Matthew Crawford On Antihumanism And Social Control
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(The main Dish and VFYW contest are taking a break for the holiday; we’ll be back with full coverage on December 1st. Happy Thanksgiving!)
Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He’s currently a senior fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia.
This episode was recorded on October 17. You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the antihumanism of Silicon Valley, and the obsession with kid safetyism — pop over to our YouTube page.
Other topics: Matthew’s birthplace in Berkeley; his dad the physics professor and jazz player; his mom the New Age “seeker type”; Matthew taken out of school at age 10 for five years to live in an strict ashram and travel to India; he left to join “the great bacchanal” of high school where he “didn’t learn much”; did unlicensed electrical work and studied physics in college; he believes bureaucracy “compromises the vitality of life”; Hannah Arendt; Tocqueville; Christopher Lasch and the close supervision of kids’ lives; Johan Huizinga and the spirit of play; Oakeshott’s metaphor of a tennis match; Enoch Powell; behavioral economics; William James; Nudge and choice architecture; Kant; TS Eliot; Nietzsche; gambling addiction and casino manipulation; Twitter and “disinformation”; self-driving cars; plastic surgery; kids and trans activism; the Nordic gender paradox; nationalism; why the love of one’s own is suspect on the political left; how “diversity is our strength” decreases diversity; Hillary’s “deplorables”; Matthew’s book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction; brainy people not understanding practical ones; knowledge workers threatened by AI; the intelligence needed in manual work; why Americans are having fewer children; liquid modernity; the feminization of society; Bronze Age Pervert; Ratzinger; Matthew’s recent conversion to Christianity; and gratitude being the key to living well.
Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there. |
| 0:29.7 | Welcome to yet another dishcast. |
| 0:32.7 | Once again, coming to from the distant shores of Cape Cod, |
| 0:39.7 | as I wait for my floors to be fully put down in Washington. I had to postpone a couple of things and miss a couple of real meetings |
| 0:46.8 | I wanted to have in D.C. with some friends. But nonetheless, you know, floors are important and I'm |
| 0:52.2 | soldiering on up here. Not that it's hard to soldier on up here. |
| 0:55.9 | It's beautiful. |
| 0:56.6 | It's just quiet now. |
| 0:57.8 | It's quite wonderful, actually. |
| 0:59.4 | We're in Trans Week, just to let you know, although it's really hard to tell. |
| 1:05.0 | It used to be called Fantasia. |
| 1:07.1 | That's changed now. |
| 1:09.1 | Fantasia used to be, will be known by the locals, by townies, |
| 1:13.7 | is what we would call, this is probably terribly politically incorrect. We call it Tall Ships Week, |
| 1:18.3 | because it would often be a week in which, and these are not trans people, as we usually understood |
| 1:27.3 | them, but they are straight couples, a man and a woman, but the dude, And this are not trans people, as we usually understood them. |
| 1:27.6 | But they are straight couples, a man and a woman. |
| 1:30.4 | But the dude really, really likes to get dressed up as a woman and walk down the street with his wife. |
| 1:36.7 | This is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, it certainly not a thing being gay, but it's definitely |
| 1:44.2 | there. And you see these couples walking up and down commercial street. And the dude tends to be |
| 1:50.2 | tall and big, and they often have these big frocks, as it were, these sort of, they're kind of |
| 1:55.9 | copying women, but haven't quite nailed it. And so they look a bit like tall ships coming across the horizon as they go down commercial |
... |
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