I’ve listened to pretty much all of Joe’s podcasts as I have to Jordan’s: independently they are superb but together they bring out the absolute best in each other. I didn’t think that anything could top their first meeting but they did exactly that in this their second. They are the instantiation of Oakeshott’s metaphor of conversation as an unrehearsed intellectual adventure with no cheap rug-pull arguments and to no extrinsic or instrumental purpose. I’d love to see Joe and Jordan together biannually — what an unlikely combination! If you are looking for something educational in the deepest sense of the term, listen to these two elegant, critical, humane and playful minds: in three hours you’ll have learnt more about the world and yourself than in all of your three years regurgitating the infertile spoon-fed tripe of your gender studies/sociology/anthropology courses. There are so many memorable and eminently quotable phrases — I hope to compile some of them when I next listen to this conversation again but here are two of them: “The rational mind likes to fall in love with its own creations”. This is as deep and snappy an explanation as I’ve come across for the rationalist’s psychology. (The Tower of Babel!). And speaking to the fuckwittery of the SJWs: “You want all the benefits of having all the benefits and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits” — a quote worthy of Chesterton! Thank you so much to the University of Toronto for bringing Jordan to the world’s attention — unintended consequences, eh? As Joe rightly said, they chose the wrong person to fuck with!
Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.
This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse, appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.
manwithoutqualities 