spelled L-O-U-R-Y but pronounced as if it were L-O-W-E-R-Y and I gather if you trace the history of that name that it's Scottish.
She could identify as a Scott.
Or I could claim some Scottish descent but I don't. I don't know who those ancestors are and frankly I don't know who my enslaved ancestors are. I can't trace my family history back very far into the 19th century.
What stories do I tell my children about who we are, about who their ancestors are? I want to tell my children some story and that story is going to be colored by my race.
Even though it is superficial and in an ideal world you might think, why would human beings... I read science fiction so there's this Chinese writer, Chik Sen Lu, it's his name. I might not pronounce it exactly right. C-I-X-I-N-L-I-U, Chik Sen Lu.
He has a trilogy, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End. Those are the three books of Chik Sen Lu's trilogy about how Trisolaris, which is another star system within a few light years of the solar system, and Earth get into a conflict.
And when the Trisolaris come down to dominate Earth, suddenly all of these differences between the Chinese and the North Americans and the Europeans and the Africans and the South Asians become kind of insignificant because after all the Trisolaris with their advanced civilization,
whose star system is dying, have their eyes on the solar system which has a planet the third rock from the sun that is pretty habitable and the difference between us become pretty insignificant.
So we shouldn't need for an invasion by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen before we would recognize the common humanity that we all share that is profound and is deep.
We all descend in effect from the same ancestral population of Homo sapiens who walked out of East Africa eons ago and have survived amongst all of the different possible variations of species and whatnot of humanoid population.
Homo sapiens have flourished. The others have died out. And here we are. And, you know, we can just look at the genetic endowments that characterize our biological essence.
And we can see that we are quote unquote the same beneath the skin. And yet we end up freighting so much weight onto these superficial differences.
And I can see both sides of the issue is what I'm saying. I can see the argument races and the relevancy because at the end of the day, deep down, it is.
But I can also see the argument that I hold on to racial identity because, A, my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me, but B, because everybody needs a story.
Everybody needs an account. You tell me you're Jewish. I mean, I don't know how deep that is. I don't know how genetically profound that is.
I do know that it's a culturally profound identity for a lot of people based upon maybe some of the same kind of forces that I'm talking about.
Maybe they won't let you not be Jewish. You could say you're not Jewish, but when Hitler is rounding people up, what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do with what the Gestapo was about.
And B, you need to tell your children a story.
That's the fascinating thing about this tribalism that you spoke about, that we form tribes as humans throughout human history, form tribes and have directed hate toward other tribes and sometimes violence and destruction.
And yet, tribalism allows you to tell a story to your children, allows you to grow a culture.
There's something about defining yourself within a particular tribe that allows you to have a tradition.
You have an article that you wrote called The Case for Black Patriotism.
Oh, yeah.
So I should also say it's so interesting because for me personally, I feel, identify as, believe I am an American.
And yet within the American umbrella, it feels that there's a longing for other tribes.
You mentioned Jewish, but what I honestly feel is, I mean, a lot of it is humor and culture and so on is Russian and Ukrainian because that's where I come from.
That's where my family is from.
There's like stereotypical things that are funny, humorous type of thing about Russians, showing no emotion, good at chess and math, into wrestling, drinking vodka.
I mean, there's literally every single stereotype, I'm in the embodiment of that.
So there's a, you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways.
There's a tradition there.
And within the American umbrella, and some of it is humor, some of it is little quirks of culture.
But now with the war in Russian and Ukrainian, interestingly enough, even that little thing, it becomes also a source of negative tribalism.
But anyway, that context aside, what is black patriotism?
And why do you feel?
I mean, I'm speaking in an article called The Case for Black Patriotism in a particular context.
And what I'm saying basically is very simple.
I'm saying we are African Americans and the emphasis should be on the American.
I actually don't even much care for the framing African American, but I'm not going to fight with people about it.
It's, you know, I don't think it's worth fighting about.
That's not how I would just say we're Americans, or if you want, we're black Americans.
We're certainly not African.
The African American population is a population of people who come into existence here in North America through the cauldron of slavery.
There are also immigrants, immigrants from East Africa, immigrants from West Africa, immigrants from Southern Africa, immigrants from the Caribbean,
who descend from an ancestral population, which is African.
We, you know, the history of the world since 1500 is a history in which people of African descent are scattered because of slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.
And so here we are.
But the institution of slavery ended in 1863 in the United States.
The struggle that we started out talking about, which gave rise to Martin Luther King giving that speech that you say is the greatest speech in American history,
and I'm not going to argue with you about that, happened right here in the United States.
We are, what is the United States?
The United States is a nation of immigrants.
The population of the North American continent was sparsely populated by an indigenous population which was destroyed in conquest by a European population that settled here in North America and appropriated the land
and have built a civilization here, which has been people by large influx of individuals from Europe, and Irish, and Italian, and Greek, and Slavic, and Jewish, Russian Jews coming in large numbers and so on,
and wave after wave after wave of immigration.
Asian, Latin American population of people have come to reside here in the United States, and we black Americans who descend from slaves.
We African Americans who descend from slaves.
So here we are.
This is a great nation.
I mean, this is a monumentally significant political force, which is the United States of America founded in 1776, 1787 fought a war of independence from the British established a republic, which is a confederation of these independent colonies,
which has grown into now the 50 States of the United States of America continental nation.
The richest and most powerful nation on the planet with massive influence throughout the world at for good and for ill.
That's who we are.
I want to say to black people, there is no other home for us.
This fantasy of we being a people apart back in the day when I was coming along in the 1960s, there was something called the Republic of New Africa movement.
And they wanted some states in the south, given over to black people and we were going to have our own country.
And that's a, it's a joke, it's a fantasy, it's, it's, it's a mythic, unbalanced, unrealistic, fanciful politics.
It's not a serious politics.
We're Americans.
We're not going anywhere here.
The idea that, and I want to say this in a number of different registers, I want to say, first of all, we need to make peace with the fact that that's who we are and that's where we are.
So nobody is coming.
The world court is not going to litigate our disputes.
The United Nations is not going to set up a desk for people of African descent who reside in North America.
We have to work out whatever our concerns are with our fellow Americans right here within the context of American politics.
That means compromise.
That means looking for frame of framework for political expression, which is broader than our racial identity, etc.
So I want to say that.
But I also want to say there's no reason to apologize for this. There's something positive to affirm. I take on this question about slavery in, in brief, in brief.
Because in fact, slavery was awful and it was wrong and it was on the backs of the enslaved Africans and it had consequences that endured, that have endured long after the termination of the thing.
But I also want to say, look at what has happened in the last 150 years for African Americans. And I want to say, look at the vitality of the institutions here in the United States of America, of the Democratic Republic of the United States of America.
Again, not perfect, which are, which are malleable enough these institutions to allow for the transformation of the status of African Americans such as has occurred since the end of slavery.
And I want to say there's a lot to celebrate in that.
So this is our country.
We are full members of the polity.
We have burdens and responsibilities, as well as privileges that are associated with our membership in this Republic.
That does not mean that we should not fight for what we believe to be right, although we are not one voice here, we black Americans, it does not mean that we should not protest things that we think are deserving of protest.
But I want to say it does mean that we should not reject the framework that we're operating in because we basically don't have any alternative.
And because when viewed in full context, a noble and profoundly significant achievement, the United States of America and a beacon to the rest of the world.
I don't want to, you know, go off in some starry eyed kind of jingoistic celebration of America as the greatest civilization, etc, etc.
But this great nation is our nation.
And I think we do best by beginning we black Americans do best by beginning.
This is my argument in the piece by beginning, but from a framework which accepts that fact and then builds on it.
So black patriotism is not exactly the same rhymes echoes American patriotism.
So a black American is first and foremost an American.
Yeah, a black American is first and foremost an American. And it's a good thing too.
Let me return to the question of Dr. King and another powerful impact from individual Malcolm X to ask you the question.
Well, first, people often perhaps inaccurately portray them as representing two different ideals approaches to the fight for civil rights.
So Martin Luther King for the nonviolent approach, the peacemaker and Malcolm X is the by any means necessary.
What do you think about this distinction and broadly speaking in black patriotism in the future of black Americans in the 21st century?
What is the role of anger? What is the role of protests?
Even, you know, violence encompasses a lot of things, but just aggression and the, you know, fuck the man.
We're going to have to make change force change.
Okay, I think you put your finger on something really important in the context of we were just discussing my black patriotism essay and it's not the only it's not the only story.
There is another story and Malcolm X is someone you identify and his memory lives on and is powerfully influential.
And I think you see it in Black Lives Matter and I think you see it in the protest and rioting and so forth that has broken out periodically going all the way back to the 1960s and before but especially since the 1960s.
He saw it in Los Angeles in 1992, the Rodney King civil disturbances that broke out there. And the balled up fist, the radical Afro centric rejection of the American story that Martin Luther King he believed in he believed in a magnificent
promissory note. And a lot of people are rolling their eyes, you know, and saying, you know, as you say, fuck the man magnificent promissory note.
I mean, just get your knee off my neck. That's what you can do for me. Don't ask me to believe in your BS about some magnificent promissory note, some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway.
I mean, just get your knee off my neck.
Now, I can relate to that. As I mentioned, I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s in the 1960s. I remember Malcolm X. I mean, literally in real time.
I remember when he was murdered in 1965 in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem in Manhattan in New York City.
I remember my uncle, I was raised in a house where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house and my mother and my sister and I lived in a small apartment upstairs in the back of this of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned.
And my uncle was a small businessman, a barber and a tradesman. He was he was a hustler. I mean, legally, I mean, he did what he had to do to make money. He was very enterprising, not especially well educated, but a very intelligent and disciplined and resourceful provider for his family,
including myself, my sister and my mother in their household. And we called him Uncle Mooney because he had moon shaped eyes that protruded and were round Uncle Mooney.
James Ellis was his name Uncle Mooney. James Ellis Lee was my uncle Mooney. But I'm saying all that to say this. He admired the nation of Islam.
I mean, King and Malcolm X, Martin King and Malcolm X differed along a number of different dimensions. Malcolm X was a Muslim.
And Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian minister.
My uncle Mooney didn't have any time for these Christian ministers. He thought that was the white man's religion. He, you know, and back in that day, you go into a black church and you'd see a portrait of Jesus. And he'd be a blonde hair blue wide.
He didn't even look like a Mediterranean. I mean, he didn't look like somebody who came from Palestine. I mean, he looked like somebody who came from Northern Europe or something like that. The picture of Jesus and my uncle Mooney rejected that whole thing.
He would be damned if he was going to bend his knee to some white Jesus. But he was not a Muslim either. But he respected the Muslims.
He brought home their newspaper. It was called Mohammed Speaks. This is the nation of Islam, which is the black Muslim movement founded in American cities in Detroit and then Chicago, going back to the early middle 20th century and growing
into a very significant movement that had a lot of influence. Louis Farrakhan and controversial figure descends from this movement. It has fractured now and has the major part of the legacy of the black Muslims has assimilated itself into Islam
proper. Malcolm X made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and came back with a very different vision about what it meant to be a Muslim and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition and religious culture of Islam that has a global
reach. And he had a different vision when he came back from that. Some people say that's why he was killed and so on. I don't know. I certainly find that to be plausible that he became the constitutive threat to the sect, which was the black Muslims
and I had to be had to be dealt with. I don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that. But anyway, what I'm trying to say is the black Muslims were there. Malcolm X was there. And in my experience, they constituted a counterpoint to the position of
King, which depended on a kind of respect for the best of the tradition of American democracy, appealing to the better nature of our oppressors live up to the full meaning of our creed. I mean, these are words that he would use a
magnificent promissory note is what he would think of as the Declaration of Independence and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, unfulfilled ideal. And the black Muslims were like, Fuck that. We're going to take care of our own.
We're going to build our own schools. We're going to build our own businesses. We're not waiting for the white man to do anything to get your knee off my neck and get out of my way and let me take care of my own. And my uncle respected that he respected the straight back.
The stand up straight with your shoulders back. That's a Jordan Peterson. But I mean, that was the way before Jordan Peterson, but that was his philosophy stand up straight with your raise your children. Don't be depending upon welfare. You taking welfare from the white man.
You need to get busy. You need to educate yourself. You need to clean up your act. Put down the fried chicken because it's going to kill you. My uncle Mooney loved this book that Elijah Muhammad, they called him the honorable Elijah Muhammad was the founder and the leader of the nation of Islam.
He had a book and all the books said was be smart, eat green vegetables. Don't eat fried food. Don't eat pork. They're Muslims. Don't eat pork and take responsibility for your diet and be healthy.
And, you know, don't be putting a whole lot of pills into your body. You don't need to do that if you just get control of your diet and you, you know, you eat probably and my uncle loved this idea of responsibility for self and determination to build.
You know, he respected that in the Muslims, even if he didn't buy the religious part of it.
And so, and by the way, when my uncle died in 1983, he left me a bequest. It wasn't money, unfortunately. It was his complete collection of the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
And I have, I have these albums. These are 33 and a third LPs. There's six of them. And I have a complete collection as best as my uncle could assemble the recorded speeches of Malcolm X.
Now, why did he do that? He did that because he did not want me to forget. Don't be dependent upon the white man, build your own stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Proud black man, take care of your business. Take care of your children.
Pick up the trash in front of your house. Get busy. This was this philosophy.
So violence now. That's another story. I mean, Malcolm X would say, you know, we're going to defend ourselves. Are you going to mess with us? You know, you racist Ku Klux Klan or whatever we're going to arm ourselves.
And we're going to fight you back. You racist police who are oppressing and persecuting and abusing our people. Well, you better be ready because we're going to fight you back.
And that too was the spirit that my uncle, that was a kind of attitude, a kind of posture. My uncle was not a radical. He was, he was a businessman, but he respected this idea.
You take your life in your own hands when you mess with us because we're prepared to defend ourselves.
So that blood runs in you too. That threat is, when you write about black patriotism, that threat is there too. It's like you embody both the ideal that we're all American, but also that there is this oppressive history.
There is the powerful that are manipulating you, that are oppressing you, and you can't just wait around for things to fix themselves. You have to take action. You have to take things into your own hands.
And sometimes that means being angry. Sometimes that means being violent. That's there too.
Yeah, it's there, but here in the bud is, I don't meet today Glenn Lowry in 2022, think that that is the answer. I don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere at the end of the day.
I think we're past that. There aren't Knight Rider Ku Klux Klan people breaking down your door and dragging you away. There are not nooses thrown over a tree limb where you hang somebody from the tree because they whistled at a white woman or they got too much property in your community and you became, you know, they were
grills and whatnot like that. That is a thing of the past in America that the situation is no longer the one that requires that kind of violent reaction and that there is, if we look at the net effect of the so-called rebellions in American cities, they're
the George Floyd protests, which became violent and arsonists in the aftermath of civil disturbance and whatnot in the summer of 2020, I think set back the program for African Americans. I don't think it advanced it.
I think there are things to be concerned about schools that are not working, police that are not not respecting citizens and so forth but I think that those are things that affect white Americans as well and that the way to ultimately correct those things is to make
an alliance and associate oneself with Americans who are concerned to change these things and I don't think it's properly framed as a racial problem and I certainly don't think that, you know, violent rebellion gets us anywhere.
I get the historical salience of that posture and it made a lot of sense in the early and the mid 20th century. I don't think it makes very much sense at all in the early 21st century.
Well, thank you for allowing me for a brief moment to try to channel your Uncle Mooney and maybe Malcolm X in this conversation as we look forward to the 21st century. You mentioned that in part you're troubled by the term African American.
So words are funny things until they're not. So let me ask you about what I think is one of the most powerful and controversial words in the English language, the N word.
So this is a word that I can't say that only certain people have the right to say. I have a friend, Joe Rogan, who has, what would you say, there was mass pushback or highlighting of the fact that he didn't just say N word but said the full word many times throughout his conversations
when referring to, in a meta way, about the power of words, especially when related to certain comedians using those words.
Yeah.
What do you think about this word? Is it empowering? Is it destructive? What is it? What does it mean for race in America? What does it mean that people like Joe Rogan were essentially there's an attack to cancel him for using the word?
Just as a scholar of human nature, what do you think about this whole thing?
This is a phenomenon that interests me. Okay. The N word, nigger, I can say it because I'm black. But I mean, I can also say it because I like hip hop.
And when I listen to hip hop, I hear the word all the time, these niggers ain't dead, you know, watch out for these, et cetera.
I heard the word constantly as I was growing up as a boy and a young man in Chicago, niggas ain't shit. That was it. That was, you know, and that could be a reflection of some kind of pathology within the African American community of self hatred and so forth.
It could be or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way. I mean, I assume other groups also have their various, I don't know how the Irish talk about their Irish brothers and, you know, whatever.
And I don't know how the Jews talk about the Jewish brothers and whatever. But black people when talking about other black people use the N word all the time.
My nigger, N-I-G-G-A, you know, my nigger, that is a term of endearment.
My friend Randall Kennedy, the law professor at Harvard University has a book called Nigger, and he uses the word in the title of the book.
The history of a strange history of a provocative word is something like there's a subtitle, but the title of the book is N-I-G-G-E-R, colon, and then he has a subtitle.
I think, of course, the use of the word as a slur and an insult, which is a part of the history of black people in the United States, the use of the word by the southern racist segregationists.
We don't want no niggers up in here. Niggers have no place in my restaurant, in my store, etc. That's meant to be an insult.
It's an insult to people. It's a fighting word. It's a way that you say that to somebody. It's an invitation for conflict.
That said, what is it about this particular word and also the asymmetry of it that do you think it's empowering to the black community to own a word?
My honest answer to you is I don't know. I don't fully understand it. It has become symbolic in a way, and the policing of the use of the word, I can say it, but white people can't say it.
I can say it. I'm not a racist. I'm not a self-hating black. I'm just speaking the language of colloquial English that has emerged amongst African Americans in which that word plays a big role.
But the prohibition on its use by others, and of course, in the Joe Rogan case, it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an N-word.
He was simply pointing out that people had said stuff in which the N-word was a part of what they said.
Now, he did make this statement about how did he put it, the planet of the apes, that one of the offensive things that he said had, you know, he walked into a room.
There's a bunch of black guys standing around. He says, like, planet of the apes.
He said it's like Africa planet of the apes.
He should have been a little bit more careful.
That was an insult. That was, you know, something that, you know, if you say that and people are offended, they have a right to be offended.
And if you didn't mean to offend them, you can apologize. And he did apologize. I accept his apology. Joe's okay with me as far as that goes.
In fact, McWhorter and I, John McWhorter and I, at the podcast that I do, The Glenn Show, I had a conversation, part of which touched on the Joe Rogan phenomenon.
And we concluded he didn't really do anything wrong. I mean, I mean, you can like Ermael, you can hate him or whatever, but the idea that he's a racist is kind of ridiculous, frankly.
I mean, Joe, you know, if that's your test of what constitutes a racist, the utterance of the word, then, you know, it's kind of a,
it's kind of silly as far as I'm concerned.
What do you think about the rigorous testing of people to the degree they're a racist or not?
The accusation of racism being a way to attack, to bully, to divide.
So what are the pros and cons of that once again? Because it does reveal the assholes and the racists, but it can hurt people who are not.
Well, I think we have a history here in the United States of blatant racism that goes back a long way and that has present day echoes.
So there are racists, I mean, there are people who will look and see all those black people, they're patronizing this business.
I don't want to patronize this business anymore.
Who, if the daughter of their son is dating somebody that is black, they will say, I really wish you wouldn't do that.
I mean, why are you hanging out with those people? Don't you know who they are?
There are people, there are racists, okay? There are black racists.
That is black people who see somebody who's white and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever or have a, you know, visceral dislike based upon nothing other than the color of the person's skin.
Such people exist. Racism is a real thing, etc.
On the other hand, I think this throwing around, you know, the accusation of racism, a college professor is teaching a course.
He says in the context of teaching the course that the underrepresentation of blacks in physics program at this university is because they score lower on the test than other groups and they're not qualified.
So say the professor gives a lecture and he says, we don't have more blacks in the physics department at this university because they're not enough qualified blacks.
Somebody in the classroom who hears that a black student objects, he's a racist. Okay.
That's a power move.
It's a move to try to control the conversation. It's not an argument. It's an epithet.
You've said that a person who has a particular idea that you don't like, maybe that idea is I'm against affirmative action. I think it's unfair. I was just with Dorian Abbott.
Dorian Abbott is a scientist at the University of Chicago who published a piece in Newsweek magazine in which he said that he thought affirmative action and racial balancing was unethical.
He was invited to give a lecture at MIT, a very distinguished lecture in his field based on planetary science. I don't know exactly what it is. I'm not a scientist.
But in any case, because he had said that he didn't like affirmative action and he thought affirmative action was racist, that's basically what he said.
Why are we looking at people based upon their race and decide we should just do it on the merit? That was his position.
Now, people protesting at the university where he was invited, MIT, saying that he's a racist because he had that opinion. He gets disinvited.
Charles Murray is a popular social science writer who is famous for his book about IQ, The Bell Curve, one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences between black and white in performance on mental ability tests
and speculates about the extent to which such differences may be connected with the genetic inheritance of these racially distinct populations.
Now, he could be wrong about everything that he's saying.
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist because he observes that there are racial differences in measured intellectual ability amongst Americans of different racial descent.
He could be wrong. Let me stipulate that he is wrong. I mean, I don't want to argue about whether he's right or about whether he's wrong.
He's addressing himself to a factual issue, and now the issue becomes, instead of grappling with the factual questions at hand and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness about those questions, the issue becomes his character.
He's a racist.
That's, in my mind, a lot like calling him a witch.
The use of that word now, I think, has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft, because they have views about substantive questions that bear on racial inequality or racial difference,
that a person finds unacceptable or that a person disagrees with and you think you can shut somebody up.
Crime in the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC is out of control, some person might say.
Murder rate is high. Who's committing those crimes? They're mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings and who are doing the shootings.
They're killing each other. They're making our city unlivable.
Now, that's a hypothetical statement that I offer.
It might be correct. It might be incorrect. It might be appropriate. It might be inappropriate. It may be true, but something that we would be better off if people didn't focus on. I don't know.
Responding to someone making that statement, have you seen what has happened to my city?
It used to be that you could go to North Michigan Avenue and you could find one after another after another high-end shop. This is in Chicago, my hometown.
Tourists would come and they'd go to the theater and there were restaurants and they'd go out. They don't do it anymore. You know what?
Half of those stores are boarded up now. You know why? Because when George Floyd was killed, black people mobbed in the city and they burnt and they rioted and they looted and it hasn't been the same ever since.
And I'm moving to the suburbs. I'll be damned if I'm going to send my children to those schools. A person could say that.
They might be right. They might be wrong to say it. Calling them a racist isn't exactly not a rebuttal of what they said. It's a move.
It's a move to try to take control of the conversation by accusing someone of having bad character because they said something that made you uncomfortable, which you can't deal with.
So you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist. You might as well be calling them a witch.
You might as well be calling for their head on a platter because they believe that Satan is Lord because that's the kind of quote argument.
Close quote, which is precisely not an argument that people who invoke that term are using. And here's what I have to say about that.
It's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody by calling them a witch. Likewise, it's a fool's errand to try to rebut the contrary forces in American politics that are a reaction often
to real things that are going on on the ground in black communities in the cities across this country by calling people a racist.
You may shut them up, but you won't change their minds. And you know what? At the end of the day, they're going to go to the ballot box and they're going to vote.
They're going to pick up their store and they're going to move it to the other side of town or to another town altogether.
They're going to keep their children away from places where they think the influences are harmful to those children.
They may not even talk about it in public. You can believe that in private that they're talking about it with each other.
You had better find a more effective way of dealing with the conflicts in this country that fall along racial fault lines than calling people witches.
Which is what this, you know, anti-racist, you're a racist because you think that the out-of-wet like birth rate amongst black Americans is seven babies out of 10 are born to a woman without a husband.
Their families are falling apart. Now, no one says that in public because they'd be called a racist if they said it in public.
But as a matter of fact, the families are falling apart. You didn't change that in the least by telling people to shut up about it.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is called a racist in the 1960s, the late Senator, the late New York Senator who was a federal employee and an intellectual writing reports.
And he writes a report about the Negro family he called it in those years.
If I use the word Negro, now they're going to call me a racist if I'm a white person. I can't even use the word Negro.
Which is a historically legitimate reference to the descendants of the slaves, enslaved people, which we were as black Americans, proud to use until yesterday.
So all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness. It's false black power.
People will seed you the ground. Okay, you don't want me to use that word. I won't use that word anymore. Okay, you don't want me to talk about that in public?
All right, I won't talk about it in public anymore. I don't want to be called a racist. Okay, so I won't express my opinion.
You haven't changed anybody's mind.
You know, so.
And you've also mentioned that for that, you haven't changed anybody's mind, but also for things like in universities and institutions, there's diversity, inclusion, and equity kind of meetings and education and so on.
And I believe I read somewhere, like I mentioned to you offline, big fan of your Glenn show, people should listen to it. It's amazing.
There's also just interviews of you that I've listened to. I believe you mentioned somewhere that even those kinds of meetings, people might sit through and not along, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress.
That they may not, they may actually be bottling up a frustration. That's the fear is that that's going to result in a pendulum pendulum sort of pushback towards this idea of forced appreciation, like forced anti racism kind of thing.
I talk about this often in my pockets. That's the Glenn show, you know, and you can find the Glenn show, my YouTube channel, and also at Substack.
Yeah, you have a great Substack. You and your friend do Q&A's and all that kind of stuff on Patreon.
Yeah.
So yeah, so people should definitely follow you.
Check us out.
But yeah, I mean, one concern is that the policing of the superficial policing, this is a part of political correctness, you know, the insistence that you only use certain words that you only talk in a certain way is a phony kind of power because it doesn't actually persuade people about the issues that are at hand.
Instead, it forces them underground in their talk about these issues and that's problematic, much better that we have overt and explicit and honest disagreement to the extent that there are disagreement about things that are going on,
than that we have a superficial kind of, you know, conversation that is perished of any real biting, you know, discomforting confrontation with the realities of the situation at hand.
And for black Americans, I think one big part of the reality of the situation at hand is violent crime.
You know, a police officer is afraid when he stops the car because it's an 18 year old driver in the vehicle.
He's got dreadlocks. He's a black person. The car doesn't have the right license plate. He's afraid to deal with that person.
And one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them is because a few who look like him are behaving violently.
Their violence is usually perpetrated against others who look like themselves, but not always.
And that reality doesn't get changed by, you know, telling a newspaper writer who writes about it that they are racist or enforcing within a newsroom.
You can't cover that story in that way because to do so would be racist.
I think it's a monumental mistake to enforce a closure on public discussion based upon a calculation that if we allow people,
if Twitter allows this kind of post, if the Washington Post runs this kind of story, et cetera,
you end up with a superficial politeness, but a subterranean seething resentment that only makes matters worse.
If I can get your comment, maybe you have ideas because it does seem that this kind of attack works of being called a racist,
being called maybe not sexist, but somebody, you know, like they were going through a Johnny Depp trial now, right?
It's a defamation trial and the reason it's a defamation trial is because all it took is a single accusation of Johnny Depp being somebody who sexually and physically abused Amber Heard.
And all it took is just a single article.
No proof was given except the accusation itself and the world believed it.
So it's effective.
So how do you fight back if it's so damn effective that you can just call anybody racist and it works?
It's hard to wash off.
It's your, you know, you're not proven in the court of law or anything like that, but we get those articles, we get that label,
and then the world moves on and just assumes that person is racist.
So how do you, do you have any ideas how to fight back?
No, I don't, frankly.
Just highlighting the fact.
Roseanne Barr, who made this statement about Valerie Jarrett, she made some kind of ape-like reference to the whatever and her show got canceled and she's a racist.
So first of all, pointing it out, I suppose, is one of the most powerful things that this, the hypocrisy of it, the...
You say it works.
I guess you're right.
It used to be that calling someone a communist worked.
I mean, going back to the late 40s, early 50s, red scare, McCarthyism and whatnot.
And the person might have belonged to a club that was pro-Soviet Union in the 1930s when they were in college.
They might have voted for the socialist candidate Henry Wallace in the presidential election of 1948.
They might belong to the Communist Party.
They might think Karl Marx was right about a whole lot of stuff about capitalism and whatnot.
And they got called a communist or a Marxist and it could have ruined their career, could have ruined their lives.
You know, and a lot of people shut up about it and it took, and it went on for a long time.
And in a way, it kind of still is going on. I mean, you call somebody a Marxist and if you can make that stick, they're certainly not going to get elected president of the United States.
But I don't know about this.
I think, you know, I once read this book by a German political scientist called Elizabeth Neula Neumann.
That was the writer's name, Elizabeth Neula Neumann.
The book was called The Spiral of Silence.
And the argument was, there can be some views, some issues in society that get defined in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views.
And as a result, people who don't want to be shamed, who don't want to be ostracized, don't express those views.
And when they don't express them, anybody holding the view, because they don't hear it said by others, think that they're the only one or one of the few who hold the view.
And so they don't want to be the only one out there saying something, so they keep it to themselves.
So now this view, this attitude in society could be held by a large number of people.
But because of the fear that if they were to express it, they'd be ostracized, no one says it.
And since no one is saying it, the others who hold the view don't know that they're not alone, that they are not the only ones who hold the view.
And hence, they keep silent. That could be an equilibrium. It could be a relatively stable situation in which the emperor has no clothes.
Everybody can see that this dude is naked.
Okay, but everybody thinks that, you know, I don't want to be the only one to say it.
And so we all kind of collaborate in this charade of keeping the view to ourselves.
Then along comes an event that somebody decides to defy the consensus and to speak out.
It could be a little kid who, in the story about the emperor has no clothes, doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say that the emperor is naked.
The thing about the kid in the story who says that the emperor is naked is not that he's saying it.
It's not even that other people hear him saying it.
It's that everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it.
Okay, the kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes creates a circumstance in which it's common knowledge that the emperor has no clothes.
Now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge.
It does not even mean widespread knowledge. It means comprehensive knowledge of other person's knowledge of the thing.
Okay, so the spiral of silence is an equilibrium that is susceptible to being undermined by a process of a kind of cumulative process, a snowballing process of revelation that you're not the only one who thinks this way.
It's fascinating to think that there's an ocean of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid to wake us up to, different little parts of it.
That's correct. And the little kid, by the way, could be somebody like Donald Trump, only more effective than Donald Trump.
Somebody who is smarter than Donald Trump. Somebody who is shrewder than Donald Trump.
Somebody who figures out that when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says, I'm not going to stand for this presidential allegiance that a vast number of people are very unhappy about that.
Somebody who understands that when a Black Lives Matter activist stands up with his ball of fists and says, burn this bitch down about a city in the United States of America, that a lot of people are upset about that, a lot of them.
A person, a shrewd politician, a shrewd manager of a public image, could build on and create a circumstance in which more and more people will feel safe to express that view.
And the more who express it, the safer those who have yet to express it, but who hold it, will feel in expressing it.
And to the extent that the view is very widespread, but is kept under wraps and explosion could happen. And you can look up at tomorrow and have a very different country than you had today, because the conspiracy of silence, the spiral of silence ends up getting unraveled by somebody
who steps out away from the consensus, dares to take the slings and arrows of exposing themselves as a naysayer, but taps into a sentiment that's very widespread.
And I fear that with respect to many racial issues, this is the situation that we actually confront, that it could unravel in a very ugly way.
But it could also unravel in a beautiful way, so it's depending. There is a spiral of silence you're saying, and it could be, because speaking of children, charismatic children, there's a guy named Elon Musk, who might be a candidate for such an unraveling.
He mentioned the person that speaks out could be Donald Trump, but in this current situation that we live in, like as this week, Elon has purchased Twitter.
That's what I hear.
And is pushing for, in all kinds of ways, the increase of free speech on Twitter. And speaking about some of the issues that we've been speaking about here with you, but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact that you have to...
It's okay to point out that the emperor wears an old clothes and to do so from all sides in a way that everybody's a little bit pissed off, but not too much.
What do you think about this whole effort of free speech in these public platforms?
Elon, in particular, Twitter, your avid Twitter user, but just public platforms for discourse, for us as a civilization to figure stuff out.
Yeah, well, the people on the left are very upset about the possibility that Elon Musk and Twitter will be more open to provocative public speech that has, here to fore, been banned or suppressed.
And I think they might be right to be concerned that that could happen. I don't know enough about the technology and about the market to really, I mean, social media and whatnot.
It seems like it's a complicated system of interactions between people and who the users are and so forth and so on.
I do know that that New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop was real news and could have affected the outcome of the election and it was suppressed and that Twitter had a role in suppressing it.
I do know that the question of where the COVID-19 virus originated in the role that a lab leak account could have played in the public processing of that event was real news and that it was suppressed by people who were trying to control misinformation,
disinformation, Russian disinformation campaigns and whatnot.
So Twitter has users. I'm one of them and it has a lot of users. It's not as big as Facebook. I gather it's not, but it's important.
The ability to construct counter platforms where people moving around and whatnot.
It's a kind of network dynamic that maybe I should understand it better than I do being a social scientist.
I don't think anyone understands it even if people include inside Twitter, which is fascinating. It's a monster because of just the bandwidth of messaging and you don't know who is a bot and who is a human.
That's a fascinating dynamic and the viral nature of negativity.
All of those dynamics, of course, you are probably the right person to understand it from a social scientist perspective, from an economics perspective, but nobody really understands.
And it's fascinating within that domain, how do you allow for free speech, not allow for free speech, encourage free speech, defend free speech.
And at the same time, manage millions of ongoing conversations from just becoming insanely chaotic.
From a Twitter perspective, they want people to be happy, to grow, to actually have difficult, critical conversations.
And the problem with humans is they think they know what that is and they think they can label things as misinformation as counterproductive for healthy conversations in quotes.
And the problem is, as we are learning, humans are not able to do that effectively.
First of all, power corrupts. There's something delicious about having the power to label something as misinformation.
You do that once for something that might be obviously misinformation.
And then you start getting greedy. You start getting excited. It feels good.
It feels good to label something as misinformation or disinformation that you just don't like.
And over time, especially if there's a culture inside of a company that leans a certain political direction or leans in all the groups that we talked about, leans a certain way.
They'll start to labels misinformation things they just don't like.
And that power is delicious and it corrupts.
You have to construct mechanisms like the founding fathers did for somehow preventing you from allowing that power to get too delicious.
At least that's my perspective on what's going on.
Well, I'll just tell you personally, I'm excited about the prospect.
I'm glad to see Musk making the move that he's making and we'll see what happens at Twitter and so forth.
You're looking forward for what did he say? Let's make Twitter more fun.
I'm looking forward to the fun.
You've talked about you are at a prestigious university.
Brown University.
Brown University.
And you've mentioned that universities might be in trouble.
I think it's with Jordan, but everywhere else that barbarians are at the gate or the barbarians at the gate of the university.
So first of all, what is to you beautiful about the ideal of the university in America of academia?
And what is at threat?
Well, you know, a university is dedicated to the pursuit of truth and to the education and nurturing of young people as they enter into the pursuit of truth to doing research and to teaching in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse.
So free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence and your imagination may lead you and civil discourse means that you exchange arguments with people when you don't agree with them on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things.
I think the university is a magnificent institution. It is a relatively modern institution. I mean, last 500 years or so. I mean, there are universities that are older than that. But the great research universities of the world and not only here in the United States are places where human ingenuity is nurtured,
where new lot knowledge is created and where young people are equipped to answer questions that are open questions about our existence in the world that we live in.
You can trace to the university, much if not most of the advances in technology and resourcefulness and our understanding of the origins of the species of the nature of the universe cosmology, etc. of science pursuit of humanistic understanding the nurturing of traditions of inquisive.
The people who are trying to shut down open inquiry at the university on behalf of their particular view about things are a threat to what the university stands for, and they should be resisted.
So, if I'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence, and I want to study differences between human populations and their acquisition of or their expression of cognitive ability, that's fair game.
It's an open question. If I want to know something about the nature of gender affiliation identity and gender dysphoria and whatnot.
That's fair game to study in the university you can't shut that down. You shouldn't be able to by saying, I have a particular position here. I'm a member of a particular identity group suppose I want to study the history of colonialism.
And there's a narrative on the progressive side which is colonialism is about Europeans dominating and stealing or whatever whatever and I happen to think, well there's another aspect to the story about colonialism to which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion of the best in human civilization to populations that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that it brought literacy to the southern hemispheric populations that were dominated in the process of the
colonizing thing. It's complicated. I'm not taking that position, by the way. I'm just saying somebody at a university should be able to take it up and pursue it and engage in argument with people about it.
I'm talking about race and ethnicity, but this extends to a wide range of things suppose we're talking about climate.
And one person says the earth is endangered because carbon in global warming etc etc and another person says no wait, no wait. Look at where we stand in the 21st century we're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago we have much more knowledge about that and so forth and so on 250 years from now.
Human ingenuity will have devised in ways that we cannot even begin to anticipate all manner of technological means for managing the problem there's no reason that we should shut down industrial civilization today.
Because we fear the consequences of it when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors and those who come up two centuries after us will be vastly more effective at dealing with problems than we are now.
I'm not actually making that argument I'm just saying the tendency to try to say oh no that person is a climate denier they can't pursue that area of inquiry is against the spirit of the university.
I think the barbarians at the gates has to do with the people who think they know what the right side of history is and try to make the university stand on the right side of history.
My position is you don't know what the right side of history is and the purpose of a university is to equip you to be able to think about.
What is the right side of history what what is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us as human beings living on this planet with the billions that we are in the condition that we are.
So the identitarians the ones who want to make the university kowtow to their particular understandings about their own identity.
We now have at the Brown University and various other places.
We don't do Columbus Day anymore.
We do indigenous people's day.
When that day comes up in October we don't talk about Columbus they're taking down statues of Columbus all across the country and so forth and so on.
I'm not arguing anything here other than that the latter day position.
Bipox black indigenous and other people of color the latter day position that the university has to reflect a particular sensibility about these identity questions.
I think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise.
I don't think you're overstating it.
I I tend to be just for my limited knowledge of MIT but perhaps it applies broadly.
I think the beauty of the university broadly speaking is the faculty and the students.
And the problem arises from the overreach of a overgrowing administration.
That gives again thinks that it knows enough to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs.
And then based on that empowers a certain small selection of students to be the sort of voices of activism of a particular idea.
And not I think activism is beautiful but not just activism but anybody that disagrees is shut down.
And that that I think the blame lies with the administration.
So I think the solution is in lessening just like the solution with too big of a government too big of a bureaucracy.
Is there needs to be a redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful which is the old students and the young students old students being professors.
So the scholars the curious minds the people that are in this whole thing to explore the world to be curious about it on a salary that's probably way too low for the thing they're doing.
That's that's the that's the whole point.
And then the administration just gets in the way and is the source of this kind of they I would say the in your beautiful phrasing.
I will say the administration is the barbarians at the gate.
So the solution is the smaller bureaucracy smaller administrations.
I have to on this point yet this conversation you put on yourself stack with Jordan Jordan Peterson about cognitive inequality.
I think it's titled wrestling with cognitive inequality.
This particular topic of just IQ differences between groups.
Why is this why is it so dangerous to talk about.
Why this particular topic.
Well it's like you're calling black people inferior.
It's like you're saying they're genetically inferior.
That's what people are saying.
It's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people.
If you if you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes.
If you say cognitive ability exists people really are different in terms of their intellectual functioning.
And if you say cognitive ability differences are substantial between racially defined populations.
The sum of that there is cognitive ability it matters and a difference by race is the conclusion that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between the populations.
People find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable.
So that's what I think is going on.
Can you still man that case that we should be careful doing that kind of research.
So this has to do with research.
It's like the Nazis used Nietzsche in their propaganda.
Right. You can use white supremacists could use conclusions cherry pick conclusions of studies to to push their to push their agenda.
Can you still man the case that we should be careful.
Yeah I could do it at three levels.
One is what do we mean by cognitive ability.
So there's many different kinds of intelligence a person might say.
How good are IQ test at measuring other kinds of human capacities that are pertinent to success in life like temperament like emotional intelligence and so on.
So intelligence is not a one dimensional thing measured by G the cognitive psychologists talk about G the general intelligence factor which is a statistical construction.
It's a factor analytic resolution of the correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery a different kind of test and they use that to define a general factor of intelligence and a person could say that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacities actually are.
And that it was much better to think about multi dimensional measures of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure so called IQ which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance of human difference in functioning.
Functioning is not just the ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers I say eight seven nine five three two you say two three five seven eight nine.
It's not just that intelligence is a complex management of many different dimensions of human performance including things like being able to stick with a task and not give up things like being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to remain focused and so forth.
That could be one dimension I could start by questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed.
I could go to a higher level I could say what we're really interested in is social outcomes and the question of what factors influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability to many other things so here's an example.
Visual acuity how well do you see you're not wearing glasses I am visual acuity varies between human beings some people see better than other people do visual acuity can be measured.
I can put you at the chart and you can can you identify and read that bottom line in small print or not.
So we can measure visual acuity and it varies between human beings visual acuity is partly genetic.
I think that's undoubtedly true.
We inherit James that influence whether or not we are near sighted or far sighted or astigmatic or whatever.
So visual acuity differs between people and can be measured and is under genetic control.
On the other hand, corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity.
Likewise, social outcomes of what we're really interested in employment earnings, whether or not they're law abiding, how do they conduct themselves in their families and so forth amongst individuals.
Yes, social outcomes are influenced by so called cognitive ability but they're influenced by many other things as well.
If they can if there are interventions that can be undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have different natural endowments of cognitive ability, the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant.
Just like it's less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field.
There are in fact interventions, educational interventions, early childhood interventions that have been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people even if they happen to be in doubt with low intelligence.
So a second level of arguing against this whole program of research on human differences and intelligences to observe that yes, human beings and perhaps racially defined groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment, but there well may be social interventions that level the playing field,
whether it's in education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions, especially for the poor.
A final level of argument is the one that you alluded to which is that if you talk like this, you're going to encourage a kind of politics which is very ugly.
And it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put emphasis on racially defined natural differences between populations.
That's argument that I am myself personally conflicted about.
On the one hand, I think, you know, those people are just stupid is racist.
Okay.
On the other hand, I think the calculation we shouldn't do this kind of research suppose I'm at the National Science Foundation research team submits a proposal the proposal proposes to undertake a study.
The study would explore the extent to which people and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction.
And I decide not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject is too sensitive.
And if you explore that subject, you might get the wrong answer.
And if you get the wrong answer, the white supremacist will be encouraged.
That is presuming before the research is done that I know the outcome of the research and that I can calculate what the political consequence of the research outcome is going to be.
That's that's assuming the thing before you even know what the thing actually is.
It's a kind of omniscience.
It presumes that you as the master of the universe can tell people what it is that people are being treated like children.
What it is that they're capable of knowing and what it is that they're not capable of knowing it would be like someone saying to Einstein.
I don't know about that special relativity theory.
You know, it could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear weapons or someone saying the Oppenheimer who is a physicist overseeing the Manhattan Project where the US developed a nuclear weapons capacity.
Don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may be more than we can deal with or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research who's interested in exploring the nature of the human genome.
Don't carry out that experiment that cloning undertaking whatever because the consequences could be deleterious.
Well, the consequences could be deleterious.
The consequences could also be the cure of cancer.
The consequences could also be being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent.
So who are you to tell me who you being the person in the political position to control the research?
What the consequence of doing the research is?
I think I don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of human inquiry.
So yes, I would want there to be regulations governing the use of biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in Wuhan or any place else.
I would I would not want to simply leave that to laissez-faire.
On the other hand, I think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences is the road to ignorance and impoverishment at the end of the day for humankind denying ourselves the potential benefits of that kind of inquiry.
I think we need to take our chances within query rather than to try to control it.
And I feel that way about the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else.
So you've asked me to steel man the case against research on IQ of the sort that Charles Murray is famous for popularizing.
And I've said, A, your measure of intelligence is single dimensional and it ought to be multi-dimensional.
I said, B, the consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the natural endowments of the people, but also on the environment and the potential for intervening in that environment environment through one or another kind of instrument as the metaphorical example of the use of
corrective lenses to level the playing field between people with different visual acuity indicates. But finally, I've said, yes, research on racial differences in IQ can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be noxious.
On the other hand, to presume that what we don't know yet and might find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume a kind of presumption or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be, which we ought to be very slow to embrace,
because if we had done so in the past, we wouldn't have nuclear power.
There's a lot of things that we wouldn't know. I mean, what were people saying about Darwin and exploration of the evolution and origin of the species?
They were afraid that it was going to, in effect, disprove the religious based accounts of, you know, what were they saying about Copernicus and et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, that was a masterful layering of, quote, wrestling with cognitive inequality. You dragged in nuclear research, Copernicus Darwin biomedical research with genetics, even COVID and the lab leak.
I mean, that was just fun to listen to. Okay.
Let me ask you about your politics. So you recently said that you're a conservative leaning. Maybe that's a day to day thing. Maybe you can push back.
So you have somebody like your friend, John McWhorter, who we could say is on your left to the left of you.
And you have somebody like Thomas Sowell, who maybe is on to the right of you. And yet there's a lot of overlap between the three of you.
So to what degree does politics affect your view on race in America?
And maybe to what degree does your view on race affect your politics?
Okay. And that for people who don't know has shifted over time. You've been on quite a roller coaster as anybody who thinks about the world should be.
Well, let's begin with the fact that I was trained as an economist in a tradition of what many people would call neoliberalism.
I was trained at MIT, which was not a right wing place by any means.
But it was a place where you learned about markets and about the benefits of capitalism as a way of organizing society.
The virtues of free enterprise, the fact that the pursuit of profit was not necessarily a bad thing, but it well might be the road to prosperity and to economic growth.
The idea that private property and individuals seeking to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth did create inequality, but it also created opportunity.
And it also expanded our knowledge and our control over the physical environment in which we're embedded in, et cetera.
So we were not Marxists at MIT, although we did read Marx. I mean, those of us who were intellectually curious, you read Marx.
Marx was an important figure in the history of the West. And I think Marx should be read in capital three volumes, et cetera.
Alienation of labor and whatnot. The implications of modernization of the advent of industrial capitalism, et cetera.
That kind of dynamic deserves to be studied and to come at it in a critical way, informed by the intellectual inheritance of Marx and Marxism.
I think that's a part of a full education in social philosophy and economic analysis that open minded person ought to acquaint themselves with.
But at the end of the day, I think that the free marketeers have the better of it.
I think the story of the 20th century, as far as economic development is concerned, reflects that.
I think that the experiments where centralized control over economic decisions was the order of the day failed.
I think that the fact of the 21st century rise of China as a force has a lot to do with the spread of, in effect, capitalist oriented modes of economic exchange,
but prices, markets, property, and so forth, although obviously it's a complicated political economic system.
I'm talking about China.
But I think that the story of the 20th century and the hope for the 21st century is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property
in a more or less capitalist oriented system.
That's the view that I hold.
I guess that makes me a conservative.
I don't know.
I want to say that's not to the exclusion of a social safety net.
I'm not saying that old people in an ideal social system would be left to their own devices, regardless of whether or not they had saved for their retirement.
I'm not saying that the ideal of extending decent access to health care to all people, regardless of whether or not they can afford it.
Decent access to education to people, regardless of whether or not they can afford it, is standing in the way of prosperity.
I don't believe that.
I think the mixed economies that we see in Northern Europe and in North America are a balancing of the virtues of free enterprise property and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand against the needs to have a decent society in which people who fall between the cracks,
are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity that is accommodated by our common membership within a single nation state, which is why I think nationalism is important.
And it's why I think borders are important because without a coherent polity who can see themselves as in a common situation and agree through their politics to support each other to some extent.
You can't sustain a safety net.
You cannot have a social safety net for a global population.
You can only have a social safety net for a bounded population who have a sense of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise, which they pay their dues through their taxes in order to sustain it.
There's a balancing that has to go on.
So that's the first thing that I would say about my politics.
I'm a neoliberal economist.
I believe in markets, I believe in prices, I believe in profit.
Corporations are not an incarnation of evil.
Corporations are a legal nexus through which production gets organized in which you solicit the cooperation of workers, of people who provide capital, of people who provide raw materials and input of customers and so on.
And that functionality allows for the production of goods and their distribution and their earning of income and its distribution, which at the end of the day is the foundation of our prosperity.
Corporations are people too.
Mitt Romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012.
But corporations are nothing but a legal fiction, the corporation is not a person as such.
But the nexus of contracts and relationships amongst the stakeholders who intersect in the context of the corporation is the way in which we organize the massively complex set of activities that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits in order to
feed people in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty going to safely take off in land and in order to be able to build cities and etc.
But to the markets, the ideal of the market collide with the ideal of all men are created equal.
The identity, the struggle that we've been talking about of what it means to sort of empower humans that make up this great country.
Do they collide and where do they collide?
Well, markets are going to produce inequality.
And all men being equal is a statement about the intrinsic worth of people.
Not about the situation that will come about when people interact with each other through markets because people are actually different.
And because there are factors that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance that, you know, you and I both invest.
It looked our priority like your investment in my investment were equally likely to succeed.
But as a matter of fact, ex post facto, your investment succeeds, my investment doesn't succeed.
I don't have wealth and you have wealth.
That is an inevitable consequence of an environment in which both of us are free to make our investment choices and where the consequences of investment depend in part upon random circumstances of which no one has control.
But you asked me about my politics and I was just trying to lay down a foundation by saying I begin as an economist in the tradition of liberalism, Adam Smith and so forth.
John Maynard Keynes for that matter and so forth.
That Milton Friedman and so forth.
That Paul Samuels and Bob Solo James Tobin and so forth.
Thomas soul.
Yes.
That appreciates property.
The virtues of free enterprise.
The set of institutions that allow for security of contract, a rule of law, things of this kind.
So that's one thing to say about my politics.
Another thing to say about my politics and you're right, I've moved around.
Is that, you know, I began outside of Chicago, black kid, I was a liberal Democrat.
I encountered the economics curriculum at the MIT and I became trained in economics in the tradition that I've just described.
And I encountered also the Reagan revolution.
This is the late 70s and early 80s.
These are big debates about economic policy and so on.
And I found a lot to admire in the supply ciders.
The people were saying, you know, let's get the government out of the way.
The people who worried about national debt, which is a lot more now than it was then.
The people who were worried that the welfare state could be too big, that the incentives of transfer programs could be counterproductive.
That you had a war on poverty and we did have a war on poverty and poverty one.
And there's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty was lost by the people who were trying to quote unquote eradicate poverty in our time.
That incentives really do matter and that the state, which is driven by politics is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives,
whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient and who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives because they can't cover their bottom line
and they're forced to respond to the realities of differences and costs and benefits and so forth in a way that governments can cover because they have their hand in our pocket.
They can cover their losses and they can make accounts balanced, notwithstanding their mistakes because they can take my property by fiat by the power of the state.
The tax collector comes if I don't pay, he seizes my holdings and they can carry on in that way.
They need the corrective influence of markets in order to be responsive to the realities of life.
I mean, I may not like it that prices are telling me that something that I want to do is infeasible.
I may not like it, but what the prices are telling me is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits to be derived from doing it.
If I persist in doing it, notwithstanding that I'm going to run losses and those losses will accumulate and the net effect of that over an entire society is stagnation and ultimate attenuation of the economic benefits that might be available to people.
Again, I think if you look at the developing world in the post-colonial period, the second half of the 20th century, that's exactly what you see.
Planning doesn't work.
Centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work.
I became more conservative in that respect, but I also, and this has to do with race, lost faith in the posture that what became of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights Movement, you quote King 1963, the Civil Rights Movement starts out as we want equal membership in the polity, but it becomes a systematized cover.
I'm going to argue for deficiencies that are discernible within Black American society, which only we could correct.
That's a very controversial statement.
I make it with trepidation.
I don't take any pleasure in saying it, but here's what I'm talking about.
So I'm talking about the family.
So the family is a matter internal to the community about how men and women relate to each other and engage in social reproduction, childbearing, the standing up of households, the context within which children are mature and so forth and so on.
So the African American family is in trouble. I think I can demonstrate that by reference to high rates of marital dissolution by high rates of birth to out of wedlock and so forth.
You can't even say that the African American family is in trouble.
Violence.
Homicide is the order of magnitude more prevalent amongst African Americans that it is in the society as a whole.
This is behavior.
It's behavior of our people.
I speak of Black people.
Of course, we're not the only people in society for whom violence is an issue.
It's an order of magnitude more prevalent in our communities.
I'm talking about schooling and school failure.
So we have affirmative action as a cover. It's a bandaid on differences in the development of intellectual performance, which is only partly a consequence of the natural intelligence of people and largely a consequence of how people spend their time, what they value,
how they discipline themselves, what they do with their opportunities, how parents raise their children, what peer groups value, and things of this kind.
The Asian students who are scoring off the charts on these exams are doing it not because they're intrinsically more intelligent to other people, but because they work harder,
because their parents are more insistent on focusing on their intellectual performance, because they're disciplined, because of the way that they devote their time and their resources to equipping their children to function in the 21st century.
This is what I believe. I think it's demonstrably the case.
And it is a factor in racial disparity.
The way that the civil rights movement has evolved under the wing of the Democratic Party into an organized apologia for the failures of African Americans to seize the opportunities that exist for us now in the 21st century,
but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century, the way in which the civil rights movement has become an avoidance mechanism for us not taking we African Americans responsible.
This is Glenn Lowry. Not everybody's going to agree with it is part of what makes me a conservative.
I am tired of the belly aching. I'm tired of the excuse me. Why supremacy?
It is, in my mind, a joke. I lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric is so seductively attractive to African Americans and so widely adopted by others.
And as I am fond of saying, at the end of the day, nobody is coming to save us.
I mean, higher education, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, where the future is happening.
That is about mastery over the achievements of human civilization, such as they manifest themselves in the 21st century.
There's no substitute for actually acquiring mastery over the material.
There's no substitute for that to be patronized, to have the standards lowered.
They want to get rid of the test. They want to tell African Americans the patiss on the head.
We're going to have a separate program for you. We're going to give you a side door that you can come into that doesn't make us any smarter.
It doesn't make us any more creative. And it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.
Now, you want to be 10% of the population that's carried along for the next 100 years.
You want to be a ward of the state in the late 21st century. You go ahead because the Chinese are coming.
You're not going to hold them back. The world is being remade every decade by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing.
If you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement of the civilization in which we are embedded,
you're going to end up being dependent on other people to look kindly upon you.
And this story that you've got, this bellyache, this excuse, my ancestors were slaves, is only going to work for so long.
So that makes me, I suppose, a kind of conservative. I hate affirmative action.
I don't just disagree with it. I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment. I hate it.
The hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid, that it is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete.
I'd much rather be in the position of having them try to keep me out because I'm so damn good like they're doing with the Asians
than having them have to beg the Supreme Court to allow for a special dispensation on my behalf because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging.
It's not just diversity. It's not just diversity and inclusion. It's diversity and inclusion and belonging.
I'm whining because I feel like I don't belong. That's a position of weakness. It's pathetic.
And it's the only political correctness that keeps people who can see this.
And believe me, a lot of people can see it from saying so out loud.
So you want the black American community to represent strength?
Correct. And I want us to deal with what it is that we have to deal with in order to be able to project strength in an increasingly competitive world.
Let me ask you. I know you said you're angry or dislike affirmative action.
Let me ask you about something that even to my ear cut wrong.
Now I'm relatively apolitical. So President Biden, when he was running for president, gave a campaign promise that he will nominate a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court saying,
quote, the person that will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications, character, experience and integrity.
First sentence, second sentence, and that person will be the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court.
Do you wish he only said the first sentence and not the second?
Yes, I wish that he had only said the first sentence, even if his intention was to do what he said he was going to do in the second sentence.
In other words, I wish that he had simply said, if I have the opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court, it's going to be a superbly qualified person to carry out that position.
And he might have kept to himself his intention to name an African American woman to that position and then going ahead and named an African American woman to that position and I'm sure that Katanji Brown Jackson.
I don't doubt that she's accepted qualified. She has a distinguished career. She served as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. She's a graduate at Harvard Law School.
She has a background. You do not have to be a world-class constitutional legal scholar to get onto the United States Supreme Court.
A lot of members of the United States Supreme Court have had different kinds of legal careers before they were elevated to that position.
Earl Warren of the famed Warren Court of the 1950s and 60s was a politician as well as a leading jurist and whatnot.
I mean, many kinds of people in the US Supreme Court. I have no doubt that Judge Katanji Brown Jackson is a qualified member to be on the Supreme Court.
I wish that Biden had not done what he did. He could have just appointed a black woman by saying that he was limiting his considerations to black women.
And what are black women as a percentage of all potential appointees to the Supreme Court? 3%, 4%? I don't know. We could look the number up.
By saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment, but it's worse than that because she will live down the asterisk if a person is inclined to do that.
She will have the opportunity to show through her performance exactly what kind of jurist she is. Just as Justice Clarence Thomas has shown through his performance that he was qualified and more than qualified to be on the United States Supreme Court.
What I disliked was the pandering. He was seeking votes from black people by pandering to us and he's treating us like children.
Why should I care what color the person is who's on the United States Supreme Court? What I should care about is what kind of opinions they're going to write when they're on the United States.
Do I suppose that being a black woman means that you're going to write different kind of opinions than others? Well, perhaps that kind of identity politics at the highest level of American legal establishment is something that rubs me very much the wrong way.
What I should care about is the nature and the future of the law. I'm actually struck by this because the court is conservative. It has six conservative members on it and it has three liberal members on it.
And if I were and I'm not a liberal Democrat, the highest concern that I would have about an appointment to the Supreme Court is, is this a person who is going to be effective in advocating my liberal views within the highest council of American law?
Now, the fact that that person is a woman or is a black person is way down the list of the things that I would think are important to the kinds of opinions that they're going to write.
So, I mean, I think Joe Biden, this is just a piece of a larger political strategy to cobble together a coalition that will be successful at the polls in sustaining Democrats.
Jim Crow 2.0, this whole characterization of the conflict in the States about election security and voting rights is another part of that strategy. He is pandering to black voters.
He is trying to frighten us thinking that if the Republicans win, our rights will be taken away. And I think it is a infantilization of African American politics.
I think black people are not to be as concerned about the color of the skin of a person who is serving in government as they are about the content of their character and the focus of their political and ideological orientation, which for me would be center or even center right, but that's me.
And it should not have a significant impact. Nevertheless, he said she can overcome the asterisks, but to me, it was deeply disrespectful that anyone would give an extra asterisk stuff to overcome.
He didn't have to say it. All he had to do was do it. If he wanted to put a black woman on the court, he could go ahead and done it. The reason he said it is because he wanted black people to vote for him by saying it.
And I'm saying that treats us like we're children. It's not a political statement. I just thought as a leader that was kind of disgusting.
Let me ask you about Thomas Sol. You mentioned him. He's a colleague and somebody who's an influence in the space of ideas. So what impact has he had on your ideas and how do you think he shaped the landscape of ideas in our culture in general?
I think Thomas Sol is in his 90s now. He's been around for a long time.
He's still got it. He's still going at it.
He's still going at it. Books continue to come out. I think he's a great man. I think Thomas Sol, regardless of his race, he's black, is one of the 100 most significant economists of the 20th century.
He has chosen as his subject, a substantial part of his subject to investigate the deep causes and consequences of racial disparity of one kind or another. He's written fundamental books about that, many of them.
He's a social philosopher. He is an economic historian. He is a combatant in the conflict of ideas around how to think about society and this beyond racial differences, although race has been a big part of what he's written about.
He's been critical of affirmative action and he didn't just stand back and wag his finger. He got busy looking at the consequences of affirmative action in societies all around the world and he's written books about that.
He's been critical of the narrative about civil rights and racial inequality. He believes in small government. He doesn't think that efforts to redistribute income have proved to be the solution to the problem of racial disparity.
Tom has not been honored by the committee that hands out Nobel recognition in economic science and probably won't be because he's controversial and I reckon that that committee would be low to encourage the blowback that they would be sure to receive if they would take a controversial and politically
focused and expressive black conservative and honor in that way. I think another reason is that Tom as a methodological matter is not especially quantitative. He pays attention to data but he doesn't do statistical analysis and he doesn't do modeling.
So from a methodological point of view, he's not a cutting edge kind of mathematically sophisticated kind of quantitatively statistically oriented, but he does descriptive stuff. He writes in a style that is much more like a social historian that it is like a
mathematically trained analytical economist. On the other hand, he is an economist in the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and George Stickler prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory, which is the analysis of the interplay of market forces,
mindful of incentives, and so on to implement the basic insights from economic science. There is no free lunch. I mean, there's always going to be a cost anything that you do and so on. People respond to incentives, demand,
care, slope downward, you know, competition tends to work best when people are free to enter and not and so on. I mean, that kind of thing. But Tom is also a social historian and philosopher in the tradition of a Friedrich von Hayek.
One of Tom's books I deeply admire knowledge and decisions is an extension of the Hayekian arguments about the limits of central planning and whatnot.
So I think Tom, so Thomas, so African American, born as I understand it in Louisiana, raised in New York City, our graduate of Harvard College, a military veteran, a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, a black conservative social
scientist of very high stature, I think he's a great man. And one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. And you're saying implicitly deserves a Nobel Prize.
Yeah, I do think so. I mean, Hayek was awarded by the committee, Gunnar Meridal, the Swedish economist wrote about economic development wrote a famous two volume work and American dilemma about the status of blacks. I mean, I think Tom could be, you know, put in
that company very easily but not any difficult.
I agree. Daniel Kahneman, them. So it doesn't have to be new. Psychologists, you know, economists, Eleanor Ostrom, the political scientist who was honored in a joint prize given to her and Oliver Williamson 15 years ago or so.
He could be put in that company really quite easily.
Let me ask you, you mentioned Obama in this in the very beginning that we were talking about. How do they feel that seems like forever ago then 2008 Barack Obama became president.
Now at that time, perhaps you identify as conservative already. But how did so politics aside, just in general, how did how did it feel that in 150 years where this country has come along?
Well, yeah, I didn't identify in 2008 as a conservative to the same extent I do today. I was I was kind of in transition yet again. I was excited by the Obama candidacy.
At first I was skeptical, because after all he's not black. The man's father is a Kenyan and the man's mother is a white American, and he identifies as black.
I find it interesting that the first black president of the United States and I could have put inverted commas around black and the first black vice president in the United States, neither of them descend from American slaves.
Kamala Harris's father is of African ancestry in part. He's a Jamaican immigrant and her mother is an Indian immigrant. She was Kamala Harris raised up largely in Canada, though born in the United States.
And Barack Obama is, as I've said, of mixed ancestry and neither of his parents are the descendants of American descendants of African slaves, but blackness is flexible.
It's something that you can put on or you can take off to a certain degree for some people and so be it.
I was excited. Our time has come. Hope and change. We are the ones we've been waiting for. These are slogans from 2008. I can't believe I bought that crap.
Oh, interesting. Let me push back here. You talked about, I mean, to me, a Jew is a Jew. Skin color is skin color.
Yeah. I mean, Barack Obama is black when it matters. When you're talking to a white supremacist, when you're talking to, if you're a slave owner, he's black.
Just like you said, when Hitler comes around, a Jew is a Jew. It doesn't matter how you identify. It doesn't matter what. So in that sense, don't you think that Barack Obama is black in the most powerful of ways?
Which is designating how far the MLK, the Dr. King vision.
Oh, sure. And look, I said it a little bit tongue in chief.
Yes, of course. But I think Obama has been very careful about manufacturing a kind of public persona that is intended to position him in the most effective way.
You mean like every politician?
Yeah, like every politician, sure. And that the racial identity piece is an aspect of that. I mean, anything I say here would only be speculation because I have no facts about the personal history of Barack Obama.
And I accept Barack Hussein Obama. As Hillary Clinton was said, I take him at his word about whatever she was talking about. Well, was he a Christian? I think is what the question was. And, you know, there was some right wing attack on Obama for, you know, having been raised in for some years in the Philippines and all of that.
Indonesia, I beg your pardon, in Indonesia and his stepfather and all of that. But she took him at his word and I take him at his word about his racial identity.
No.
But you were captivated by the power of his words and you regret to the degree you were captivated?
Well, I mean, I think in retrospect that whole campaign looks like pie in the sky kind of fairytale. We are the ones we've been waiting for. I can't quote exactly that speech that he gave in Grant Park in Chicago when he was announced as the winner of the election.
But today is the day that the rise of the ocean stopped words to this effect. I mean, those who doubted that we could do it that tonight is your answer. This was going to be a new day. It was going to be a new regime.
Well, it wasn't a new day and it wasn't a new regime. It was American politics, more or less as usual. Barack Obama turns out not to be the Messiah. Maybe there should be no surprise in that.
Race relations got set back during Obama's tenure. My beef with Obama is that, okay, you're black. You say you're black, you're black. You got elected. Now we have a black president, a black president.
You can do stuff that nobody else could do. You're a black president.
You could tell the people burning down the city to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it.
You know, you could tell the race hustlers, the Alsharptons of the world, not only has our time come for those who supported my campaign, your time is over for those who want to carry on a advocacy rooted in racial grievance.
This section of myself to this highest office proves that the institution of this state are legitimate and open to all comers.
I think Barack Obama, when the SHIT hit the fan, if I had a son, he looked like Trayvon. I deeply regret that he said that. He's president of the United States, the color of his skin and the color of Trayvon skin,
the relationship between those two things. If I had a son, he looked like Trayvon. Now he says, when he said it, he only meant to sympathize with the parents.
But in fact, when he said it from the highest office in the land, and then sent his Attorney General Eric Holder out to enforce this narrative, he doubled down on a racial narrative that I think is actually false.
I think the story that systemic racism in America as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people because of the color of the skin is demonstrably false.
I think that the central threat to black lives is violent crime perpetrated largely by black people against other black people.
I think there is such a thing as police brutality, and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police, but I think it is a second order issue in terms of the quality of life of African Americans.
I think Obama could have told the people who after Freddie Gray died in police custody in a van in Baltimore and who undertook to burn that city down to get their asses off the street and go back to their apartments and stop it.
I think he could have said in the aftermath of Michael Brown being shot dead by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and there was a grand jury deliberation that elected not to indict Officer Wilson.
And people took the streets in that city and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on.
He could have told them, we don't mob around courthouses in this country, we respect the rule of law, get your butts off the streets and back into your apartments.
He didn't do that.
To push back a little bit.
Yeah, good. Push back.
I think you're asking Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, to do the thing that I think should be done by the second black president of the United States.
I think his very example, given the color of his skin, was the most powerful thing. And actually doing some of these hard, Thomas Sowell type of Glenn Lowry type of strong words about race, it may be too much to ask, given the nature of modern day politics.
He is a politician.
He is a politician. He needed to get elected. He needed to get reelected.
Yeah.
In his second term, where most of what I'm talking about happens, so he wasn't facing further election, but Obama was what, 46 or 47 when he was inaugurated.
He served for eight years. So he's in his mid fifties. He's got another half century or 40 years of life, God willing.
So his presidency, I think, was what was primarily on his mind, not getting elected to anything, but being enshrined in a certain way. And the persona that he is now embodying, which depends upon a racial narrative that I and Thomas Sowell and others object to,
I think, was very much in the forefront of his mind when he made decisions as the chief executive officer of the country that we've all now have to live with.
Yeah. But the fact is, he opened the door in a way that hasn't been done in the history of this, the United States, that I don't see there being even a significant discussion when an African American, a black man or a black woman runs for president,
maybe a black man, let's say, because there still hasn't been a woman president. I just see that that broke open the possibility of that. That's not even a discussion.
And that example by itself, I mean, to me, the role of the president isn't just policy, it's to inspire. It's to do the Dr. King thing, which is I have a dream.
And Barack Obama is an example of somebody that could give one hell of a speech. It got you to believe Obama is a smooth operator without any question.
He's a master of his craft. He, you know, he did the impossible. I mean, he beat Hillary Clinton in that primary fight.
And he beat John McCain in that general election and hats off to him. And moreover, he remains an iconic figure in American culture. I don't think there's any doubt about that.
Let me just mention, Clarence Thomas is also black. Clarence Thomas has a story that is vivid and inspiring, just like Obama's story.
He overcome obstacles, just like Obama did. I mean, extreme poverty and so forth and so on. Clarence Thomas has served longer than any other member of the United States Supreme Court.
He is one of nine justices and it's three equal branches of government. So Clarence Thomas, by my arithmetic, personifies 127th of the American state.
He is an iconic figure. His example should be an inspiration to Americans of all races, but especially a black American youngsters.
He happens to be conservative. He's very conservative. So fucking what? He too deserves to be in that pantheon.
He is not by the custodians of American education. Clarence Thomas' name is not on that many schools. Barack Obama's name will be on many of them.
I'm not equating them. They're different people. The offices are very different. But the same logic that you just used to extol the significance of Barack Obama's ascendancy could and should be applied to Clarence Thomas, in my opinion.
Yes, but you know, it's the office, but also there is a resume and there's accomplishments, but then there is oratory and charisma and the number of Twitter followers.
So there's ability to captivate a large number of people and that's a skill that's a skill that correlates but is not directly connected to with how impressive your resume is.
I agree. And moreover, the judicial function, the judge doesn't go out and give speeches of that sort because it's exactly antithetical to what he's doing.
He's a custodian of the law, not a popular figure in American policy. He doesn't stand for election and it's a good thing too.
So I take that point. Here, I want to say something else though that's provocative. The next black president, you say the first black president shouldn't have been the one to do that.
The second one should is more likely than not going to be a Republican. I don't have a particular person in mind. I'm just saying.
I agree. I agree. I agree. And that's why it's going to be super fun. Let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and give advice to young people.
So if you're talking to somebody who's in high school, in college, what advice would you give them about their career, about life in general, how to live a life they can be proud of?
Well, I'd say the world is your oyster. I mean, first order business, you're not a victim. I don't care what color you are. I don't care. You're male, female, you're gay, straight, whatever.
The world is your oyster. You are so privileged. You sit here in the United States of America, a free country, a rich country. Everything is possible for you. Believe me, you can do anything.
Okay. Secondly, I would say mastery over the medium in which we're embedded is the key to the future. So get educated, focus, work hard, invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need to be able to navigate the 21st century.
I would say the Chinese are coming and I don't mean anything against China. I just mean to say the world's a small place and it's getting smaller.
And you better get moving and you better get moving quickly. I'd say your identity, your coloration, your orientation, your category is not the most important thing about you.
So the temptation to limit yourself. I give this speech to my kids. I say, I quote James Joyce. He has a passage in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in which he says,
Do you know what Ireland is? Ireland is an old sow that eats her feral. This is Joyce. He says, Stephen Dedalus is the character that he has in mind in this chronicle.
He says, your ethnic inheritance, he's talking about Irish nationalism, are like nets holding you back. That your challenge is to learn how to turn those nets into wings and thereby to fly.
Okay, flying into the open skies of modern society. Don't be your grandfather. Don't be your father. Don't wear your things so heavily that it keeps you from being open to everything that's new in the world.
Wear it lightly. Yes, everybody comes from somewhere, but it doesn't have to be where you end up.
So you're not your father. You're not your grandfather. You are this wonderfully blessed human being in the middle of going into the middle of the 21st century.
And don't miss it. Don't live blinkerately. Don't live small. Live big.
Live big and wear your history lightly.
Yeah. Everybody's got a mother tongue. Everybody's got a story. Everybody has a people, but the world is a small place.
I love that you're quoting an Irishman. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a profound one, but an Irishman nevertheless. The levels of humor within that is not lost on me.
Let me just mention the great Ralph Ellison, the African American writer, invisible man is his masterpiece, embodied this spirit. Okay, we black Americans, we do come from somewhere that come in from somewhere is from slavery in America.
That's our ancestral heritage. But that's not what we are. Skin and bone. These are superficial things, the spirit.
And if I were a more religious person, I could give a whole disposition about that. But it's the spirit. It's that light that's inside. That's who we are.
And our challenge is to live in the fullness of it as opposed to this blinker thing. We don't look left. We don't look right. We're just fitting within this template that we inherit. That is a travesty, really.
Glenn, you've lived an incredible life, a productive one, but just representing some powerful ideas, some powerful ideals. But life comes to an end.
Yeah.
Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?
Well, it is a really interesting coincidence that you pose me that question. Because I'm coming from a funeral.
Today is Sunday. On the preceding Tuesday, five days ago, I was at the funeral of Eugene Wesley Smith, who was my brother-in-law.
He was my sister's husband. My sister, Leonette, passed away in August of 2021.
Her husband has died at the age of 68 in April of 2022, and I was at his funeral.
He died suddenly of a heart attack that came completely out of the blue. He seemed to be in perfect health.
He was a magnificent human being. I could go into the details, but take my word for it. He was a businessman, a steel trader, a metals trader.
He would buy and sell. He worked mostly from his home office. He had clients, counterparties, people he did business with all over the world.
He had three sons, one of whom is in his early 30s, two of whom are in their late 30s. These are my sister's children.
Now he's deceased. The older two sons are severely, developmentally disabled, and although they're in their late 30s, they're not independently viable.
They don't function effectively. They have to be cared for.
That responsibility has now fallen to the family, but mainly to the surviving son who lives with his wife and his two young children and has assumed the responsibility.
They've cared at home. My sister and her husband, Eugene Wesley Smith, cared for their disabled sons at home.
They didn't want to see them institutionalized. They had some help from programs at the state and social worker and so on.
But they mainly took on the burden of caring for them at home.
Anyway, I go on at length here, and I don't know how much of this you will choose to make use of, and it doesn't matter really.
I'm just trying to respond to your question.
I was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral, and I offered them.
I spoke well of this great man. He was a great man. He had a straight back.
He was a stand-up guy. He could be counted on. His word was his bond. He had broad shoulders.
He carried a lot of people with him, business associates, family members, and so forth and so on.
He had a huge heart. He was a giving and kind person. He had a great mind.
He was an intellectual, even though as a businessman, much of his day was taken up with minutiae of contracts and the details of the order being delivered and not being delivered,
of the quality of the product, of the financing, and so forth and so forth.
They were still a powerful mind there.
Yeah, he was a powerful mind, and he studied. He read books. He was interested in music and art.
He was a spiritual seeker, had been ordained as a child minister in his youth, and while he remained a master of the Christian canon,
he also explored Eastern religion and other spiritual paths and kind of stood above any particular tradition as a man who believed in God,
but thought that God manifests himself in many ways to human beings and that there was much to learn from other religious traditions as well.
This is Wesley. We call him Wesley by his middle name, Eugene Wesley Smith. May he rest in peace.
68. That's five years younger than I am right now. He dropped dead without any warning. I could too.
So how did that make you feel? What were the thoughts in your mind leading up to it, having to give that speech in the days that followed?
Well, first of all, I wondered, what would I say? What would I say? And, you know, there was no way to prepare.
And I decided, you know, I rehearsed in my mind this, you know, straight back, he had broad shoulders.
He had a big heart. He had a great mind. You know, he had a capacious spirit and whatnot, and I use that as a template for making my remarks.
But my main thought was, my God, life is precious and life is fleeting. And death is a part of life.
My death is a part of my life. And I thought, you know, well, I want to take better care of myself than I do, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But I also thought a lot of this is not in my hands at all. I thought one should have his affairs in order.
My brother did not have all of his affairs in order in the sense that there is a lot of, you know, things are going to probate.
There was no will. There's, you know, this is kind of unsettled. I don't want that to happen to my surviving family members.
I want to have my affairs such that should heaven forbid, I fall over one day and don't get up again.
People don't have to scramble about how to take care of things from that point forward.
But as a human, are you afraid?
I'm afraid. Now, I read this wonderful book called The Swerve. It's about Lucretius.
It's about the nature of things, which is this great classical work from the Roman period by this guy Lucretius.
And I'm trying to think of the name of the author, but you could look it up. The Swerve is the book.
It's one like a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize. And it's the history of the recovery of this book by one of these Italian Renaissance Italian people
who would go into the monasteries in central Europe and look through the scrolls and they discover these classical works from antiquity,
which had been lost through the Dark Ages and they republish and read these works.
And Lucretius' great work on the nature of things was one of these books, Poggio Broccolini.
I don't remember the Italian guy's name, but this all could be looked up.
Yeah, Poggio Broccolini, 15th century and the name of the author is Stephen Greenblatt.
Yeah, Stephen Greenblatt, a magnificent book and a terrific story.
Anyway, one of Lucretius' points, he was an atheist. I mean, he was a Roman.
He didn't believe in mysticism and he argued it's irrational to be afraid of death.
Why should I fear death? Death is coming to all of us.
The point of being afraid, I mean, I'm wasting my time fearing something that I have no ultimate control over.
It's irrational to be afraid of death.
Yeah, because you can't predict when it happens. You only know that it happens, so why be afraid?
And therefore live every day fully, live every day purposefully, and so on.
But these are all just words. I don't want to die. I want to live forever. I'm not going to live forever.
I don't want to suffer. I see people suffering. I saw my late wife, Linda Datcher Lowry, Dr. Linda Datcher Lowry,
professor of economics at Tufts University, whom I met in graduate school at MIT, black woman from Baltimore.
We married, we raised two sons together. She died at the age of 59 from metastatic breast cancer.
And I watched her suffer and I watched her die. And it took a while.
And we cared for her at home right up until the very end. She died in our bed with our sons on either side of her.
And the dog curled up by the door, the porch door in the bedroom, and she expired.
And I watched her suffer and I watched her die. And I don't want to suffer. Who does? I don't want to die.
I am likely to suffer before I die. I am likely to see my death coming and to lament it.
There is a book by Richard John Newhouse, the theologian, called As I Lay Dying, As I Lay Dying, Richard John Newhouse.
He had stomach cancer and he thought he was dying and he wrote this book as he lay dying.
Then he recovered. He went into remission and he had another couple of years.
He thought he was dying and he had another couple of years.
And I can remember meeting him at a bookstore in suburban Boston when he was on a tour.
He was a friend of mine, a theologian and public intellectual.
He founded the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City, which still exists.
Richard John Newhouse and he's contemplating his own death from the point of view of a Christian minister.
He was first a Lutheran pastor and then he converted to Catholicism or as he would have put it,
I returned to the church because he thought the Renaissance was over.
I mean, I'm sorry, the Reformation. Richard thought it was over.
He says there's only one church, et cetera, getting into theology stuff here.
But I'm saying all that to say I read that book aloud to my wife, Linda, as she lay dying in that bed.
I read that book and it was filled with hope.
I mean, it first acknowledged the dread.
Yes.
I lie dying. I don't want to die.
I'm a Christian minister. Christ was raised from the dead.
I'm supposed to believe in everlasting life, but the fact of the matter is this is me and I'm lying here and I'm dying.
This is the end of me.
How are you going to do anything other than dread the end of me?
So let's acknowledge that I don't want to die.
Okay, I'm just going to tell you that up front, but that is not the end of my death is not the end of life.
I have lived well and fully.
I will go and do my best right up until the end.
I will accept what is inevitable and I will hold out this belief and he's a Christian minister.
So he holds out this belief and he knows that the belief is not rational.
It's not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion.
It's spiritual in the most fundamental way.
It is something that people hold on to and they have hope and he had hope.
I don't know if I have that hope.
I used to be, but I'm no longer a Christian and I'm no longer a theist really.
I'm with Lucretius there.
There's no magic that's going on here.
There's no unseen hand behind the scene that's arranging things.
What I believe is that when I look at the natural world, I see the evolution of the species.
I see the organic development of the of the planets.
I mean, the earth is going to not exist in a finite number of years.
I think with our very high probability, the sun is going to die.
It's going to, you know, implode.
It's going to go supernova or whatever is going to happen and there's not going to be any there there.
What's the meaning of life?
That's the meaning of life.
Let's go.
What's the why?
Or is that something economists and social scientists and mathematicians are not equipped to answer?
Surely, you know, I think we live, we try to live well and meaningfully within our time.
We bond, we reproduce, we try to pass on and we accept our limitations and our mortality.
We try to contribute and that's through our children and through our work.
And we're in this together.
We're not in this alone.
We are connected to other people.
I get a lot of gratitude out of teaching.
I'm a teacher.
My students are going to outlive me.
They're going to have students.
I'm a writer.
My writing is going to outlive me.
I don't want to be, you know, self-important or pretentious here.
I doubt that I'm going to be the James Joyce of the 21st century.
They may not be reading my stuff in 100 years as people will certainly be reading Ulysses in 100 years.
But I try to have an impact on the world that I'm a part of and try to leave a legacy that's dignified.
You know, I mean, I could give some flowery words, truth-seeking and whatnot.
What about love?
Love.
What role does love play in this light thing?
Love makes the world go round.
I mean, without love, I mean, what have we got?
We don't have family and, you know, we certainly have missed out if love is not a central part of our existence.
But stop asking me questions like that.
Glenn, thank you for doing everything you do, for thinking the way you do, for being fearless and bold.
And in the Glenn show and your writing and in your work and just being who you are, thank you for being you.
And thank you for giving me the huge honor of spending your extremely valuable time with me today.
This was awesome.
It's been my pleasure, Lex.
I mean, really.
And it has been like four hours, man.
You're wearing me out.
I love it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Glenn Lowry.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you can't fly, then run.
If you can't run, then walk.
If you can't walk, then crawl.
But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.