The Museology of Morality, the "Spirituality" of Universities: Critique of Alain de Botton.
15 December 2018 [link youtube]
Part 2 of an atheist critique of "Atheism 2.0".
Support the creation of new content on this channel for $1 per month on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel/
(This video is one of numerous examples of a video "generated by" questions, suggestion or discussion sent in by donors who support the channel.)
Here's the link to Alain de Botton's original video, i.e., the one being criticized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ&t=977s
Youtube Automatic Transcription
I know he's told us well just don't
think about Stalin don't think about Mao Zedong don't think about those extreme examples the word propaganda sets off alarm bells we think of Hitler we think of Stalin don't if you're talking about messages that are only gonna reach people who voluntarily buy the ticket then you have to create works of art that people want to buy people want to see and hear and listen to you've got to get in there and compete with spider-man and Batman and everyone else at the box office [Music] my views that museums should take a leaf out of a book of religions if I was a museum curator I would make a room for love a room for generosity a room you know all works of art are talking to us about things and if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we'd be told use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind we would get a lot more out of art I know louboutin so I apologize if my first response was a bit lengthy but now I can pretty rapidly proceed through this because the same issues are coming up again and again are you going to force school children to attend these museums with these exhibitions devoted to these ideals that you you personally believe in your view I'll and the bottles view of love and human decency and these things you want to preach if I was a museum curator I would make a room for love who chose you who elected you to be museum curator there's a very strange elitist aspect of this and of course the religions of the world are only to a very limited extent grassroots and responding to their adherents but ultimately they do ultimately they're answerable to their donors and their parishioners and the Communist Party is not Joseph Stalin is not and worryingly even in a country like Canada with our modest modestly dysfunctional form of parliamentary democracy Parliament decides to make a Museum of Human Rights Parliament decides to make a museum about indigenous peoples First Nations peoples Native Americans for lack of a better term who decides the message of that museum and who wants to see it who wants to pay $40 to come and see it when you actually look at the numbers most museums in order to have the attendance that they boast of they actually do rely on forcing school groups of children to come and see those exhibitions at the Museum and that in itself really constrains the messages that they can deliver now the other justification for a museums budget has to do with actually caring for the Jax the artifacts the archaeological site museum G the conservation preservation even archival site of Musial G that they're caring for items of some kind of historical and cultural value that's not considered here but let me tell you something I've dealt with museum budgets they are also in the hundreds of millions of dollars the amount of money that governments pour into museums for very dubious public benefits very dubious outcomes it's it's shock inducing its eye watering the museum exhibits in many ways are like blockbuster movies but that only a handful of people ever go to see so it's a very strange thing that in most modern Western parliamentary societies we've just come to accept this that there's a tiny elite of people in London England and nobody elected them and nobody scrutinizes them and they're given enormous quantities of taxpayers money to tell us what great art is to tell us what culture is to tell us what even theater is and more worryingly to give us powerful propaganda messages mostly about the history of world war ii hope nail with the hundredth anniversary we're getting some museo lagea but world war one the last time I went to the Canadian War Museum and I went to the British War Museum in England most of those museums are almost totally focused on World War two you're not going to get a lot of deep examination of England's role in unpopular wars in Africa oh you're not gonna get soul-searching about the history of the British slave trade or this kind of thing why because these museums do serve a propaganda purpose and there's nothing grassroots there's nothing answerable to the public about it so I don't know why he has this faith for lack of a better world that the secularization of propaganda in elite forms in museums and art institutions that this could transform society I think in order to believe that again I know he's told us well just don't think about Stalin don't think about my house the dog don't think about those extreme examples who who do you think this message would possibly reach if you're talking about messages that are only gonna reach people who voluntarily buy the ticket then you have to create works of art that people want to buy people want to see and hear and listen to you've got to get in there and compete with spider-man and Batman and everyone else at the box office and I for my part as an atheist as a nihilist as a vegan I do want to compete I want to compete with Curious George I want to compete with all the children's books I want to compete with Peppa Pig I want to compete with Mickey Mouse but I precisely see that as a form of artistic free market competition and not as propaganda and what that leaves you is the very very limited margin to be didactic because if it's a little bit too didactic then you start to resemble compulsory education and for the purposes of this discussion the most important part there is questioning what makes it compulsory what to organize religions do they group together they form institutions and that has all sorts of advantages first of all scale might the Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to The Wall Street Journal so religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it books alone books written by lone individuals are not going to change anything so in part here again we have a repetition of the same fundamental economic and political naivete that we heard before oh you envy the Catholic Church for collecting tens of millions of dollars what would be the basis for people donating tens of million dollars to you or for your imaginary cause your imaginary foundation it's very difficult to make a case for fundraising for any of these things you're proposing but moreover one of the fundamental things that's changed in the 21st century simply the ease of disseminating ideas I could understand his pessimism about people publishing a book he says when has publishing a book ever made a difference when has a lone person publishing a book ever made a difference every day of my life I mean in the 21st century to say this books alone books written by lone individuals are not gonna change anything know me the 17th century 16th I don't know how far back we'd have to go but for most of the history of civilization even without having a printing press or I did history of Southeast Asia where it was all handwritten manuscripts using a metal stylus to scrape into palm leaves palm leaf manuscripts but still new ideas and stories spread across the continent like wildfire no so writing a book can change the world and I think what's worth facing up to is the the saddening extent to which commercial mass media entertainment like Batman and spider-man and Curious George and Peppa Pig those are books that change the world um Harry Potter one woman sitting alone wrote this book and have this enormous impact and yeah if you want to take it that far I totally despised Karl Marx but what are you gonna tell me that Karl Marx didn't change the world by publishing a book how about you compare his publishing books to everything else he did in his life I think you can look at the organization of mass of groups of people mass organizations hundreds of people are thousands of people within the life of Karl Marx and other people's lives and say oh wow you did all this work organizing this event or organizing these people even if you had a demonstration that lasted a day or something ten years later where is the trace of it what influence did have on planet Earth the the types of impact you can possibly have through anything other than publishing a book seems to be very easy to be cynical about but we live in a world in the 21st century when it's more difficult to make money out of book publishing than ever but to write ideas that matter to people and change the world that's very easy to do and we don't need tens of millions of the horse to do it hey it'd be great if you got ten thousand bucks for an advertising budget get a literary agent promote your ideas great you can help but as never before were unencumbered from needing just the the infrastructure of an organization like the Catholic Church and again on what basis does the Catholic Church collect tens of millions of dollars lies deception threats and oppression I don't want to be part of a movement based on a lie I don't want to collect donations from people with phony promises of liberation or political outcomes I can't deliver for talking about real world stuff I don't want to be part of a religion like modern Buddhism that promises people things that you know promises them health benefits or meditation that just don't exist so on and so forth I don't want to promise people something as banal as inner peace and I don't want to promise them they're gonna be freed from the chains of capitalism or all the things that seem to motivate people to donate money and then to have very little scrutiny about what's done with the money after they after they donate it so if the case is gonna be made for large institutions having large sums of money at their disposal you'd need to be in a situation where millions of people were motivated by one commonly understood objective they all share veganism has got that atheism doesn't and to re-appropriate his term here atheism 2.0 I think interesting use of the idea of atheism 2.0 would be switching from an era one point though when we were mostly talking about the critique of religion by atheists and the critique of atheists by religion and switching on to atheism 2.0 a period of time when atheists are really engaged in criticizing one another in order to try to find that objective that clear sense of social change cultural change and political change and then decide on how they're going to achieve it I think that might be atheism 2.0 and I'm eager to get on to atheism 3.0 because I want to start collecting donations to publish this children's book I'm writing I'm writing right now a children's book trying to challenge Christmas trying to provide some kind of meaningful holiday meaningful mythology if you like it's not religious you know secular people can have a meaningful you know end of December holiday with their kids I'm interested in producing that new cultural change to challenge what came before but guess what we can do it in a highly decentralized non hierarchical mutually respectful participatory transparent and very low-cost way that education the process of education particularly higher education will make us into nobler and better human beings that's a lovely idea it's also an idea that we have forgotten you know if you went to a top university let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge and you said you know I've come here because I'm in search of morality guidance and consolation I want to know how to live they would show you the way to the insane asylum this is simply not what our grandest and best Institutes of higher learning are in the business of in the United States of America people go $50,000 into debt to get a university education and more the opportunity cost even if you have a fully paid scholarship of losing four years of your life we already have a crisis in our society of people in the humanities going to university and receiving diplomas that do not in any way open up forms of employment for them this is a crisis on a massive scale we did make several videos talking about this at length and doing a book review there were quantitative studies there were real dimensions to this that run deep so in 2018 a landable tone looks at this broken higher education system and it's not broken from the perspective of the professors it's broken in terms of the service its providing the students and I can say to society as a whole and enormous quantity of resources is being poured into this higher education system by the government and from the students and from their parents in terms of tuition and he sees this and he says oh this should be more like medieval education this should be more like communist education this should be more of a situation we are having inculcated into you moral and ethical values and as I asked before with the production of art the production of propaganda whose moral values who elected you I mean if you're the rector of this university if you're the president of this university if you are as he fantasizes the curator for this museum so your morality now takes on this people Authority why and why would I pay for it whether I'm the donor fronting the money two hundred and fifty million dollars for you to make this movie or I'm the the viewer I'm the member of the audience buying my ticket for whatever it is now thirteen dollars fifteen dollars to to see a movie or from the student paying five thousand dollars maybe fifty thousand dollars to get this education why am I paying you for it why am I paying for you to give me a morality lecture and maybe this is the greatest irony of all because you know one of the things that's really touching about a sincere religion like tera vaada Buddhism is precisely that the monks are forbidden to touch money that they're supposed to walk barefoot from town to town giving people morality lectures and guess what if you ask people to pay for you to stand there and explain to them that they're an immoral character that they need to be more upright people are not going to pay you for this neither as donors nor as supplicants and they don't begin from any common sense of belief or objective which we as vegans have and you as atheists don't say hey this is what we all want to accomplish therefore donate this money to me and I'm gonna produce propaganda to achieve this goal so again I think the most unexamined error here on every level and it comes up again again again it's most visible when talked about economically but the real underlying error is one of authority it's one of hierarchy that all of his face seas are top down there of enlightened and noble atheists like himself becoming the president of the university becoming the professor becoming the museum curator becoming the person in power who gets the point the finger and act like the Pope and dictate what morality is and what love and the Brotherhood of humanity is and that other people are just gonna have to take it well there's a reason why people associate this view of society with Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and maybe to some extent the Nazis and Adolf Hitler okay it's because your fantasy alone Atlanta Bell tone is authoritarian and we have alternatives like right now here on YouTube or pretty much every day I upload morality lectures I don't really do one of my most popular videos of all time is why you should not drink alcohol is me lecturing equation drag alcohol but the people who watch my videos don't have to pay me a dime and they can walk out of the theater any time none of them are captive audience when people ask who elected you who elected me the answer is my audience did because what we have here is a transparent open-ended participant participatory participatory model for cooperation collaboration and spreading of ideas and in 2018 it's this format not reproducing the authoritarian relationships of the Dark Ages that are winning a landable tone I understand your aesthetic yearning for some of the trappings of religion but when you look past the trappings you have to recognize that the money authority and power that religion built up and why it exhibits those traveling's is all built on a lie [Music]
think about Stalin don't think about Mao Zedong don't think about those extreme examples the word propaganda sets off alarm bells we think of Hitler we think of Stalin don't if you're talking about messages that are only gonna reach people who voluntarily buy the ticket then you have to create works of art that people want to buy people want to see and hear and listen to you've got to get in there and compete with spider-man and Batman and everyone else at the box office [Music] my views that museums should take a leaf out of a book of religions if I was a museum curator I would make a room for love a room for generosity a room you know all works of art are talking to us about things and if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we'd be told use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind we would get a lot more out of art I know louboutin so I apologize if my first response was a bit lengthy but now I can pretty rapidly proceed through this because the same issues are coming up again and again are you going to force school children to attend these museums with these exhibitions devoted to these ideals that you you personally believe in your view I'll and the bottles view of love and human decency and these things you want to preach if I was a museum curator I would make a room for love who chose you who elected you to be museum curator there's a very strange elitist aspect of this and of course the religions of the world are only to a very limited extent grassroots and responding to their adherents but ultimately they do ultimately they're answerable to their donors and their parishioners and the Communist Party is not Joseph Stalin is not and worryingly even in a country like Canada with our modest modestly dysfunctional form of parliamentary democracy Parliament decides to make a Museum of Human Rights Parliament decides to make a museum about indigenous peoples First Nations peoples Native Americans for lack of a better term who decides the message of that museum and who wants to see it who wants to pay $40 to come and see it when you actually look at the numbers most museums in order to have the attendance that they boast of they actually do rely on forcing school groups of children to come and see those exhibitions at the Museum and that in itself really constrains the messages that they can deliver now the other justification for a museums budget has to do with actually caring for the Jax the artifacts the archaeological site museum G the conservation preservation even archival site of Musial G that they're caring for items of some kind of historical and cultural value that's not considered here but let me tell you something I've dealt with museum budgets they are also in the hundreds of millions of dollars the amount of money that governments pour into museums for very dubious public benefits very dubious outcomes it's it's shock inducing its eye watering the museum exhibits in many ways are like blockbuster movies but that only a handful of people ever go to see so it's a very strange thing that in most modern Western parliamentary societies we've just come to accept this that there's a tiny elite of people in London England and nobody elected them and nobody scrutinizes them and they're given enormous quantities of taxpayers money to tell us what great art is to tell us what culture is to tell us what even theater is and more worryingly to give us powerful propaganda messages mostly about the history of world war ii hope nail with the hundredth anniversary we're getting some museo lagea but world war one the last time I went to the Canadian War Museum and I went to the British War Museum in England most of those museums are almost totally focused on World War two you're not going to get a lot of deep examination of England's role in unpopular wars in Africa oh you're not gonna get soul-searching about the history of the British slave trade or this kind of thing why because these museums do serve a propaganda purpose and there's nothing grassroots there's nothing answerable to the public about it so I don't know why he has this faith for lack of a better world that the secularization of propaganda in elite forms in museums and art institutions that this could transform society I think in order to believe that again I know he's told us well just don't think about Stalin don't think about my house the dog don't think about those extreme examples who who do you think this message would possibly reach if you're talking about messages that are only gonna reach people who voluntarily buy the ticket then you have to create works of art that people want to buy people want to see and hear and listen to you've got to get in there and compete with spider-man and Batman and everyone else at the box office and I for my part as an atheist as a nihilist as a vegan I do want to compete I want to compete with Curious George I want to compete with all the children's books I want to compete with Peppa Pig I want to compete with Mickey Mouse but I precisely see that as a form of artistic free market competition and not as propaganda and what that leaves you is the very very limited margin to be didactic because if it's a little bit too didactic then you start to resemble compulsory education and for the purposes of this discussion the most important part there is questioning what makes it compulsory what to organize religions do they group together they form institutions and that has all sorts of advantages first of all scale might the Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to The Wall Street Journal so religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it books alone books written by lone individuals are not going to change anything so in part here again we have a repetition of the same fundamental economic and political naivete that we heard before oh you envy the Catholic Church for collecting tens of millions of dollars what would be the basis for people donating tens of million dollars to you or for your imaginary cause your imaginary foundation it's very difficult to make a case for fundraising for any of these things you're proposing but moreover one of the fundamental things that's changed in the 21st century simply the ease of disseminating ideas I could understand his pessimism about people publishing a book he says when has publishing a book ever made a difference when has a lone person publishing a book ever made a difference every day of my life I mean in the 21st century to say this books alone books written by lone individuals are not gonna change anything know me the 17th century 16th I don't know how far back we'd have to go but for most of the history of civilization even without having a printing press or I did history of Southeast Asia where it was all handwritten manuscripts using a metal stylus to scrape into palm leaves palm leaf manuscripts but still new ideas and stories spread across the continent like wildfire no so writing a book can change the world and I think what's worth facing up to is the the saddening extent to which commercial mass media entertainment like Batman and spider-man and Curious George and Peppa Pig those are books that change the world um Harry Potter one woman sitting alone wrote this book and have this enormous impact and yeah if you want to take it that far I totally despised Karl Marx but what are you gonna tell me that Karl Marx didn't change the world by publishing a book how about you compare his publishing books to everything else he did in his life I think you can look at the organization of mass of groups of people mass organizations hundreds of people are thousands of people within the life of Karl Marx and other people's lives and say oh wow you did all this work organizing this event or organizing these people even if you had a demonstration that lasted a day or something ten years later where is the trace of it what influence did have on planet Earth the the types of impact you can possibly have through anything other than publishing a book seems to be very easy to be cynical about but we live in a world in the 21st century when it's more difficult to make money out of book publishing than ever but to write ideas that matter to people and change the world that's very easy to do and we don't need tens of millions of the horse to do it hey it'd be great if you got ten thousand bucks for an advertising budget get a literary agent promote your ideas great you can help but as never before were unencumbered from needing just the the infrastructure of an organization like the Catholic Church and again on what basis does the Catholic Church collect tens of millions of dollars lies deception threats and oppression I don't want to be part of a movement based on a lie I don't want to collect donations from people with phony promises of liberation or political outcomes I can't deliver for talking about real world stuff I don't want to be part of a religion like modern Buddhism that promises people things that you know promises them health benefits or meditation that just don't exist so on and so forth I don't want to promise people something as banal as inner peace and I don't want to promise them they're gonna be freed from the chains of capitalism or all the things that seem to motivate people to donate money and then to have very little scrutiny about what's done with the money after they after they donate it so if the case is gonna be made for large institutions having large sums of money at their disposal you'd need to be in a situation where millions of people were motivated by one commonly understood objective they all share veganism has got that atheism doesn't and to re-appropriate his term here atheism 2.0 I think interesting use of the idea of atheism 2.0 would be switching from an era one point though when we were mostly talking about the critique of religion by atheists and the critique of atheists by religion and switching on to atheism 2.0 a period of time when atheists are really engaged in criticizing one another in order to try to find that objective that clear sense of social change cultural change and political change and then decide on how they're going to achieve it I think that might be atheism 2.0 and I'm eager to get on to atheism 3.0 because I want to start collecting donations to publish this children's book I'm writing I'm writing right now a children's book trying to challenge Christmas trying to provide some kind of meaningful holiday meaningful mythology if you like it's not religious you know secular people can have a meaningful you know end of December holiday with their kids I'm interested in producing that new cultural change to challenge what came before but guess what we can do it in a highly decentralized non hierarchical mutually respectful participatory transparent and very low-cost way that education the process of education particularly higher education will make us into nobler and better human beings that's a lovely idea it's also an idea that we have forgotten you know if you went to a top university let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge and you said you know I've come here because I'm in search of morality guidance and consolation I want to know how to live they would show you the way to the insane asylum this is simply not what our grandest and best Institutes of higher learning are in the business of in the United States of America people go $50,000 into debt to get a university education and more the opportunity cost even if you have a fully paid scholarship of losing four years of your life we already have a crisis in our society of people in the humanities going to university and receiving diplomas that do not in any way open up forms of employment for them this is a crisis on a massive scale we did make several videos talking about this at length and doing a book review there were quantitative studies there were real dimensions to this that run deep so in 2018 a landable tone looks at this broken higher education system and it's not broken from the perspective of the professors it's broken in terms of the service its providing the students and I can say to society as a whole and enormous quantity of resources is being poured into this higher education system by the government and from the students and from their parents in terms of tuition and he sees this and he says oh this should be more like medieval education this should be more like communist education this should be more of a situation we are having inculcated into you moral and ethical values and as I asked before with the production of art the production of propaganda whose moral values who elected you I mean if you're the rector of this university if you're the president of this university if you are as he fantasizes the curator for this museum so your morality now takes on this people Authority why and why would I pay for it whether I'm the donor fronting the money two hundred and fifty million dollars for you to make this movie or I'm the the viewer I'm the member of the audience buying my ticket for whatever it is now thirteen dollars fifteen dollars to to see a movie or from the student paying five thousand dollars maybe fifty thousand dollars to get this education why am I paying you for it why am I paying for you to give me a morality lecture and maybe this is the greatest irony of all because you know one of the things that's really touching about a sincere religion like tera vaada Buddhism is precisely that the monks are forbidden to touch money that they're supposed to walk barefoot from town to town giving people morality lectures and guess what if you ask people to pay for you to stand there and explain to them that they're an immoral character that they need to be more upright people are not going to pay you for this neither as donors nor as supplicants and they don't begin from any common sense of belief or objective which we as vegans have and you as atheists don't say hey this is what we all want to accomplish therefore donate this money to me and I'm gonna produce propaganda to achieve this goal so again I think the most unexamined error here on every level and it comes up again again again it's most visible when talked about economically but the real underlying error is one of authority it's one of hierarchy that all of his face seas are top down there of enlightened and noble atheists like himself becoming the president of the university becoming the professor becoming the museum curator becoming the person in power who gets the point the finger and act like the Pope and dictate what morality is and what love and the Brotherhood of humanity is and that other people are just gonna have to take it well there's a reason why people associate this view of society with Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and maybe to some extent the Nazis and Adolf Hitler okay it's because your fantasy alone Atlanta Bell tone is authoritarian and we have alternatives like right now here on YouTube or pretty much every day I upload morality lectures I don't really do one of my most popular videos of all time is why you should not drink alcohol is me lecturing equation drag alcohol but the people who watch my videos don't have to pay me a dime and they can walk out of the theater any time none of them are captive audience when people ask who elected you who elected me the answer is my audience did because what we have here is a transparent open-ended participant participatory participatory model for cooperation collaboration and spreading of ideas and in 2018 it's this format not reproducing the authoritarian relationships of the Dark Ages that are winning a landable tone I understand your aesthetic yearning for some of the trappings of religion but when you look past the trappings you have to recognize that the money authority and power that religion built up and why it exhibits those traveling's is all built on a lie [Music]