Chelsea Follett: Joining me today is Maarten Boudry or Boudry is the, more American pronunciation, which he’s let me know he’s also alright with, he’s a philosopher and author. He was the first chair of critical thinking at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University and has eclectic interests including progress, cultural evolution, science, conspiracy theories and more. You should check out his substack, which we will link to in the podcast description. And he joins the podcast today to discuss a really fascinating essay, that I personally found just incredibly insightful in understanding some of the cultural trends that we’re seeing today, about what he calls the modern aversion to modernity. So, before we dive into all of that, how are you?
Maarten Boudry: Great. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I’m honored to be a guest on this podcast. And yes, it is indeed the Boudry or, but everyone pronounces it Boudry in English. So I’ve gotten used to that.
Chelsea Follett: So this essay is still forthcoming at the time of this recording, so the title might change, but it’s currently titled, ‘Biting The Hand That Feeds You Because It Won’t Punch You In The Face’ which is just, just a great title, so.
Maarten Boudry: Long word working title. Yeah.
Chelsea Follett: Let’s, just sort of walk through the whole thing. So you start with this very powerful and illustrative story about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the enlightenment era philosopher, and what you describe actually is extremely relevant to understanding cultural trends today. So tell me about Rousseau.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah, so it’s relevant because I think it’s one of the first instances of the phenomenon that I’m describing because of course, it’s at the very early stages of modernity. Modernity hadn’t really delivered anything tangible for common people, yet. So people were still like poor and destitute and miserable. But of course, this was the era of the republic of letters. So people were already freely changing, exchanging ideas. So there was a relative measure of intellectual freedom already. So in that sense, we were already in the, at early stages of modernity. And so what Rousseau was doing, of course, this was before he was established or well known as an aspiring philosopher. And during a walk to the French suburb of Vincent, which is close to Paris, he describes in his autobiography that he wrote much later that he read something in a magazine that he was just casually leafing through, that really struck him like a bolt of lightning.
Maarten Boudry: And it was an announcement, for a prize by the Académie de Dijon. And I don’t really have the prize question with me here, but I think it’s something to the effect of, has the improvements of the sciences also led to a betterment of the morality in our society? And Rousseau describes that the moment that he read that sentence, that he really became another man and he saw another universe. And that just in, one like flash of insight, he saw the innocence of humanity in its original state, and its supposedly ignorant or barbaric state and just the depravity and the decadence of civilization. And so he wrote his essay that which he submitted then, basically [laughter] a sweeping indictment of the whole of, so-called civilization is basically saying that, wherever the sciences are blossoming, wherever knowledge is improving, the virtue is declining, and that every supposedly great civilization is like eventually collapsing under the weight of its own useless knowledge.
Maarten Boudry: And so, what I find fascinating about that, by the way, he won the first prize, this is [laughter], this is relevant also, for what comes next is that, I mean, Rousseau himself is a very cultured and educated man. I mean, he was one of the major contributors to the Encyclopédie, the Diderot and D’Alembert project, which is one of the mainstays of the French Enlightenment. He wrote most of the articles on music. So he was a very learned man, but here he is like, just in very refined and eloquent prose just condemning the whole of modernity and condemning the whole idea of being refined and learned and cultured, et cetera. So what he’s doing in effect, and that’s the title of the essay, is he is biting the hand that feeds him.
Maarten Boudry: He’s basically, rejecting everything that even though it was, as I said, still the early stages of modernity. So he still had to be careful of what he was saying, of course, because it was, the Catholic church was still relatively powerful, but he knew that like the Enlightenment philosophers had already created like this refuge, this little island of intellectual freedom for themselves. So that was the hand that was feeding him, that was giving the freedom to learn and to study and to exchange ideas. And he knew that that hand a metaphorical hand would never punch him in the face. Like if actually they were inviting him, please criticize us, like Diderot, his friends, they later had a huge fallout, was basically encouraging him, even though he totally disagreed with the argument. He’s like, come on, yeah, submit this essay, because he just relished the provocation of like a philosopher, an enlightenment philosopher, basically tearing down the whole project of enlightenment and of philosophy.
Maarten Boudry: And that I think is like one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of modernity that we are not just allowing or tolerating this sort of behavior, I mean criticism that is both like accurate and justified and also just completely unfair and just posturing, and that we’re even encouraging this, basically we’re, welcoming people. Like, please give us a good thrashing. So that’s, okay, that’s kinda a long winded story, but that’s the scene that I’m opening with to say that, okay, this is really a fascinating thing. Rousseau is one of the first philosophers. I mean, as you know, he’s also, he’s a kind of Enlightenment philosopher, but he’s also kind of the pioneer of the romantic movement, which is kind of the part of the counter enlightenment. And if you understand like what is behind that story, I think it provides a lot of insight of what comes next, everything that we’ve seen in the 20th century and the 21st century, about this very modern phenomenon of anti-modernity. The capitalist phenomenon of anti-capitalism and the western hatred of western civilization.
Chelsea Follett: No, absolutely. Some people consider him to be a counter enlightenment figure for those reasons, but let’s bring it into the modern age. So then you move in the essay into talking about the modern aversion to modernity, sort of a cultural trend of disdain toward western civilization and modern prosperity and capitalism. Tell me about that.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. So the thing is this essay is actually based on a book that I’m writing, and it’s a kind of a, in one of the later chapters, so the book is called “The Betrayal of Enlightenment.” It’s originally written in Dutch but I hope to translate it. And so the first couple of chapters is about the different ways in which progressive people specifically have betrayed modernity. Have turned against modernity and enlightenment in different ways. I’m perhaps kind of adopting, sort of ideological bigotry of low expectations here, because I’m kind of assuming that it’s more shocking for progressives to condemn modernity or to turn against modernity than conservatives. I mean, perhaps some conservatives might be offended by that. But I think, at least, I mean, it’s in the name progressives, they believe in progress, right?
Maarten Boudry: They should be the defenders, the torch bearers of enlightenment and of modern civilization. But for a variety of reasons, they have turned against it. And so in the early chapters, I described a couple of intellectual movements, different perhaps, tributaries to this grand river of anti-modernity, anti-civilization. So, for example, I have a chapter on postmodernism and the idea that we should undermine the foundations of modernity. That like the ultimate step that we take as enlightenment thinkers is that we have to attack the very notions of rationality and truth and reason. And then, of course, there’s the victim versus oppressor narratives, which is sometimes called post-colonialism. This is the idea that you can neatly divide the world into oppressors and victims, which is also something that very much originated in the left of course, among progressives, which also leads to an indictment of Western civilization, because western civilization is like basically the root of all evil according to this ideology.
Maarten Boudry: And then you have a chapter on environmentalism, which is also more interesting because it was originally on the right, and then it kind of moved to the left in the ’70s, which is a different story, but which also ends up kind of rejecting the whole of modernity and also, you know, biting the hands that is feeding them, because all these people, of course, are enjoying the fruits and the benefits of modernity. But then in that chapter, so the essay that you wrote, that you read it, I’m asking like a more fundamental question. Like, okay, you can describe all these intellectual movements, and you can say, well, it’s all the fault of Foucault and Derrida, the post-modernists for example. Or it’s all the fault of what happened in the ’70s with the move towards, like deep ecology and environmentalism.
Maarten Boudry: But then you can ask a deeper question. Why do these ideologies, different ideologies, I mean, it’s the whole host of different thinkers, why do they originate at all? Is there something about western modernity that like sows the seed of its own destruction? And I think what really made me think is that, you can already go back like way before postmodernism, way before post-colonialism, something that George Orwell wrote, something that also Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his famous book about, I always forget, it’s capitalism, socialism, and democracy, that this breed of anti-modern, anti-enlightenment intellectuals that already existed back then. So that made me think like, there must be like a more fundamental explanation. So it’s not just that you can trace everything back to postmodernism. And I think the explanation that I eventually come up with is, I mean, it’s very simple, and perhaps it’s deceptively simple if you think about it.
Maarten Boudry: And in a way, it’s something that we all know, but I think people don’t really realize, all the consequences of that insight. And I think, and of course, the rest of the essay goes into a lot of details about, Israel, for example, is one example that I’m exploring. And so the very simple insight is western civilization, modern civilization is the only hand that allows itself to be bitten that will not punch you in the face. I mean, you shouldn’t try to criticize any other kind of, like for example, I mean the classical, examples of course, before, during the Cold War, if you were living under Stalin’s communism, then of course, you should never dream about criticizing the political ideology or the economic system, because it was just not tolerated.
Maarten Boudry: And the same, applies to China and to a lot of other unfree countries. It’s only in free countries that you can allow, you can afford to criticize the government, for example, with impunity. And you don’t have to be worried that you’re gonna end up in prison. And so that leads to a sort of paradox, which I think actually was first described by this American politician or diplomat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which basically says that there’s an inverse correlation between the amount of complaints about human rights violations and freedoms, just and freedom in general, and the amount of actual human rights violation. So the more you hear people complaining about something, it’s like the more you see these people that are like biting the hand that feeds them, the better, actually.
Maarten Boudry: I mean, if you find yourself in a society where nobody is complaining and every everyone is agreeing that like the future will be glorious and the leaders are really taking care of us, and the political system is great, then you really have to get out of there as quickly as possible, because that’s an completely totalitarian society. If you live in a society like ours where everyone is freely biting the hand that feeds them, I mean, of course, it’s not very constructive, but you should be relieved that you’re finding yourself in such a society. So I think that is the like the fundamental insight that I’m exploring in the book. And that I also end with that. Like perhaps we should be glad that we’re living in a society where people are complaining so much, even though not all of the complaints are justified.
Chelsea Follett: No. Absolutely. That’s, and it’s fascinating ’cause other people have noticed to this tendency to self-flagellation before you have a great quote saying, ‘Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West,’ from a French philosopher…
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. I love that.
Chelsea Follett: Pascal Bruckner. And there are so many examples that you give in this essay over and over again, how every single evil in the world is laid at the doorstep of modernity or western civilization or capitalism. And we have seen more of this trend on the left recently, and other people have tried to explain the trend. You talk about an alternative explanation where some people claim or they imagine that maybe this self-flagellation is all some sort of twisted, mutation of Christianity. Maybe it has something to do with sin and damnation, but without, you know, forgiveness and redemption. This is what you call the loving your enemies explanation. And you ultimately reject that explanation and you put forward this much simpler and more parsimonious explanation, what you call a supply side explanation. So tell me a little bit more about your explanation.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. So, I mean, it’s a fascinating idea and this is actually, also explored by Pascal Bruckner. So the philosopher who came up with that great quote about nothing being more western than hatred of Western civilization. So he really sees the influence of Christianity in this, specifically this leftist version of extreme, self-flagellation and self-abasement. Because of course, as a already, like people, philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche said like a lot of the morality in the Jesus teachings is actually inverted. It’s like the meek shall inherit the earth. It’s taking, it’s the downtrodden and the poor that will eventually prevail. It’s this kind of inversion where the more weak and vulnerable you are, the more virtuous you are. And also this, I mean, that’s separately from that sort of, what Nietzsche called slave morality, the notion of original sin. The idea that all of us are just irredeemably tainted by evil the moment that we’re born. And that there’s not really much we can do about it except atone for our sins. And constantly, like literally as in the Middle Ages, flagellate ourselves, and constantly repeat how horrible we are.
Maarten Boudry: And if you look at some of the leftists versions of anti-modernity, of counter enlightenment, it is true that it’s, yeah, it is very analogous and it’s tempting to see like some Christian fingerprints there. But I think ultimately, it’s kind of hard to prove. I mean, people have also said that Marxism, for example, is basically, I mean, there are analogies because there’s the paradise, some sort of a, there’s a linear view of history. Eventually, there’s gonna be a paradise on earth and everyone will be equal, et cetera. So it is a sort of redemptionist story as well. But I’m not sure if I wanna reduce Marxism or postmodernism, or just left itself flagellated to Christianity only because many of these people, of course, are like very anti-Christian. I mean, it’s also, I mean, a lot of them have completely secular upbringings and they’re rejecting western civilization.
Maarten Boudry: And Christianity, of course is a part of western civilization. So even though it’s possible that unconsciously they’re influenced by these Christian ways of thinking, I think it’s hard to prove. And also it doesn’t work very well for all of the cases. So if you look at some woke versions of these white guilt rituals that you sometimes see on YouTube where like white people have to bet like, almost flashlight themselves, like literally abase themselves or prostate themselves in front of the people that they have oppressed and just, and ask for forgiveness, et cetera. Okay. I can kind of see that there’s definitely a religious element to this.
Chelsea Follett: Or that their ancestors have oppressed, not even they’re obeying them.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. That their ancestors have oppressed. And which is also, I mean, it is very similar, at least to the idea of the original sin, because yeah, I mean, of course you didn’t have any slaves, obviously. Some, and of course, they can come up with an economic argument about reparations that you still benefited from slavery from what your ancestors did. But still, just the idea that whiteness itself, like just the color of your skin, your identity is something that you have to apologize for. I guess, we can have an argument about about influence of Christianity there, but it doesn’t really work for all of the cases. And especially, it doesn’t really work well for the rightist conservative forms of anti-modernity, because on the right you have a much more like muscular and domineering and aggressive kind of rejection of modernity.
Maarten Boudry: So, there is a long history, of course, which is currently revived by people like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump of cozying up to foreign dictators, because they still stand up for family values and tradition and religious faith, et cetera. And even to say stuff like, I mean, I think I remember Donald Trump, recently said something in response to somebody questioning him about Putin’s regime. He said something like, “Yeah, you think we’re so innocent.” Which is something that like a disciple of Noam Chomsky could have said. That’s something, you almost have a, like this, this horseshoe phenomenon where you see people on the extreme left and extreme right, like dabbling in very similar arguments. So I think when it comes to this rightest version of anti-modernity, I don’t really see a lot of guilt there. I see a lot of pride actually just pride in. I mean, it’s not really part of their moral framework to constantly feel guilty about them, about themselves. It’s just that also, and I think, that’s my more simple explanation, both on the left and on the right there’s just more opportunities to bite the hand that feeds you. It will be tolerated.
Maarten Boudry: I mean, you won’t end up in jail if you’re Tucker Carlson. If you’re traveling to Moscow and you say that this, I mean, this is great, and you are walking through a supermarket and you’re actually glorifying the society, you can afford to do that. Nobody’s gonna lock you up. I mean, you can, you will be ridiculed of course, and you will, you know, be criticized in your own right. But it wouldn’t work in the other direction. I mean, if somebody from the… And the example that I’m actually giving in my essay is, Vladimir Putin, which, I mean, who was back then already one of the most important enemies of western civilization was given a platform in the pages of the New York Times to take Western leaders to task for their plan back then was during the Obama Administration to intervene in the Syrian war, which of course he was funding. And he was lecturing us, he was lecturing the West about the international order and how invading or just interfering in another country’s business would be like a blatant violation of just territorial integrity of a country. But imagine the opposites happening.
Maarten Boudry: Would Vladimir Putin ever give us a platform to criticize his regime in one of the newspapers that he controls? Of course, that’s completely out of the question. So yes, somebody like Tucker Carlson, I guess there’s no Russian equivalent of a Tucker Carlson. Or at least if there is, if there was a Russian dissident, he would never survive in Russia. Of course, there’s plenty of Russian dissidents who are living in the West, somebody like Kasparov, for example, and they’re free to do so. And even in the West, they have to be very careful about, not being poisoned by Russian agents.
Maarten Boudry: But it’s just that that’s why I call it the supply side explanation, I think, because the demand for complaining about just the current state of affairs, the current government, the regime, just the political system, that’s probably always been there. I mean, people like to complain and clutch and gripe about everything. I actually, came up with this law of conservation of outrage in an earlier piece where basically no matter how much progress society makes, the amount of complaining will always stay the same. People will always find a source of complaining.
Chelsea Follett: I think you’ve given a really good rundown of some of the alternative explanations for this. But again, going back to your explanation, it’s very simple, and it does seem to explain a lot. And you compare it to a German soccer term that means to theatrically flop down and feign an injury. Can you tell me a little bit about that analogy to better describe this theory?
Maarten Boudry: The demand for complaining will always be there in every society, but not every society allows it or tolerates it. In many societies, you will be punished for doing so. So the only society that provides just almost unlimited opportunities for doing so is a free. A free society like Western modernity. And indeed, I borrow a term from German soccer. Actually, I’m not a sports fan at all, but I do know the phenomenon that they’re describing. And it’s something that we’re all familiar with, but I don’t think it exists in English. It’s not really well known. It’s called a Schwalbe, and it’s what happens when a player just flops down to feign an injury just to get a penalty shot, for example, for his team. That’s really what happens.
Maarten Boudry: Also, not only does Western modernity provide a lot of opportunities for criticizing the government and the current economic system, but you can also do a Schwalbe in the German way by pretending that you’re being oppressed. There’s this famous Monty Python sketch that I’m also referencing, where a peasant is just annoying the knights of the round table so much that in the end, they’re trying to shut him down. And then he feels vindicated. Because like, see the inherent oppressiveness of the system? See, I’m being oppressed. Look, I’m being oppressed. That’s also what a lot of people are doing. Even if you’re living in a free society, you want to feel like the hero. Somebody who’s really oppressed, who’s living in an unfree society, won’t engage in that sort of posturing, of course, because you would never hear about it. He would just end up in jail or would be sent to the gulag or whatever.
Maarten Boudry: But in our Western societies or in free societies, you’re free to criticize and you’re also free to posture about your rights being infringed upon. Like, oh, look how unfree I am and I’m being a victim of the censorship industrial complex and all that kind of stuff. And that is also something that you see both on the left and the right, this kind of faux heroic posture that they’re striking. Because in a way, they want to present themselves or they want to cast themselves in a heroic light by pretending to be oppressed. But if you’re writing in a newspaper that, look, I’m being silenced and whatever, and I’m not allowed to voice my opinion. I mean, the very act of doing so, it’s almost like self-denying, because by the very act of doing so on a public platform, you’re showing that you’re not being oppressed at all.
Chelsea Follett: You actually say in the essay, such anti-Western critics often like to pretend, just like Rousseau, that their bravery will be met with universal outcry against them. This is something Rousseau believed or said he believed would happen with that essay we talked about at the beginning of this podcast. But with a few exceptions, you’ve noted that these crusaders actually today are almost always given free reign. And if anything, they are often handsomely rewarded for their hands biting. So not only are they often not punished or met with this outcry that they expect or say they expect, but they actually are rewarded. And this gets into the analogy of the hand that feeds you. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Maarten Boudry: Yeah, they are rewarded. Although, I have to say they’re only rewarded in specific contexts by their own peers. So if you’re living in an academic environment, for example, and as I have been for the last couple of years, I’m in philosophy, which is a pretty progressive and left wing discipline, of course, although it’s less ideologically biased than some other disciplines in the humanity. Of course, in that particular cultural environment, you are rewarded for finding ever more novel ways to condemn your own civilization. Which is basically, I mean, a lot of academia is just churning out ever novel ways of sexism and racism and slavery. And it’s kind of like a pissing contest almost, like who can come up with ever more original ways of saying that, like not just slavery was the worst in like the transatlantic slavery was the worst of all history, but actually slavery was invented by the West. It’s even worse. It’s like upping the ante constantly. And you are awarded for doing so. But of course, you’re not rewarded across the board, because some people outside of that cultural environment will, of course, criticize you.
Maarten Boudry: And sometimes, I mean, what happens, I don’t wanna say that society itself it’s rewarding some of these leftist intellectuals that are literally like calling for the destruction of Western civilization. Some of these, you know, so-called pro-Palestinian activists are really showing their true colors. When, I mean, it’s not really about the state of Israel per se, I think Israel is only like a proxy for the real enemy, and the real enemy is the West western civilization. And because Israel’s an ally of the west, it’s kind of, yeah, it’s in their sight and it’s being attacked. But it’s really, it’s a hatred of Western civilization as such. And, so it within their own cultural environment that is indeed rewarded, because it’s a very safe way of pretending to be heroic and striking this heroic post, without really having to fear any, any real consequences.
Maarten Boudry: So, these people are probably being criticized outside of their cultural environment, but I would say, I mean, they’re still living of taxpayers money, of course. I mean, many of these academics are being, all of these anti-capitalist people are also selling their books in capitalist markets, freely competing with other writers. And many of them have university positions with taxpayers money. That is just a… Yeah, that is basically, the surplus production of the capitalist system. So in that sense, also, they’re biting the hand that feeds them.
Chelsea Follett: And do you contrast this, you know, freedom to criticize one’s own culture, within liberal democracies, modern capitalists societies with historically what has happened under communism and under fascism? Can you walk through some of those examples that you give in the essay?
Maarten Boudry: You mean how this played out differently under fascist and communist regimes?
Chelsea Follett: Yes. So you have some excellence observations there in your essay. For example, you quote a letter, by…
Maarten Boudry: Oh, yeah. [laughter]
Chelsea Follett: Oh, oh, you, why don’t I let you talk it?
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. Pankhurst, yeah, yeah. [laughter] That’s actually, that’s what, yeah… One of those things that I discovered that made me realize, this goes way back. This is not just postmodernism, which originated in the ’60s and ’70s in France, and then later in the US but this is in the ’30s. This is Sylvia Pankhurst which is, has become a bit of a hero of mine because she’s really leftist of the, who really believed in the abundance and in material progress and in enlightenments unlike many of her descendants. So many people on the left, of course, are almost calling for degrowth exactly the opposite. But she was somebody who was really standing on the side of material progress and abundance for all and the eradication of poverty. But she also understood this point I think about biting the hand that feeds you. Because as you know, in the ’30s there were a lot of people that were fellow with travel, fellow travelers at that point of the Soviet Union and a later of China, of course. But in this era, it was mostly the Soviet Union of Stalin.
Maarten Boudry: Many of them of course, were just hypocrites, in the sense that, I mean, they were glorifying the regime, but deep down they realized that they would never wanna live there because they just preferred the comfort of their own, supposedly evil capitalist society. And one of them, one of those many, fellow travelers on the left was the playwrights, George Bernard Shaw. And he had written, he had like engaged in the very same sort of posturing that Rousseau had kind of, founded at the beginning of modernity where he was basically, cheering on the fascist because he believed that in a very Marxist kind of way, that fascist, it was like an inevitable stage in the downfall of capitalism. So it was kind of following capitalism to its logical conclusion. And even though like he was trashing Mussolini and he was calling the fascist, like it would a bag of air or something like that, or an explosion of gas or something to that effect, he was basically saying, yeah, like fascism is the way forward because it will hasten the downfall of capitalism. And also this was around the time when an, I forgotten his name.
Maarten Boudry: It was an Italian socialist who was being murdered by Mussolini back then. And George Bernard Shaw was basically like, “Yeah, well, that kind of stuff happens. I don’t really care. I mean, as long as, you know, it drives history forward and it and it hasten this inevitable downfall of capitalism, then I’m all for it.” And then in a letter that Sylvia Pankhurst wrote to George Bernard Shaw, she’s basically pointing out, like, try to put on a show like that in Italy. Just try to live in Italy and go fascism and explosion of gas and just bite the hand that feeds you. You’ll see you, you won’t even be able to finish your sentence. And she’s trying, and she’s saying, I mean, he was also like his reply, I don’t quote it in my essay, but was extremely sexist.
Maarten Boudry: So he basically answered it like, “Oh, you’re so shrill. Like, stop being so shrill to me. You’re always shrieking.” [laughter] He’s like, okay. So he was a kind of a chauvinist, male pig as well, but that’s like [laughter], that’s a separate argument. But she was basically telling him like, you would never get away with something like that in Italy. And here in England, in Britain at least, you’re allowed to engage in your propaganda. You’re allowed to tear down capitalism and to openly favor our enemies and you get freedom to do so. Shouldn’t you at least be a little grateful that even though we share, of course, she was also a socialist. So she also believed eventually that capitalism was going to be destroyed. But at least she understood this very facile posturing that somebody like Shaw was engaging in and just completely unaware of how privileged he wants to live in a society where he could voice his opinions freely and about his own society and about his own leaders.
Chelsea Follett: And you give a bunch of more recent examples as well of people who criticize their own societies and were rewarded for it. You gave the example of Said and his ideas of Orientalism. You talk about, popular Slovenia, philosopher. You talk about Foucault. Tell me about some of these more recent examples as well.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah. In a way it’s very similar. So I think, of course, it’s no longer about socialism per se, although is still kind of glorifying Stalin, basically writing stuff like. I’d rather have the worst Stalinist oppression than the most liberal democracy or something to that effect, of course. And then of course, I make the obvious point that, yeah, I mean, try to put up a show like that and under Stalin’s regime. But I mean, Foucault is an interesting example because he was not a communist. I mean, very early on, he was a member of the Communist Party, but he very quickly broke with communism as an ideology. He was one of those postmodernists. So he didn’t believe in ideology, postmodernism, rejects all grand narratives, but he was also biting the hand that feeds him in the sense that he was trying to demonize many of the institutions of modernity that we take to be exemplar of moral progress. Something like a hospital or school or even a prison system or an asylum for people with psychiatric conditions. And in his work basically, I mean, I’m cutting some corners here, but Foucault’s argument always amounted to, oh, so you think that we were so much better than in the Middle Ages?
Maarten Boudry: In the Middle ages, they were torturing criminals, for example, but his argument was always that what appeared to be a morally aligned way of treating prisoners, for example, or treating them mentally insane, was actually perhaps even worse because it was presenting itself as morally enlightened, but it was more insidious. It was a kind of bourgeois, exercising of power, of a sinister kind of power to dominate the weak and vulnerable people like criminals and the criminally insane. And so his argument always amounted to basically tarring modernity and modern institutions. And the tragic irony of Foucault’s life history is that, of course, first of all, he had an unstrained freedom to express like his hatred of modernity, and nobody like he never had any trouble with that, of course.
Maarten Boudry: And he was rewarded by a lot of acolytes and followers, who thought he was so brave that he dared to question the narrative of moral progress. But at the end of his life, as you know, he was a homosexual. He was one that, that was one of the few ways in which he was actually a progressive, because it was kind of progressive in that time to be openly homosexual, but he contracted HIV and at the end of his life, so he died pretty young, when I was born actually in 1984. He was treated in the Salpêtrière, which is a hospital in France, which tragically or ironically was the very same hospital that plays a central role in one of his major works madness and civilization, because that was the hospital where he says, that he was blaming for, basically, treating insane or mentally unwell people in a way that was even more insidious and cruel than, and in the Middle Ages.
Maarten Boudry: So he was treated at the end of his life, he was comforted in exactly that same institution. It’s in tragic irony that surely he must have been aware of himself, but there’s no indication. I mean I read his biography that he said anything about that situation. But that’s even like, that’s one of the most extreme examples of biting the hand that feeds you and hand just keeps nurturing you and even comforting you at the end of your life.
Chelsea Follett: And the other example you give of the Said and his criticism of the West and all of the accolades that he received for that, and how he is now mandatory reading in many of the places that he criticized.
Maarten Boudry: That’s right. Even in Israel.
Chelsea Follett: Yes. That’s…
Maarten Boudry: Israel is a great example of, because that’s relevant today. I’m gonna mention Israel in a moment, but Edward Said was indeed, one of the founders of post-colonialism, of this idea first expressed in his seminal work, Orientalism, that Western civilization through the centuries has always harbored, like a secret desire to oppress and to invade and colonize the orient basically the rest of the world, but especially the orient. And this was, basically, the intellectual groundwork for that was laid by novels, by fiction, by poetry, which was presenting the orient according to Said in a certain way as exotic, irrational, as sensual, to kind of contrast with the self image of the West as a rational and enlightenments and dominant and masculine, et cetera.
Maarten Boudry: And to be completely fair, there is a kernel of truth in what he’s writing. It’s obviously true that especially if you go back centuries, that Western civilization had a lot of, biases and prejudices and had a very distorted view of other civilizations and cultures, just like every culture in all of history had less favorable and distorted and biased representations of other civilizations. But Said was not interested in an even handed or symmetric treatment of Western civilization and oriental civilizations, he was mostly interested in trashing the West. And basically, his whole book is one long indictment of the West. And to the extent that the East or the Orient appears at all in his book, it’s mostly as a passive victim.
Maarten Boudry: They don’t really have any ideas or any representations of their own. He’s not really interested in that. So it’s actually also ironically condescending and infantilizing for these non-Western cultures. But the irony, of course, is that he studied in Princeton at… He had guest professorships and distinguished chairs at Yale and Berkeley. I don’t remember all the universities, so correct me if I’m wrong here, and he got a lot of awards and prizes for basically condemning Western civilization. And even in Israel, because of course, he was partly Palestinian Lebanese. He had a kind of a multicultural background, even in Israel, which he was in his later works, was also condemning as an oppressive, apartheid regime in a similar way that is very similar to many of the pro-Palestinian forms of activism today, even in Israel, he was welcomed. His book was on the university curriculum. He was allowed to…
Maarten Boudry: And his books were published. They were being translated into Hebrew, and I mentioned in my essay that ironically, at some point he had a fallout with Yasser Arafat after actually being his speech writer. For a long time they had a friendship and so he was in kind of like the intellectual, defending the Palestinian cast, but at some point, Yasser Arafat, I don’t even know exactly, what was the rift between them. Just got fed up with Said and just banned his books on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, which was under the Palestinian control. And I think there’s no better example of the difference between a hand that punches back, that slaps you in the face, and one that allows itself to be bitten.
Maarten Boudry: I don’t wanna argue that Israel is a perfect or is like a completely free civilization. And of course, it scores pretty high on the index of freedom and democracy, but at least it is still a society where you can bite the hand that feeds you. And that is something that people don’t understand that, and often even misunderstand in a sense that there’s a lot of Israeli NGOs, for example, and Israeli writers and intellectuals that are extremely critical of the governments, and rightly so. Also critical of the Netanyahu government, that are extremely critical of the regime of the history of the country that are even anti-Zionists that are calling their own country an apartheid regime. And the way this is perceived in Western countries, especially on the left is, see even Israeli intellectuals are now telling us that their own country is basically an apartheid, racial, supremacy regime that should never have existed in the first place.
Maarten Boudry: And their understanding is that, oh, it must be so bad there that even their own intellectuals are turning against them. But it’s exactly the opposites. The very fact that we have so many Israeli intellectuals that are living in Israel and that don’t have to be fearful for their life, they’re free to criticize the government in their own newspapers. And the fact that these newspapers are still being published and that these journalists are not being rounded up, and these intellectuals are free to publish whatever they want. This is very different from most, almost any other Arab country where you also have political dissidents, fortunately, but almost all of them are living not in their own countries, but in the West and are publishing at Western universities and are teaching at Western and so are publishing at Western publishers and are teaching at Western universities.
Chelsea Follett: Let’s take it back to capitalism, the system of free enterprise, because that gets to a point you make toward the end of the essay about literal feeding. Up until now, we’ve been talking about how critics of modernity often receive accolades or prestige or university positions, and that’s a metaphorical feeding, but you also talk about literal feeding. Tell me about that and how our modern economic system quite literally feeds the mouths of many of its fiercest critics.
Maarten Boudry: Yes, exactly. Yeah. This was very different in Rousseau’s time, of course, because the feeding was then mostly metaphorical. That was a little intellectual island of freedom that had been created in the French salons and in their… The so-called Republic of Lettuce, but this was before the industrial revolution. So people were still, mostly as poor as they had ever been throughout all of human history. So the literal feeding, of course, only begins in the 19th century, late 19th century, first in England, and then across the continent. And what you’re seeing is that the more people start to enjoy the benefits and the fruits of a capitalist society, the more they also have like material opportunities to engage in criticism, because of course, if you’re working in a factory or you’re working as a farmer on the land, you don’t really have time to write pamphlets or whatever, or to trust the economic system that you’re living under.
Maarten Boudry: So in a way, capitalism, or industrial modernity, it becomes a victim of its own success because it breeds this intellectual class of people that can be safe in the knowledge that their material needs will be provided for by the capitalists machine, and that they can lead a life of intellectual pursuits, biting the hands that feeds them. And that is something that is really starting to happen especially towards the end of the 19th century. Karl Marx himself, of course, was basically living off of the cotton factory of his father and the handouts that he was receiving from Friedrich Engels. So that was [laughter] probably one of the first, and most famous examples of literal feeding. He was really living… The capitalism itself was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write scripts against capitalism.
Maarten Boudry: And this is something that you see in Europe, it’s even worse than in the US I think. There was a study recently about what are the hotspots of degrowthism? This philosophy that wants to basically call an end to economic growth and have a controlled shrinking of the material production of our societies. And that seems to be happening mostly in countries like Germany and Spain and the UK, some of the wealthiest country on the planet. And that’s not a coincidence. I think, if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for too long, you also tend to become forgetful of your own privilege. I think it’s not a coincidence that these hotspots of degrowth are to be found of all places in some of the most affluent countries on the planet.
Maarten Boudry: You don’t really hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people from, developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism because they notice a difference, the contrast sometimes in the span of one generation. My girlfriend is Chinese. It’s not so long ago that Chinese society was extremely poor. So they had a much faster industrialization than we had, of course. And that gives them a more vivid memory I think, of what life was like back then. And so, I think sometimes I wonder like what exactly will happen to a country like China or other developing countries as they become more prosperous? Will they also experience this sort of phenomenon that I’m describing in my essay?
Maarten Boudry: If it’s true that this is just an effect of Christianity, then you wouldn’t really expect it in South Korea, for example, or in China, because these are not Christian societies. But if it’s just like an inevitable outcome of just progress or material progress, if at some point you’re just breeding this intellectual class of people and because of certain incentive structures and rewards, they will bite the hand that feeds them in various ways, and it doesn’t have to be exactly the same way. So my best guess is now that we’re probably gonna see that eventually also in these other societies as they… Yeah. I think as the horrors of the past recede from memory, people also tend to take things for granted. And you can sometimes read some of these degrowth literature and just marvel at the fact that these people seem to have no clue at all about what it means to live on a farm, for example, to be self-sufficient.
Maarten Boudry: They romanticize it and they can afford to romanticize it, because nobody is there to tell them what it was like because even their own grandparents never experienced it. This is not just about material affluence, of course, it’s the same thing with war. I have very vivid memories of conversations with my grandmother who experienced war and who knows what it was like. And I think that gives her… I don’t wanna recommend war as a sort of psychological remedy for this kind of decadence, but I do believe that just being reminded, perhaps in history lessons as well, I think that’s an important role to play in education, that we tell the story of progress that before you start chomping away at the hand that feeds you, just realize what it was like before that hand was starting to feed you and realize that… Somebody like Jason Hickel, one of the main apostles of degrowth, literally believed that people in the Middle Ages were happy because they were self-sufficient and they didn’t need to work for a wage. They were not wage slaves under a capitalist system and they were having vegetables in their own gardens. And he’s like, “Are you insane? Have you ever tried to lead a life like that?” And so, yeah, anyway, I’m ranting now.
Chelsea Follett: No.
Maarten Boudry: But I think, it’s something that I’m thinking a lot about and also for the future. What does it do to society if, when Schumpeter, for example, was writing his book that was in 1943 or something like that, he was actually very concerned that capitalism would not survive this sort of self-destructiveness. He said, like if we’re breeding this class of intellectuals that are biting the hand that feeds them and if everyone is becoming anti-capitalist and it’s almost like it’s an expectation, it’s almost a form of politeness to express your opposition to the capitalist system, can a society survive like that if basically none of the intellectual class really supports it? I think at this point, I’m more optimistic. I do think that capitalism itself, who said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? Some Marxist who said that. I think it’s Frederick James or someone else. So I’m pretty sure that our societies are robust.
Chelsea Follett: Bringing it back to something that you said earlier. You have this great part in your essay where you write, only rich Westerners can afford to sing the praises of pre-industrial agriculture without fertilizers, tractors, and pesticides, only well-fed climate activists in a comfortable living room chock full of oil and gas, the cement in the walls, the steel in the girders, the aluminum in their laptops, the hundreds of different plastics in their appliances and clothes, the food in their refrigerators, the glue with which they stick themselves to paintings can lecture the world about its addiction to fossil fuels and it takes a privileged 21st century degrowth professor to imagine that subsistence farmers in the Middle Ages were quite happy because they had access, allegedly, to abundant commons and did not have to work for wages. I really do think that it is about forgetting how poor our ancestors were and losing not just overcoming poverty, but the memory of poverty.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there’s also, you know, the research by Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician and physician who’s probably one of my major intellectual influences in turning me towards progress studies because he’s probably the first person to ever have told me that global poverty, for example, during the last three decades has actually declined spectacularly. I think it’s halved, if I’m not mistaken. So it’s really, it’s at the lowest point that it has ever been in history. And if you ask a lot of people, if you do surveys about the state of the world, then and if you give people three options, like has poverty increased, has it remained the same or has it declined or halved over the past three decades? And only 10% at most of respondents give the right answer, mainly so that poverty has declined.
Maarten Boudry: And I think it’s really hard to drill this into people’s minds that how… You can know at some level, of course, everyone knows that, yeah, in the middle ages people were poor, but to know exactly what it means to be poor and to really understand the consequences of all of that, it is hard to wrap your mind around. And I have to admit, even as an… I think I’m more aware of material progress than the average Westerner, I guess, because it’s like, okay, I read about it and it’s really one of my core interests, but even I sometimes have to remind myself just how privileged is that I am that water is coming out of the tap, for example, and it’s not like dirty water full of germs that will make me sick, but it’s just like, I can be confident that it’s pure and it’s well-maintained and it’s always available and I will never be thirsty, et cetera.
Maarten Boudry: It’s really hard to understand what life was like in the past. And I think when it comes to these leftist intellectuals, some fallacy or some misunderstanding, I’m also running up against, and it relates to this misunderstanding about poverty, is that at some level, of course, people understand that the West is richer now than it was in the past. That’s almost incontrovertible, right? But they have this kind of zero-sum thinking where they say, “Oh, because we are so wealthy, that must have been because we have stolen all that wealth from somewhere else.” So that there’s like a fixed pie in the world, like two centuries ago, for example. And then all of a sudden, like the West takes off. And that’s only because of imperialism and colonialism and plundering and exploitation. And even though, of course, some of that happened, that’s absolutely wrong as an explanation of how we became rich. It’s not… I don’t have to explain this to somebody from the Human Progress or the Cato Institute. That’s not at all how wealth works in a capitalist society. But many people are absolutely convinced that, and because of course, the logical consequences of that line of thinking is that at one point, Africa and non-Western countries were actually wealthy.
Maarten Boudry: They only became poor because we plundered everything. All the natural resources, all of their riches, they were plundered by the West, and that’s how they became poor. And it’s very hard to make people understand that, no, this is not… Everyone has always been poor. Poverty is not what needs to be explained, that just like has been like that for all of human history. It’s just this unprecedented level of wealth and affluence that needs to be explained starting in the 19th century. And it’s not a zero-sum game. Luckily, it’s not a zero-sum game. Luckily, one country’s prosperity doesn’t come at the expense of another country’s poverty. Yes, I completely agree that, somebody once said that the most important source of pessimism is a bad memory or something like that. And we’re all vulnerable for that. There was a journalist who called me yesterday about 1999, like the year 1999, just before the turn of the millennium. And I also have fond memories of that time because I was 15 and the future was bright.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah, of course, I was young. I didn’t have any responsibilities. And I only remember the good bits. I forgot about all the horrible things that happened like the Kosovo War and the genocide in Rwanda and the anti-globalization movement and the millennium bug and that kind of stuff. And this is not two centuries ago. This is like 25 years ago. And our memory is already distorted. Even though I try to remind myself that I have these rosy-tinted glasses that I’m wearing when I’m looking back on my own youth, then it’s still very hard to resist, I think. And it’s something that we’re all susceptible to.
Chelsea Follett: You end the essay on a very nuanced point where you say that in some way, we should be actually very happy that there are so many critics of our civilization, because it is a sign of how free speech is still existing, and that like the canary in the coal mine, we should be worried actually if the critics ever fall silent. But even though self-criticism is important, and it’s important to let people express that and to learn from our mistakes to further improve our societies, ritual self-flagellation is still just not productive and is actively harmful. So despite these trends that we are seeing that seem quite negative, there’s something positive in it too. It’s just important to remind people that when they’re criticizing their societies, they should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water and get rid of parts of their societies that actually are the underpinnings of so much progress that we have made.
Maarten Boudry: Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps because I’m an inveterate optimist, I try to put a positive spin on this kind of ungrateful, spoiled behavior that I’m describing in the essay. But it is a serious argument. I wouldn’t wanna live in a society where people are afraid to speak up. And even people that are ungrateful and that are another posturing and that are biting the hand that feeds them, they should have the freedom to do so. Even Tucker Carlson, even the pro-Palestinian activists. Of course, if you start glorifying terrorism, then it gets into, free speech has its limits, of course. And I’m a free speech absolutist, but there are limits when it comes to openly advocating for terrorism or for violence.
Maarten Boudry: But yeah, I do believe that a society, that is engaging in so much self-abasement and self-flagellation loses confidence in itself. And perhaps this sounds like it’s a… Lemme rephrase that. So, I think a society that engages in too much self-abasement loses confidence in itself. And I do worry about what that portends for the future. Because there are some signs, especially in Europe, and even in the US, that indicates technological and economic stagnation for the past couple of decades. And if you look back on earlier eras, earlier modern eras, like the beginning of the 20th century and even the post-war period in the ’50s and the ’60s, I think there was a lot of more confidence and optimism and belief in progress and in just a rising tide that lifts all the boats, et cetera. And I don’t wanna glorify the past, because as I said, we have to be mindful of bad memories. But I do think something has changed in the past, and we no longer seem to believe in ourselves.
Maarten Boudry: And again, I think capitalism itself, it’s probably a pretty robust system, I think even if 90% of people are anti-capitalism, capitalism will still survive because it’s such a tempting… It’s such an irresistible a good idea, I think that it will be very hard to eradicate once it’s really established. But let me give you one example where I think and it’s not mentioned in the essay where I think this kind of wholesale rejection of industrial modernity is actually harmful, and it’s actually harmful, not so much for western societies, but for poor and developing societies.
Maarten Boudry: Again, it’s often these poor and vulnerable societies that bear the brunt of our delusions. So think about the way that people talk about fossil fuels being an addiction in western countries, oil and gas, and they’re destroying the planet, and we have to rein ourselves off of that addiction as quickly as possible. Okay, it’s one thing for an activist that is surrounded by fossil fuel products in their living room, everything is full of oil and gas and et cetera, it’s one thing for them to indulge in these fantasies and to call for a net zero by 2030 or something like that, which would be catastrophic, but luckily, which will never happen because politicians are at least, they can engage in virtue signaling. But at the end of the day, they also are down to earth and they know that society would’t survive without fossil fuels, but then if you look at the other side of the globe, what I think is really makes me extremely angry, western environmentalists are basically telling poor countries now, “Oh, you shouldn’t repeat our mistakes,” meaning you shouldn’t burn all these fossil fuels because they’re destroying the planet, and we are so guilty because we have been doing that for two centuries, and then they engage in self-abasement, et cetera.
Maarten Boudry: But all that self-abasement leads them to actively sabotage fossil fuel development in poor and developing countries out of some sort of mis-guidance, paternalism because, “Oh, we don’t want you to make the same mistakes as we did, it’s gonna be horrible, and you don’t want that. Here’s a couple of solar panels and wind turbines, you’re gonna be fine,” and what you’re really seeing is at the IMF and the World Bank, and a lot of these investment banks have openly promised and sometimes made agreements that they’re no longer going to fund fossil fuel investments in poor and developing countries. Not at home, mind you, they’re still building coal plans in Germany and gas plants in Norway, and that’s how hypocritical they are. But to engage in virtue singling, they just prefer to do it at the expense of poor and developing countries.
Maarten Boudry: So that’s just one example where I think illusions have consequences if people can be… It’s one thing to be anti-capitals and you could… Perhaps you could say, “Yeah, what’s the point? It’s harmless, it’s innocent. It’s not gonna hurt anyone.” Well, perhaps not here, because we’re cushy and we’re surrounded by much material affluent, and it’s not really… Our society is not really gonna collapse, but think about like the downstream consequences of all your stupid delusions at the other side of the globe.
Chelsea Follett: That is a very important point for people to think about. So I think we gonna end the podcast here so they can sit with that. Thank you so much once again, Maarten, for speaking with me. This has been a…
Maarten Boudry: You’re welcome.
Chelsea Follett: Fascinating and wide-ranging conversation.
Maarten Boudry: Thanks a lot for having me.