Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A political philosopher and Harvard professor whose course on justice became one of the most popular in the university's history, watched by tens of millions wo
On the island
Eight records
And this was nineteen sixty three. Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader, had been murdered by a white supremacist. And Dylan writes and sings this amazing song that explores the complex relation between injustices of race and of class.
I always found it inspiring. But I began to be a bit more critical. About the American triumphalist belief that God is on our side.
Her voice is a voice of aching beauty. A dissonant song. Dissonance hardly describes the aching pain, but also the beauty of it.
I saw this musical in Broadway shortly after it came out. I was blown away by it, but then during the pandemic, they showed a version of it on television. This was shortly after I had written The Tyranny of Merit and what struck me listening to it just recently is that Alexander Hamilton is a celebration of the meritocracy that I criticize in The Tyranny of Merit.
It's a song of darkness but with hope, and it's also a song against the striving for perfection. He tells us there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
The Stars Will Sing to YouFavourite
A song that my wife Kiku Adato composed when our children were very young. It's a lullaby called The Stars Will Sing to You. It's a cosmic lullaby.
What's interesting about the song, and the reason I want to bring Ray Charles along, singing it. Is this line God shed His grace on thee? is sometimes read as a hope and a prayer, May we be worthy of grace. but is sometimes read as a fact God has already declared us worthy. That's a reading that I resist. that I disagree with because I think it leads to a kind of divine triumphalism. And yet Ray Charles, in his riff on the words, takes that second meaning, and it's certainly magnificent as he sings it with aching sorrow and redemptive joy.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:24How do you manage the discomfort that philosophy brings?
Well, it's true. Philosophy estranges us from the familiar. It leads us to question familiar assumptions, the way we live. But it's a journey in a way. So whether it's in our public life or in our personal everyday lives, there's always new grist for philosophy, new occasion for trying to think through the assumptions by which we hope to live.
Presenter asks
3:43Are you surprised by the level of fame that your work has brought you?
When we put the Justice Course online, we never dreamt I certainly didn't, that tens of millions of people would want to watch lectures about philosophy. A colleague of mine came back from Beijing and reported that he'd been riding in a taxi and the taxi driver in Beijing said, where are you from? And he said, Massachusetts. He didn't even say Harvard. And he said, you know, I've been taking a course about justice from Harvard and my wife and children have been watching too. And that's one of the greatest satisfactions, greatest rewards that this whole project, I think, brought me.
Presenter asks
10:57You describe catching a glimpse of what you call the unencumbered self. Tell me more about that. What is it?
This is the image of the perfectly self-sufficient individual, independent of all moral ties, all community ties. And I saw that this was destructive and corrosive of family life, of a sense of community. So this struck me about Southern California. I hadn't quite theorized it in these fancy terms back then as a high school kid, but I think it made an impression on me.
The keepsakes
The book
The Collected Dialogues of Plato
Plato
They depend on an interlocutor, but I could sit on the desert island and read them and imagine my interlocutors, so that would enable me to subsist at least for a while.
The luxury
There is something that kind of relieves the insularity of the lockdown … to be able to keep track of the birds in the garden … I'd like to do the same on the island if I could and have a good pair of binoculars.
Presenter asks
14:02You invited Ronald Reagan to a school debate. How did you manage to persuade him?
I sent an invitation to his office at the state capitol and got no reply. But then my mother read in a magazine article that he loved jelly beans and had them always to hand on his desk. So I went out and bought six pounds of jelly beans, put them in a box with a bow. Wrote out the invitation and delivered it to his house, which was not far from the school. There were state troopers guarding the house. State troopers with German shepherd dogs. I'm afraid of dogs generally, much less German shepherd dogs in a guard house. They wanted to know what was in this box, and I said jelly beans. They took it and looked rather skeptically at it and they felt their way through the jelly beans and decided it was innocent enough and let me deliver it to the front door. And a few days later he called the school and said he'd come. And I was on the debating team at the time, and I thought I was a pretty good debater, and I thought I could make quick work of Ronald Reagan. He held all the views that we rejected. He was for the Vietnam War, we were against it. He was against giving 18-year-olds the right to vote, which was an issue of debate at the time. I thought it would be relatively easy to defeat him in a debate, so I prepared, I sat up on the stage with him, point by point challenged him, and I didn't really lay a glove on him. It was an object lesson in how a politician can, by listening and engaging, actually charm an audience that entirely disagrees with him.
Presenter asks
21:57What were your ambitions for the Justice course you designed at Harvard?
When I had my first brush with political philosophy as a student, I found it remote, abstract, dull. And what drew me to philosophy? was seen the connection between philosophical accounts of justice and rights and liberty and the good life, And the debates we have every day. To take one recent example, there are fraught debates going on now about mask wearing. Does government have the right to mandate the wearing of masks? And does government have the right, for that matter, to mandate? Getting a jab with the COVID vaccine. Now the ideal scenario to play out that discussion is not to begin with like minded people people who say, well, of course everyone should be required to wear a mask. It all depends on gathering people, whether in a classroom or in a public forum. Who disagree? Not just for the friseon of having clashing views. The disagreement is a starting point. To see whether the participants can respond to the arguments, to the competing principles that are at stake in the debate. That's the excitement of it.
Presenter asks
29:01What metric would you use to measure the value of your own work as a teacher?
If I'm in a lecture hall and I hear people coughing or shuffling their papers or their feet, I know that I've lost them. So my metrics, if you want to call them metrics, are looking at the eyes and listening to the sound of the classroom. And if there's coughing and shifting and shuffling of feet, I need to shift. I need to do better. The other is, and it's the most gratifying report that any teacher ever gets, is when years later someone from the course writes or calls to say what an impact it made on their thinking over the course of their lives. It matters more than any quantitative teaching evaluation could possibly do.
“Philosophy estranges us from the familiar. It leads us to question familiar assumptions, the way we live. But it's a journey in a way.”
“When we put the Justice Course online, we never dreamt I certainly didn't, that tens of millions of people would want to watch lectures about philosophy.”
“I didn't really lay a glove on him. It was an object lesson in how a politician can, by listening and engaging, actually charm an audience that entirely disagrees with him.”
“Because this way of thinking about success also leads the successful to believe that those who struggle, those who are left behind, have no one to blame but themselves.”
“The humility that parenting teaches, I think, springs from the fact that however much we might try to shape our children, help our children, they are who they are, and it's not thanks to our doing only. And cultivating that distinctiveness, which exceeds our efforts to shape and control and to mold, simply beholding them and loving them for who they are, that's where the humility comes in. That kind of humility, I think, is part of love.”