Ten topics in applied Objectivism — interviewed by Mark Michael Lewis [Transcript]

Interviewer Mark Michael Lewis and I had an extended conversation about philosophy and its applications to education, business ethics, postmodernism, and entrepreneurship. A video of this interview is available at YouTube. Here is the transcript:

Mark Lewis: Welcome to a new edition of Becoming an Ayn Rand Hero, where we use the ideas of Ayn Rand and objectivism to create a life and a lifestyle with the qualities of an Ayn Rand hero. A life that we can’t wait to wake up to, in which we live heroic approaches to life. Today is sort of special for me. I get to speak with Professor Stephen Hicks, who I had the pleasure of meeting not too long ago and had some extraordinary conversations, whose work I’ve been following for years. His book is Nietzsche and the Nazis. As someone who cares tremendously about the philosophy of Nietzsche, Stephen’s work has been enlightening and illuminating. His book, Explaining Postmodernism, which growing up as a post modernist, coming out of school as a post modernist and thinking of myself as a post modernist socialist, his analysis helped me both own and reclaim the value of post modern thinking and the types of challenges that it represents, and provided a framework in which to understand its role in culture.

Among other things, his work with business ethics. Stephen is a professor of Business Ethics at Rockford University, and a long time objectivist and hero to many of us. It’s a pleasure. Welcome, Stephen.

Stephen Hicks: Thanks, Mark. I appreciate the opportunity.

Mark Lewis: Yes. I tend to like to start off the show to get a sense of who you are and how Ayn Rand fits into your life. How did you encounter Ayn Rand? What was that story? How did she become prominent in your life and thinking?

Stephen Hicks: Late teens. My parents were readers, so they always had tons of books all around the house. I was a reader when I was a kid. Couple of things, I remember at one point looking for a book, and it was during the summer, and pulling Atlas Shrugged off the shelf and asking my mom about it. She said, “That’s a really good book, but wait a couple of years before you read that one.” That always stuck with me. Then, I finished high school and I was going on a summer trip. I’d saved up money and always wanted to go to Europe, so I was going. My parents took me to Toronto Airport to put me on the plane, and my dad asked if I had a book for the plane, and I didn’t. He took me to the bookstore and, just browsing around, came across Rand on the shelves. I was looking for something fiction, so I grabbed The Fountainhead, and that summer I spent a few months in Europe, so I have a lot of memories of Europe, but mostly I remember reading and rereading The Fountainhead about five times.

Mark Lewis: It spoke to you for some reason.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah. I was an apolitical person right at the point. Interested in history and ideas, but the thing that really grabbed me was the conception of living principled and making a strong commitment to values and following all the way through on that, so being struck by the idealism of Roark, and of course, the petty disgusting-ness of Peter Keating, and then the very interesting hybrid characters, Wynand and Dominique, and so on. Then, that year, I started university. I read Atlas, and I started reading my way through the fiction, but I didn’t really yet have a sense of philosophy as a discipline. Actually, I hated my first philosophy course in university. I remember walking out of the exam swearing that I would never take philosophy again.

Mark Lewis: Irony.

Stephen Hicks: A small irony there. Actually, my second semester I took a course in the political science department, and it was taught by a very dynamic professor, and we were reading political philosophy primarily. We were reading John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli. Then, Nietzsche, Rousseau and so on. I remember being just fascinated with those issues, and at that same time I was reading Atlas. It was during that semester that I had a conception about what philosophy was all about as an integrated discipline and that I was fascinated especially by these issues of human nature and ethics. Not so much the politics, that was a secondary set of issues. Then, I came back as a philosophy major in my second year. That’s my story.

Mark Lewis: As a philosophy major in college, familiar with Ayn Rand, reading Atlas Shrugged, I’m imagining that there was some sort of cross pollination between the kinds of issues that you were studying and your philosophy.

Stephen Hicks: Sure, yes. At that point, I wasn’t serious about philosophy as a career. I thought I was going to be a civil engineer and architect. My dad was in real-estate development, and I thought I would go into business with him. I was taking my liberal arts education for fun. I sensed my career would be very technical, but I wanted to, as I thought of it, have a lifetime reading list of the great books and know what the big issues were and so on. I was mostly just exploring right through those years, but yes, there was a lot of crossover. My university in Canada was the University of Guelph, mostly noted for biological sciences but they had a large philosophy department. They had about 20 professors, and it was a great department for me.

As it turns out, the guy who put the department together in the 60s was a skeptic. He had been basically hired and given a charge to take a small department and turn it into a large department, so he had a shopping list. He said, “All right, well, I need a Kantian. I need a Platonist. I need a Popperian. I need a Nietzschean. I need a Marxist.” So the department was very diverse, and then since the university was primarily a sciences’ university, there actually weren’t very many philosophy majors. I recall most of my undergraduate courses were just me and the professor, or me and one other student with the professor.

Mark Lewis: Wow.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah, it was awesome. I had a course on Rawls, and a course on Kant, and a course on Plato, and so forth. I got a very good history of philosophy education. Primarily it was a matter of reading the primary sources, and I would write a paper and meet with my professor for an hour or two in his office, and we would talk and argue about stuff. Then, simultaneously, I was also reading more in Rand, and she had expressed interest in Mises, so I was reading a lot of Mises, learning some economics but interested in his philosophical underpinnings to it. I also have to give some credit here to Leonard Peikoff. My philosophy courses at the university, although I took a lot of courses in the history of philosophy, they tended to be non-integrative. I’d have a course of Aristotle’s metaphysics, and then a course on Descartes or whatever, but there was not a connection there.

I remember taking by tape, I think, it was Peikoff’s History of Philosophy course. What that did for me was give a sense of the grand sweep of history, and then he puts an interpretative framework on it so you can see it as a series of competing arguments developing over the centuries. That also was very formative of my thinking.

Mark Lewis: Okay. Thank you. I want to start off with explaining post modernism as an entrance into your work and to the way that you think. One of the things I appreciated about it, and given the history you just said, it makes more sense to me is that you were not polemic in your style. Many philosophers, it’s like okay, I have the right answer and I’m going to show how the other people are wrong, and they offer uncharitable interpretations of the people’s work rather than engage with the actual ideas for what they’re worth, and then to bring them out, to find the value in them but then define their limitations and to show how they fit it, people just attack.

One of the things I enjoy about your work, Explaining Postmodernism, and I know you’re working on a new project on liberal capitalism, which also hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk about, is that you really attempt to capture the essence of these post modern thinkers and to tell the story of what it is that they were bringing. What were the real ideas that they brought? Then, how were there limitations in place and what were the social context. I’m curious. In terms of post modernism as a movement, how did you get so interested in it? Why do you believe it’s important? What role do you believe it’s playing in our current situation? Small questions, of course. You would expect a lot of them.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah, that’s like actually three encyclopedia articles in themselves right there.

Mark Lewis: Yes.

Stephen Hicks: Your first point, method of logic, I think you’re right. This is perhaps a little uncharitable between what I think of as an evangelical mindset and, let me stick with the religion analogy, someone who is interested in the study of religion. Whether you’re religious or not, you have to realize that religion has a lot of deep answers to important questions that human beings who are thoughtful and sensitive grapple with. Whether you agree or not, your operative principle should be to understand why people become religious, why they take this road as opposed to that road, or why they say the whole thing I don’t think makes sense and become atheist or agnostic. I think in particular if one is going to become an academic, and if you’re going to become an academic who is an educator training young minds, it is a responsibility both to yourself and to your students in your profession to always take the arguments at their best. Religion is hard. Philosophy is harder.

In many cases, to reach a conclusion you’re integrating a large amount of material so it’s understandable that people will integrate it in different ways. You have to be willing to step outside your framework and try to see things from the other person’s perspective. Maybe one of the things that was useful to me was, as I mentioned before, I had a number of courses just on the major philosophers, so as an undergraduate I think I developed good skills and a comfort level with being able, for a semester, to be a Hegelian and to get inside that system and see the whole world the way a Hegelian does. Then, the next semester go do it from a Leibnizian perspective or a Thomistic perspective, or whatever.

Of course, that’s difficult because those philosophies are challenging. In some cases actually, the difficult thing is, the way I think of it is, finding your way back to reality. A lot of the philosophers are in fact very strange, and they will accept some premises but because of their brilliance they take them to some very far away, distant-from-reality places. If you’re taking the project seriously, then you have to go there, but then you do have to work hard to reorient yourself when you realize that it’s in fact not in connection with reality. Postmodernism, in particular, I got interested in that in the middle 90s. It was some years, not too many, after I finished my Ph.D. work and I became a full-time professor with a tenure-track position. Up until that point, my philosophy training had been in the history of philosophy as I had mentioned.

I’d also gotten more interested in political issues. A lot of Cold War issues were looming over everyone’s heads during the middle part of my century, my formative years, so I remember reading a lot about Russian history and the history of Marxism to try to understand why our more liberal, democratic, free market, capitalist system was on the brink of war with some very widespread popular ideas. More people were living under communism in the world in the middle part of the 20th century than any other system. So where that came from mattered. I had done a lot of reading in that area, and of course a lot of my professors in university were left of center. Some quite far left. One always gets a good grounding in left-wing thought if one goes to a good university. For my graduate work, I did mostly work in epistemology, in logic, and in the philosophy of science. A lot of it was from an Analytic and Logical Positivist perspective.

I actually did not know very much at all about any of the postmodern thinkers. Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, of course, and various others until I finished my Ph.D. work. Then, I came to Rockford University, and I was teaching in the Honors Program, which was a very exciting program for our best students. One of the features of the program was that all of the courses were team taught but with a professor from different disciplines. I would be teaching a course on whatever with a history professor or a literature professor or a sociology professor. As I started reading around, I was reading a lot of stuff I hadn’t read before, and a lot of it was coming from deconstructionist perspectives or postmodern perspectives. The arguments were powerful and persuasive, and the more I surveyed what was going on in the profession, I realized that postmodernism was not just a thing but a big thing and an important thing.

I started then reading quite a lot on the postmodern thinkers, most of the French guys, and then realized that they were pointing back to Heidegger and Nietzsche, whom I had some familiarity with at that point, but they were also pointing back to the later Wittgenstein and some of the pragmatists whom I had some familiarity with. All of them were then pointing back to Hegel and to Kant. I knew that story very well. So there was a whole epistemological story, and I could see it as a two-century development track going on there. Then I was also struck by the fact that all of the leading postmodernists were quite far left in their politics. The rhetorical arguments were always in the service of certain political conclusions that were coming from a specific part of the political spectrum.

There was a history-of-philosophy story, there was an epistemology story, there was a politics story. And then I realized this is a very interesting story and that I have a great deal of knowledge now about all three of those stories — and that to understand postmodernism, you really have to know all three of the stories because it’s not just about epistemology and deconstruction and it’s not just about politics.

Out of that, came a series of lectures that I did [1998], and then I had my first sabbatical and I wrote the book during my sabbatical year [1999-2000]. That’s where that came from.

Mark Lewis: One of the points you make in the book is that if postmodernism were really just a philosophical enterprise, if it wasn’t also a political enterprise, if there weren’t a core political drive behind it, you would expect that some of the philosophers would show up on the left and some would show up on the right, but that they were universally on the left.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah, and the first generation or two dominated right by the far left. Why that’s the case –that’s a very interesting question.

Mark Lewis: Okay. As you were doing this, you were also familiar with Ayn Rand, and working through Ayn Rand’s work, so how did —

Stephen Hicks: At this point, not so much. This is now in the 90s. I had done my main reading of Rand about 15 years earlier, in my student days.

Mark Lewis: When I think of you, I think of you as one of the leading lights in the philosophical side of Ayn Rand, you could say, in terms of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics. Your epistemology, your ethics, actually dealing with the real ideas and how she fits into the context of the Western historical tradition. How did having her philosophy, or exposure to it, her metaphysics, her epistemology, influence how you understood postmodernism, or how did your study of postmodern influenced how you approached her?

Stephen Hicks: I’d say two things. One prominent feature of Objectivism is that it is a systematic philosophy, and that makes it an outlier in 20th-century philosophy, much of which has tended to be very unsystematic. Partly, that’s driven by the specialization that goes on in scholarly discourse. You focus on a fairly narrow set of issues and you don’t have time or expertise to deal with the whole range. It also is driven by the fact that particularly in the middle part of the 20th century, philosophy was in a very skeptical place. The Logical Positivist program had collapsed by the time we get to the mid-20th century, and so philosophers were largely scrambling around wondering what to do. That’s a little bit uncharitable, but there was a strong sense of we really don’t know what we are doing. We’ve reached some very skeptical conclusions about language, about logic, the possibility of values being objective and so on.

Rand then was a strong contrast in that she argues that all of philosophy is systematic and that your politics, your ethics and views of human nature, and underlying issues in metaphysics and epistemology. I absorbed that when I was younger, and that stuck with me. I think that’s a true and an important thesis that if you just carve off one issue in philosophy and try to just work on that in isolation, you can’t really do it. You can’t really do it very well. You typically then get caught up in snarls, and the snarls are typically driven by when you tried to carve off that one subsection of philosophy you buy into a whole lot of assumptions that then you are just taking for granted. If you don’t eventually make those assumptions explicit and ground them, and argue for them, you’re not going to be able to make progress.

That stuck with me. Of course, the other thing was Rand’s strong advocacy of reason and rationality that things ultimately make sense, things have an identity that plays out in causal form. Of course, the world is very complex so there are very complicated causal stories that we have to tell. What that means, though, is even when one is dealing with things that seem highly irrational and unsystematic and crazy — and postmodernism in some of its manifestations certainly goes down that road — that there nonetheless is a story that makes sense for how that particular form of irrationality came about. When you have a big sprawling movement like postmodernism, which has something to say about literature, something about history, about law, about the arts, about philosophy and so on, that if you work at it, even though it bills itself as antirational, anti-systematic, you can eventually understand why that unsystematic or antirational way of looking at the world has so much influence in so many different disciplines. Methodologically, I think that was helpful to me as well.

Mark Lewis: Postmodernism sometimes talk about the narrative, the framework through which you’re interpreting which has a profound impact on how you interpret, and this idea of a meta-narrative that can there be one narrative that holds the other narratives, this system that Ayn Rand’s suggesting. To suggest that there is a meta-narrative in which all of the pieces fit and make sense is extraordinarily provocative. I look out into the world of philosophy, I don’t find anyone but Ayn Rand who is bold enough to make that kind of suggestion it seems.

Stephen Hicks: Well, she was an outlier certainly in the middle part of the 20th century, when she was active. The philosophy profession is, I think, more healthy now. We can talk more about that later if you want. There are people who are more comfortable with broader theories in applied ethics, in meta-ethics. I think cognitive science is a very exciting area right now, and people are starting to talk about truth again. Already, the language of narrative, of course, that comes primarily out of the world of fiction. It’s easier to talk about narratives than it is to talk about theories and truth, because the idea of a narrative is you’re telling a story and you’re more interested in the story being more internally coherent and hanging together. Whether it’s true or not is a supplemental feature.

The narrative language already is a retreat philosophically from talking about theories and whether the theories are true or not. But it makes sense that once you start talking about narratives and you’re more interested in the rhetorical power of the stories that we are telling, then the idea of a meta-narrative is going to seem even more distant. That somehow there’s one overall story that fits all of the stories, well, you’re not going to buy into that. Lyotard’s phrase sticks with many people.

Mark Lewis: Okay. Going to your work on Philosophy of Education. You’ve done an enormous amount of work on it — but by the way, the lectures that you have online, or the videos that you have online, where you go through topics just systematically with your whiteboard, just brilliant. Thank you.

Stephen Hicks: That was a very fun project.

Mark Lewis: To watch you think through the issues, define the terms, bring them together, relate them together, put them in an arc — highly recommended to my listeners. You will always come out smarter.

Stephen Hicks: Thank you.

Mark Lewis: In contemporary education in contemporary colleges, there’s this large movement about … I consider it language policing. There’s micro-aggressions and safe spaces, and an enormous sensitivity to dominate marginalized languages and cultures, and people’s place in them. How do you see that unfolding and relating to philosophy and what does Ayn Rand have to say? Again, these small questions.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah. I’d say right now, with respect to that phenomenon, that’s third-generation postmodernism. What you have in the first generation postmodernism is some high theory. You have a large number of people who are very well educated. One of the striking things for example about the leading postmodernists, Richard Rorty, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and so on, is that all of them are philosophy Ph.D.’s and all of them in their graduate school are getting at very good schools in Europe and the United States a first-rate education in epistemology. It’s really the rigor and depth of their understanding of where epistemology is at a very skeptical moment that gives them the power and the stature that they have. What you then have is a movement that says, “Okay, we can’t know the truth. In fact, we should really just stop talking about truth.” There maybe are truths, so we relativized the concept of truth, or we take the notion that truth really is a subjective projection on a possible reality that is out there.

That is integrated then with the politics because all of the leading postmodern thinkers in the 50s and 60s when they’re coming of age, they are young men and young women, all of them are Marxist or close to being Marxist. What the Marxism then adds is this strong adversarial stance toward the world, an adversarial stance toward what’s taken to be the dominant culture, a breaking down into subcultures, each of which has its own, so to speak, narrative that’s in competition and contradiction to the narrative of other elements of culture, but since we are skeptical, we don’t think that rationally we can sit down and have a good discussion and work out what the truth is. Instead, all we have is people strongly committed to contradictory value systems, and then no possible way of rationally reconciling them.

Okay, so that’s first-generation postmodernism, and then as that then gains more adherence among young people who then are university educated, they then some of them become professors themselves in the next generation or they go on to careers in intellectual life or in the arts community and become influential there. One way that comes out is in saying that, “Well, if we are skeptical, nobody really knows the truth, but there are dominant narratives and then there are weaker narratives that are marginalized, then what we should do is …” — this would then be a second generation thing — “… is push for a kind of equality.” That there’s no narrative that is truer or better than any other narrative. That’s what the first generation teaches us, so the second generation concludes that all narratives are equal so what we need to do is make equal space in the curriculum for all narratives.

That then means if you say we’re going to have the students read, and I’m just making up a number here, 100 books over the course of their university career, right now 80 of those books are written by dead white European males, for example, and only a minority of the books are being written by women, members of racial minorities, ethnic minorities and so on. In the name of diversity, equality, fairness, and so on, what we should do is have a more equal representation of all voices across the curriculum. The way that plays out is a kind of affirmative action than for books. Then you say if 40% of the population is white males, then maybe 40% of the books should be written by white males. If 17% of the population is Hispanic, then we should have 17% representation and so on. We’re going to go for some kind of equality or proportional representation.

You see that manifesting itself starting in the late 80s on through the 90s, early 2000s. By the time we get to the third generation, the last 10 years or so, that starts to shift for a couple of reasons. One is that you then get just demographically a higher percentage of people who are now professors whose careers are based on teaching the previously underrepresented books in the curriculum. That’s what they know. That’s what they’re interested in. That’s what they think is true and/or important, so they’re interested in further advancing the course of those books and those ideas in their curriculum. They’re not that interested in teaching the other traditions and the other perspectives. Some of them are, of course, just ideological teachers and not really professors in the best sense of the word.

Also, and this is perhaps an Ayn Rand insight, and behind her Nietzschean insight, that one of the things that those who are on the weaker side — those who think they’ve been alienated and oppressed learn to do because of a certain kind of altruism — we can talk more about altruism and its varied uses — is that what we need to do is not push for a kind of equality between strong and weak, rich and poor, powerful and powerless but rather give special preference to those who are on the losing end of various social forces, so to speak — that we should actively sacrifice the stronger for the sake of the weaker, sacrifice the richer for the sake of the poorer, sacrifice the oppressors on behalf of the oppressed. What this then means is that we get away from equality as the standard to a compensatory justice as the standard, where if you think that the rich and the powerful, and the smart and the strong have been using their advantaged position to damage, harm the interests of the weaker, then it’s perfectly fine to sacrifice the stronger for the sake of the weaker.

Once those who are in the weaker alienated position realize that they, so to speak, have this tool or weapon at their disposal — that they are owed and that people who are in the advantaged groups feel guilty because they’ve been taught to be feel guilty about all of the advantages that they have — this becomes a very powerful tool for leveraging your position within the institution. Then you can start saying, “No. It’s not just the case that we can’t say that conservative voices and liberal voices are equal, they’re all just narratives so we should have equal space.” We say, “No, no. The conservative voices have been dominating in our culture, and so it’s time for them to shut up for a while and we’re only going to hear voices from our side of the equation.”

It’s not just as a matter of Hey, let’s do this in fairness and make up for past sins, but you see it coming out in the particularly aggressive and ugly form that it does: “You owe us, and anything that you say because of your group membership is just evil, depraved and we can just shut you up by any means fair or foul.”

Mark Lewis: It’s an expression of your privilege —

Stephen Hicks: Yes, that’s right.

Mark Lewis: You must check your privilege. You must use the guilt that you’re talking about to question your own thinking and your own right to speak it.

Stephen Hicks: Right. Those who have privilege, they don’t have equal rights anymore. In fact, they should just shut and go away and be silenced. That, of course, is a power play but to the extent that it works, it means that your side then has more control over the institution, whatever institution you’re talking about.

Mark Lewis: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with what’s going on with Jordan Peterson. I’m imagining that since you’re from Toronto, you may be familiar with it. Is that —

Stephen Hicks: Oh, yes. Yes. I think highly of the stance that he is taking. That’s a complicated set of issues in one sense. The local debate is over pronouns, and we’ve been having arguments about pronouns. His, her, their, and so on, for a couple of generations now. Part of this is a matter of how in language, with language evolving but also we take people’s quest for personal identity seriously and we want people to explore and become themselves. For a long time, it’s been a matter of in some sense we need to make sure that the pronouns we’re using aren’t in fact presupposing there’s only one gender that we’re being inclusive, so when appropriate, use his, her or his or her, or whatever.

Mark Lewis: Ze or zir?

Stephen Hicks: Well, that’s the more recent variations. It’s also part of the package of civility to respect people’s claim about how they would like to be referred to. I always think back when kids, suppose your name is James but when you were a kid you were called by your parents Jimmy. For 10 years, 12 years, they’ve been calling you Jimmy but now you are becoming a teenager and you don’t really feel like a Jimmy anymore. That sounds too childlike. You want to be Jim, or you want to be James. Just say, “All right, now we can change our habit and respect his desire to be called this other name.” People might more dramatically say, “I don’t like my given name. I’d rather be called by my middle name.” We’re sensitive to that, and that all seems very fine and healthy, but of course it should be done civilly.

Demanding that people just call you your preferred thing is already a retreat from civility, and that should be a two-way street in that you also have to respect the other person’s context and what linguistic framework they are operating within. This may be a bit of a dig here but I always think for example of many religious leaders who give themselves very exalted names, or old fashioned aristocrats, “You’ll have to refer to me as Your Worship, or Your Highness, or Your Exalted-ness.” Demanding that other people buy into your linguistic framework and say, “No, no. You have to call me Exalted One.” That’s a bit presumptuous with respect to the other person’s framework. There should be a civil give-and-take, and people should be able to work out something that respects both parties’ interests.

I think what Professor Peterson is doing well is he’s saying: Of course I’m open to calling people by their preferred pronoun, but that should be a request rather than a demand, and it should be something that comes out of a discussion with the person, not an immediate presumption that that person is evil and wicked for not automatically adopting your preferred linguistic framework. On issues where this is controversy, like people’s gender identities and all of the biology and psychology and politics that’s wrapped up in that, you can’t simply demand that your preferred psychological, biological and political framework be the only one allowed in the conversation, and that you’re going to use linguistic power plays to shut up the opposing perspectives. Those are the things we need to argue about in a free speech, civil environment and not make demands. I applaud him for pushing on those points.

Mark Lewis: Thank you. Where do you see this going? Rockford perhaps isn’t one of the most politically correct schools in the nation. It’s not Brown. Where do you see things going?

Stephen Hicks: We’re actually a middle-of-the-road institution, yes. Sorry, I didn’t hear that last part.

Mark Lewis: Where is it do you think things are going in terms of the arc of this conversation and where it leads?

Stephen Hicks: You’re asking me to do crystal-ball gazing. I’m not someone who predicted that Donald Trump would win.

Mark Lewis: That’s fine. We’ve got —

Stephen Hicks: Take my predictions with a grain of salt. I don’t think anybody knows. I think these things are always unpredictable partly because the philosophical issues that underlie all of it are very complicated and there’s no way of predicting which set of arguments are going to prevail. When you leave this tricky political or philosophical arguments, are all kinds of psychological factors and social psychological factors, and cultural factors, and international factors that say what issues are important in any given generation, so thinking about what should be thought, what values are important and what should be done. Let me just speak from my narrower perspective, which is a philosophical perspective, and a philosophical perspective inside the academic world broadly speaking.

I would say one sign of hope is that while all of the arguments that are prevalent and now being deployed actively in university campuses and in culture, they’re all philosophical in their origin. They get played out and applied in all of these sub-cultural areas. Philosophy to a large extent has moved on, so even when it goes through its skeptical moments, nonetheless it has built into it a pro-reason methodology to a large extent. Philosophy tends to attract people who like argument, who like looking things at different perspectives, and they are really interested in truth, even if the line of argument they follow leads them to the conclusion that truth is not possible. What has happened in the philosophy profession is the philosophy profession will follow the arguments of the really smart people to their bitter end and reach various skeptical moments, and then grope around for five or ten years or so, and then some other smart person comes along with another really interesting argument, and then everybody will go to work on it, trying to defend it, trying to tear it down.

Typically, it has some flaws, so it gets torn down eventually and we grope around for a while, but then somebody else comes up with another one. That’s what has happened in the philosophy profession since the 1960’s and the 1970’s, which were quite skeptical moments. Quine was dominant. Thomas Kuhn was dominant. Paul Feyerabend was prominent, and so on. Then, on the continental tradition, Heidegger and Nietzschean philosophy and the postmodernists were all gathering steam. Since then, there’s been a lot of very good work done in the history of philosophy. There’s been a resurgence of interest in most of the major thinkers in philosophy. The history of philosophy almost always proceeds on the assumption that what the philosopher said, what he or she said, the text is there. There is a better and worse way of interpreting the text. All of the greats then are re-discussed, and we have very sophisticated arguments about them.

There’s been a movement to take applied ethics very seriously, so there’s a lot of very interesting work being done in business ethics, engineering ethics, medical ethics, and so on. All of that proceeds on the assumption that human beings, for example, have real biological natures and real medical needs, and it’s important for us to figure out what these are. There was a big boom, and continues to be a big boom of interest in philosophy of mind among philosophers, and working systematically with people in the other cognitive science disciplines. The brain scientists, the linguists, the psychologists and so forth. We really want to figure out how the mind works, and the assumption there is that psychology and language are real disciplines, and biology is real.

There are a lot of skeptical things going on in philosophy right now, but a lot of very healthy and very interesting things are going on as well. One thing is those issues attract smart young people who say, “I actually want to work on something interesting, on something that’s going to go somewhere.” Young people will be more attracted to those interesting issues, and they won’t be attracted to the implications of the skeptical issues as well. The other thing I would say — even though I’ve been saying this for I guess almost 15 years now, so maybe I should back off from it — but once you reach postmodernism with its skeptical, highly subjectivistic, highly conflict mode of social interaction, there’s not really anywhere to go after that.

Once you say we don’t know anything, everything’s just a subjective projection. Then, okay, we don’t know anything, so what do we do next? Well, there’s nothing more to say, right? Or, everything’s just a subjective projection. Okay, well then that’s just your subjective projection, so I’m not really that interested in talking with you anymore. It becomes boring very quickly, and when you’re dealing with smart people with active minds, they don’t like to be bored. I’ve been sensing this, and you do start to see this in the literature that people are seeing that a lot of the postmodern arguments are re-tread, re-variations and re-statements of things that they’ve been hearing now for quite a while, and it’s just not that interesting anymore.

It might have a lot of cultural traction still, and some institutional power because it’s entrenched among much of the professoriate, but people could get bored and move on. At least, that’s my hope.

Mark Lewis: Fingers crossed. Okay, let’s have that lead into the question of applied ethics and business ethics. You could say that’s where your professorship is. You work in business ethics.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah, it’s one of the courses that I teach regularly. I’m a professor of philosophy, but I teach business ethics too.

Mark Lewis: Perhaps, it’s uncommon specialty.

Stephen Hicks: Okay.

Mark Lewis: You’ve written a number of articles on it. You’ve been published in different places. You published your own pieces on it. I’m particularly interested in business ethics from a number of perspectives, especially the practical ability to create a business that works long term. Again, when I came out of college, I was a postmodern socialist, and I was in graduate organizational development clinical psychology, and I was passionately deconstructing across the board, and then I came across Ayn Rand and she kicked my butt, and I became interested in business. Business went from being the tool of the evil people in power who used their money and access to resources, these capitalists and landlords who are dominating society — into entrepreneurs who are creating new products and providing win-win solutions. That fundamentally changed not just how I understood the world, how I understood my life, but how I lived my life, the kinds of relationships I build, the kind of businesses I build, who I work with.

What’s it like to be in that arena? What’s the hope of it? How does Ayn Rand play into that?

Stephen Hicks: Well, in your first point, if you look at business sociologically, there’s a lot of truth to the crony-capitalist narrative, because we do have a huge number of them. I’d say in the last generation we have more of them, those who use their access to political power at the local, state and federal level to line their own pockets at the expense of everyone else. There always are, in the business world, people who see it as a zero-sum game and whose strategy is to be sophisticated at exploiting other people and defrauding them, so you can always find a number of people who are that way. Of course, that leaves out the most important number of people in business and the people who really matter, those who are genuine value creators. The ones who start their own businesses, who provide a new service, a new value that adds to lots of people’s lives. We should be celebrating those people. Or even people who work well within existing organizations creatively. They work hard, they’re adding value and so on.

In many cases, in the business ethics literature, they have been the unsung and often even unnoticed people. The first generation of the business ethic literature, especially business ethic literature in the popular press, typically focuses on the scandals, on the bad guys. Partly, that’s a matter of just the journalistic dynamic of bad news sells, scandals sell, so scandals and bad news in the business world is more likely to get noticed. In one way, it’s not that sexy, the idea of being a responsible person and getting up and going to work in the morning and just getting the job done. Millions of people do that, so it’s not especially newsworthy. When one starts looking outside of the popular press and into the more serious academic press, it is true that the business ethics profession in the first generation or two of its existence was reflective of the broader intellectual climate, and it had an anti-business ethic. It did see business as a zero-sum game, business ethics as an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms.

It was drawing on some very deep philosophical sources that says concerns with money and profit are of a lower order, and if you’re a good person, you should be non-materialistic or interested in higher things. Or, that nice guys finish last and if you really are going to be successful in the business world, you have to be a kind of bastard and be willing to screw people over to get ahead. All of those analyses would then in various ways feed into what business ethics saw itself as doing. Now, there has been a sea change, but there has been a significant minority movement now within the business ethics literature just in the last ten years, people who are taking value creation more seriously.

For example, we look at the companies that are in the Fortune 500 right now. The top, say, 500 companies in the United States, and we look at how many of them existed 30 years ago, or one generation ago, and we realize it’s really only a minority of them.

Where did all of these big, huge companies come from? We realize that all of them started as entrepreneurial, small firms, a couple of guys in a garage or their basement or whatever. People realized that all of the wealth that is out there — I’m overstating to some extent — not all people, but a significant minority of people in the business ethics profession — that the story that somehow there’s just a certain amount of wealth and that there are just all these corporations out there that are dominating the landscape and merely redistributing existing wealth around — that that’s not the true story. We have to understand that some people figure stuff out, that they come up with ways of producing new things that add a huge amount of value, so there is more interest in value creation and understanding entrepreneurship as a phenomenon.

The other thing I would say about the business ethics profession is that it started to professionalize itself in the last 15 years or so. When I started doing business ethics, most of the people who were doing business ethics were philosophers who didn’t actually know very much about business. They had never run a business. Most of them had been good students and gone straight through their Ph.D.’s, and they got interested in business ethics for whatever reason. They might have had a theoretical, idealized ethical understanding of what business should be, and they were interested in applying that in their disciplines. They didn’t necessarily have an MBA, so a lot of it frankly was just awful. Awful. Normative theorizing in the worst sense, but that has changed a lot.

What we’re starting to see now, particularly in younger people, is a lot of people who at least got an MBA, so they at least have some theoretical understanding of business, or they worked for a while and then got a philosophy degree so they’ve got some practical experience. Or, a lot of people who went the other way. They got the MBA, they got the work experience and then they got very interested in business ethics, and so got a master’s degree in philosophy or a Ph.D. in philosophy. I think the field is slowly professionalizing itself. It’s still, I think, dominated by people who are not necessarily anti-business but who see business as in itself amoral but it can be redeemed in various ways. I’m part of, I like to think of it as a growing minority —

Mark Lewis: Vanguard.

Stephen Hicks: Okay, there’s a good word. We’ll take Lenin’s phrase, yes. The vanguard of the entrepreneur who see business as inherently a positive force, as an inherently healthy force. You’re interested in taking charge of your life, making your life into what you want and your business career, whatever field that is, as one of the primary vehicles in your life by which you are going to realize that.

Mark Lewis: How do you understand Ayn Rand’s philosophy fitting in to business ethics as you understand it?

Stephen Hicks: Fair enough. I wrote one piece, and then I started getting interested in this phenomenon of business ethics from an entrepreneurship angle. Much of the literature has been dominated by a model called Corporate Social Responsibility, where the assumption is that we do business ethics by studying corporations. Typically, mature corporations, and we study them in terms of what they owe to society in various ways. I thought that was a limited model for a number of reasons. Instead when you do business ethics, you should start where business begins, and business always begins with entrepreneurship. Someone has an idea and starts a business, and then of course, if you’re successful you might grow your business into a mature corporation but that’s a derivative, later, organic development that comes out of a more fundamental understanding of where business comes from.

That then raises the questions of where these new businesses come from, and the people who start them, what kind of people are they? I started studying a entrepreneurs, a lot of the psychology literature on entrepreneurs. I started doing a lot of interviews myself with entrepreneurs trying to get inside their head and seeing what they tick, and drawing on other people’s studies and my own studies, I came up with a list of what I think of as success traits for being an entrepreneur. If we think of a somewhat idealized entrepreneur, what kind of a person do you need to be to make a go of that process? You’d say well, obviously you have to have some creative ideas. You have to have a certain mindset, not just waiting for other people to tell you what you are supposed to do.

You are the one that’s going to come up with an idea, so a certain mindset is there. You have to be a person then who has some initiative. The entrepreneur is a self mover. Rather than just saying, “Well, that’s a nice idea”, but then not doing anything with it. I’m actually going to act on the idea. Almost all entrepreneurs talk a lot about fear. I have to give up my job with its steady income, so there’s a fear of not being able to pay the bills. The fear of failure. How do I know that this idea is going to be successful? Most entrepreneur ventures, we know, fail several times. I might look like an idiot. My spouse and my friends might laugh at me, and so on. This whole issue of dealing with all of the fears that go into entrepreneurship, you have to have some fear tolerance.

Now, if we just pause right there at the very early stages, already we’re talking about a certain kind of cognitive mindset, what I think of as a creative rationality that you have to have in place. Being playful with ideas and really studying ideas, but that tracks on to the virtue of being a rational person, being committed to looking through your own eyes at the world, seeing what’s good, what’s bad, what can be improved, imagining alternatives and so on. That tracks very nicely on to the Objectivist virtue of rationality. If you talk about the person who says, “Well, I’ve got a nice idea,” but I changed the channel or do something, I don’t actually act on the idea. I have an idea, and I’m going to act on it. I’m going to put into practice what I think is true, important, worth doing and so on.

That tracks very nicely on to the virtue of integrity. Integrity as an overarching virtue is to say I think this is true and that’s what I’m going to live, or my actions are going to be integrated with my beliefs about what’s true and important. If I think I have a really good business idea that will make my life better, then I act on that idea. That entrepreneurial trait also factors in. If you’re talking about people who are aware of risks and dangers and the possibility of failure, and the natural fears that come with that, but say, “Okay, I still think this is a good idea, and it’s an important idea, so I am, despite my fear, going to do what I think I need to do.”, then you’re talking about the virtue of courage. Courage, of course, also maps on nicely into the Objectivist list of virtues.

That’s a short story, just three right off the bat.

Mark Lewis: To be able to risk other people’s judgment of your failure maps on to independence.

Stephen Hicks: Independence, perfect.

Mark Lewis: As you’re saying this —

Stephen Hicks: You’re nicely anticipating where I want to go. Or, the virtue of pride, which Rand characterizes as a kind of ambitiousness, a moral ambitiousness, wanting your life to be the best that it can be. Well, that again is very entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurs want to make their lives, their business careers, the best they can be, but of course, they have that typically nested in a broader vision of they want a certain lifestyle that they think is going to be best for them. This idea, also, entrepreneurs typically take very seriously. They want to be compensated well for the value that they know that they are adding to other people’s lives. They know that their product or service is good.

Think about Rearden Metal, and Rearden’s unwillingness to sell it at the point of a gun so to speak. He says, “I know this is good, and I want to be compensated, but I want to be compensated on my terms.” The flip side of that is your awareness that other people who are using your product that it’s actually adding value to their life, and liking the fact that you are adding value to their life. Most entrepreneurs will say they get a real charge out of seeing say somebody wearing the clothes that they designed, or using a device or program, or an app that they designed. They recognize that there’s a trade that has been built into what they have done, and that they are, as a result of their value creation, receiving great compensation, but the other person is also receiving great compensation.

That, I think, maps on to a kind of justice. If we think about justice in this narrower sense, it’s a matter of all of the parties so to speak get what they deserve. Both parties, in an ideally just situation, walk away ahead from a transaction. The customer adds value to my life if I’m the entrepreneur in proportion to the amount that I have added value to that person’s life. It’s a mutual win-win and both sides of that transaction, both of us being treated as we deserve, matters. That’s a kind of justice as well. That also maps onto objectivism well.

If you take the core list of Objectivist virtues, seven or so, depending on fine-tuning and which ones you emphasize, there are very tight connections the entrepreneurial set of traits that enables people to be successful. More broadly, you can think of Objectivism as an entrepreneurial philosophy. If you think of its value philosophy, it really is encouraging you to be the entrepreneur of your life, so to speak, to say This is my life. What do I want to make of it? It really is mine to make of, and I need to think of all of my options and be creative and persevering and all of those things that entrepreneurs have to do to see your whole life as a grand entrepreneurial venture.

Mark Lewis: Thank you.

Stephen Hicks: You’re welcome.

Mark Lewis: Thank you. The show is called Becoming an Ayn Rand Hero, and it’s about how you want to live your life.

Stephen Hicks: Sure, right. That high romanticism that’s also built into Rand, that almost aesthetic sense that your life can be wonderful and beautiful that most of us had when we were kids, hopefully. Never losing that as one grows to maturity and life gets hard and complex.

Mark Lewis: Yes, and in the five-tier model of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics, right?

Stephen Hicks: Yes, very good. Yes.

Mark Lewis: I think of the Ayn Rand hero as exemplifying the virtues, but the entrepreneur, the Ayn Rand hero, someone who wants to make their life, their business, something that they’re glad to wake up to, that they can have moral pride about, that’s beautiful because they’re following their truth and they’re working with other people to help them live great lives, too, such so they can take joy in the success of the people they’re interacting with.

Stephen Hicks: Absolutely.

Mark Lewis: When I think about Atlas Shrugged, I think about the valley. I think about how when Dagny and Hank are negotiating the cost of Rearden Metal.

Stephen Hicks: Ah, yes. Good scene.

Mark Lewis: They’re ruthless in that sense, but they’re having so much fun and there is so much respect, and they understand that this traction, this interaction, must be win-win in order for it to work, in order for both of us to thrive, and it’s the fact that they’re playing so hard with one another.

Stephen Hicks: Absolutely. That dichotomy often between work and play completely gets broken down in that scene, and of course, Rand is having fun with it as a novelist as well. The point you’re making, you’re saying it very well is exactly the thing that business ethics needs more of. Because we, for various reasons, actually deep cultural reasons, deep philosophical reasons, have entrenched notions that work is one thing and that work really is a duty and obligations, a drudgery that you have to do — and that play is something else. That’s a very dehumanizing model of work. You hear about the many sad stories. Millions of people — even in our free entrepreneurial society to a large extent — who they do hate their jobs. They feel locked in. They have phrases, “I’m just working for the weekend.” The idea that for five days, I don’t get to be me. I just have to do what the Man tells me, and go to this job that I hate, but in two days out of the week then I get to be me. The weekend.

This idea of seeing your career as something fulfilling, creative, that you can make your own whether you start your own business or go to work for someone else, your work is an important fundamental part of your humanness, who you are, and you should make it in your own self image. That needs to be pushed a lot harder.

Mark Lewis: That choice to make your work part of your aesthetics, an expression of beauty. I give each of these five levels, I give them words that begin with R to make them memorable. The R for aesthetics is realization. It’s to realize your vision of what’s possible, which means that you have to have a vision of what’s possible. When you align your life, when you align your work and you say, “Okay, I’m going to wake up today. I’m going to be doing a number of things. I’m going to do them in a way that I make them beautiful, that are an expression of what I believe to be beautiful.”

Stephen Hicks: You are a kind of artist.

Mark Lewis: Yes, and I believe when I look at all of Ayn Rand’s heroes, they are all artists in that sense. They see something that’s possible, something that inspires them. A creation that will require of them their best, right?

Stephen Hicks:  Absolutely.

Mark Lewis: Let’s hope it requires your best. In fact, if the goal I’m seeking does not require my best, I’ll increase the goal.

Stephen Hicks: Good.

Mark Lewis: That means that there’s more that I can do, and when I think of entrepreneurs and business ethics, if there’s anything we could promote around business, it’s this vision that you can create something great with what you’re doing. I’ll say one more thing. At the beginning of Atlas Shrugged, in the first scene we meet Eddie Willers, and he’s walking through New York. It’s broken down. Many of the shops are closed, but as he’s looking he sees a bus expertly steered. That premonition of something that matters, something done well, it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re doing, if you really focus on what it is you’re doing, the reality of it, and you use reason and you have integrity, you take responsibility and you treat people with respect, you can make something beautiful out of what you’re doing.

Stephen Hicks: Yeah, that’s very nicely said. Use that point about business ethics to connect then to the philosophy of education material we were talking about.

Mark Lewis: Please, please.

Stephen Hicks: If we think about people’s formative years, if we say we want to prepare people for a certain attitude that their work lives can be beautiful, fulfilling, creative and so on in their life — but more broadly, then that means we really need to think seriously about how we educate children. It has some, I think, profound implications for trying to change what we are currently doing. If you think of the stereotype — it’s not really a stereotype because we all have experienced this about how a standard classroom is organized — it’s straight rows of desks, and the students go in, and they have an assigned seat. They have to stay there and not move-

Mark Lewis: For twelve years.

Stephen Hicks: Well, yeah, that’s the worst-case scenario, right? The teacher is standing up at the front as the authority figure, and she has all of the answers, and if she doesn’t, they have the answers in the textbook. You do what the teacher tells you and you work on preassigned problems, and all of the students are doing the same problem at the same time in the same way, and they’re all supposed to get the same answer. That does not train people to think creatively. It doesn’t train people to be independent. It trains people to be robots. If the lesson is, as many children do is that school is a dehumanizing place, and they first become disengaged, then they become bored and then it becomes actively painfully. They feel that they only way they can express who they are is by teenage rebellion by the time they get to that stage.

You’ve got to go with the kids. They’re struggling to retain their humanity in a context of a school system to the extent that it follows that model is not only not preparing them for a fulfilling work life, not preparing them for a fulfilling life. It’s sad-to-repulsive, depending on what degree of system you’re talking about.

Mark Lewis: In your work on the philosophy of education, where do you see the opportunities, and again, how do you bring Ayn Rand into this? I’m imagining you get to work with your students, and they come in with a certain set of expectations. Your class is yet one more step on this journey of fulfilling this step by step process of getting … How do you attempt to reach them? Are they open to ideas? What’s your experience?

Stephen Hicks: Well, actually overall good. I still enjoy my teaching a great deal, but as you were pointing out there, part of what I need to work on a lot with my students, particularly the first year freshman students, is just this expectations issue. To a large extent, they have had any sense of creative thinking beaten out of them. That’s too strong, but it has been suppressed in them to the point where it’s not an expectation for them. At least, in formal education. I should say American culture is pretty good outside of school at fostering independence and creativity with all of the sports and music lesson and so on, but inside the formal school systems, students do learn you sit there, you do what the professor or the teacher tells you. You learn the material minimally to get through the test and so on.

Right from the beginning, I do confront that as nicely as I can. In my class, I tell them nobody has to take philosophy. I resist any movements in my department or at my institution for making philosophy courses required, because if students come in and they have to take the course, it’s already one barrier that you have to overcome. I typically only get students who at some level have chosen to take the course. I tell them, “You don’t have to take this course. If it’s not for you, then go somewhere else.” Phrase that nicely. It’s not that I’m trying to kick them right out of the class. I typically make all of the assignments optional all the way through. What I will do is I will say, for example, “This semester, at the end of the semester, you will send me an essay in which you discuss all of the readings.”

We typically do one reading per week. “Tell me what you think about these essays all the way through, but every week if you want, you can send me 300 words on that topic and come and talk with me about those 300 words, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.” The idea, again, is that they don’t have to do these assignments. If they are serious about learning, they will decide to do the assignments. Again, getting away from that social model of just following the orders. Some of them get it pretty quickly and they like it. I do typically have, at least in my freshman classes, a quick drop rate of about 25% of the students who say, “No, this is not what I want to do.” When you debrief them, they’ll say, “No, I just want to know what I need to learn and I want to have set assignments with set dates, and that’s what I comfortable with.” I think that’s sad, but they know themselves well enough that that’s not going to be the course for them.

If one tries to play the authoritarian teacher and tell them what to do, and what the right answers are, that’s not good education anyways. It’s a little bit hopeless at that point. I would say in one way, I’m in a very fortunate situation so the students that do take philosophy and stay with it, they tend to be students who actually are interested in thinking about the issues and getting some feedback, so it works out well.

Mark Lewis: Excellent. In service of your students, in service of you continuing to teach, and I know you have other responsibilities to attend to, thank you so much for the conversation. It’s always a pleasure to be in your mind and hear your thoughts, and thank you for —

Stephen Hicks: It was a pleasure. Very good questions, and a lot of your thoughts were very well formulated. I enjoyed listening.

Mark Lewis: Thank you, Stephen. I look forward to seeing you at future conferences, and otherwise, have an excellent day.

Stephen Hicks: Thank you, and you, too.

Mark Lewis: In the name of the best within us. Bye.

Stephen Hicks: Okay. Bye for now, Mark.

Mark Lewis: The becoming an Ayn Rand Hero podcast is sponsored by the composer, Darin John Lewis, whose music I use for this podcast. If you’d like a custom choral or symphonic piece for your special event or celebration, or if you’d just like to hear more of his music, go to DarinJohnLewis.com. That’s D-A-R-I-N J-O-H-N L-E-W-I-S.com. Thank you. See you in the next episode of becoming an Ayn Rand Hero.


A video of this interview is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTKE00OQTpE.

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