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 f