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Ideas Matter Podcast is home to talks from leading contemporary thinkers on the most important political and cultural issues and intellectual trends of our times. Many were recorded at or reflect the topics discussed at Ideas Matter events, including Living Freedom summer school, The Academy residential weekend and Debating Matters schools debating competition.
Episodes
Friday Dec 13, 2019
Friday Dec 13, 2019
In 1992, conservative Republican Pat Buchanan declared the launch of a ‘culture war’ for the heart of the US. In the late 2000s, following the rise of the Tea Party movement, Andrew Breitbart suggested that politics is downstream from culture, and his young protégés like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro created turmoil in university campuses. Trump rode the bandwagon of conservative anti-establishment sentiment to the White House, whereas his opponents linked him to the racism of the Alt-Right. Meanwhile, figures like Jordan Peterson made popular and edgy ideas around ‘sorting yourself out’ and traditional masculine values. Are conservative ideas now the ‘counter’ to a ‘progressive’ establishment?
LECTURER
Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos, a lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of York and the author of the book The Rise of Lifestyle Activism: from New Left to Occupy.
TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
• Right wing reactionary movements have often been, in their essence, counter-cultural.
• Lacking a coherent economic and political plan, modern conservatism has found a new existential mission in the culture wars
• The new reactionary Right is less a revival of all bigotry and racism, or a conservative resurgence, and more a product of the current zeitgeist: obsessed with identity, and seeing humans as vulnerable subjects conditioned by their environment
• Right and left wing tribalism are both movements opposing the same Enlightenment values: liberalism, reason, and individual agency.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle, Zero Books, 2017
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy edited by Mark Sedwick, Oxford University Press, 2019
The Prehistory of the Alt Right, by Jeffrey Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 2017. See https://fee.org/articles/the-prehistory-of-the-alt-right/
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Spotify, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter and on Facebook. Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Thursday Dec 12, 2019
Thursday Dec 12, 2019
Under the seemingly all-encompassing umbrella of ‘mental health’, the public sphere appears saturated with claims about emotional damage. This lecture explores such claims of emotional harm and analyses the conversation-stopping effect of dismissing the rational human subject and the degeneration of public debate into never-ending culture wars.
LECTURER
Dr Ashley Frawley – senior lecturer in public health, policy, and social sciences at the University of Swansea; author, Semiotics of Happiness: rhetorical beginnings of a public problem
TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
• The rise of new emotional problems and emotional solutions to existing problems.
• Underlying their rise and fall is a belief that human subjectivity, conceived of as defective psychology, ultimately underlies most social problems.
• Diminished views of subjectivity are partially rooted in a perceived gap between Enlightenment beliefs in the rational, free-willing subject and the apparent failure of these ideals to exist in practice.
• Human nature is conditioned by the real possibilities of a given time period and social formation. It is not that human beings are by their nature irrational, but the possibility of a society governed by human rationality emerged at a time when the conditions for the full exercise of that rationality did not exist.
• Instead of trying to understand social conditions and their constraints on human freedom and rationality, we have jettisoned freedom and rationality altogether.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Resilience: The Governance of Complexity by David Chandler, Routledge, 2014
The Death of the Subject Explained by James Heartfield, School of Cultural Studies, Sheffield Hallam University, 2006
The Meaning of Race by Kenan Malik, Palgrave, 1996
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Spotify, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter and on Facebook.
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Friday Dec 06, 2019
Friday Dec 06, 2019
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry argued that movies and mass-produced entertainment represented the ‘de-artification’ or commodification of art by capitalism: an inauthentic and formulaic regurgitation of reality that deceived its audiences. The real thing was difficult and hard to understand: modernism separated itself off from mass culture in order to try and save high culture. Heidegger, too, argued that we had become enchanted with technology and needed to find a way back to beauty. Postmodernism took up the debate the other way – looking to debunk the authority of high culture with the irony of kitsch and the elevation of the everyday – moving from abstraction to art as a construct glorifying the role of the artist. Either way, the disenchantment of culture has left us with an ongoing war between low and high, new and old.
LECTURER
Angus Kennedy, author, Being Cultured: in defence of discrimination; co-editor (with James Panton), From Self to Selfie: a critique of contemporary alienation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
‘The crisis in culture: it’s social and political significance’ in Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, Penguin Books (1977)
‘The origin of the work of art’ in Basic Writings by Martin Heidegger, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter and on Facebook. Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Tuesday Sep 17, 2019
Tuesday Sep 17, 2019
This lecture on the crisis of bourgeois ideology, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, is a pre-history of today’s culture wars. It explores the broad sweep and trajectory of modernist culture, from the mid nineteenth century through to the interwar years of the 20th century.
LECTURER
Dr Tim Black, books and essays editor, Spiked.
TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
- Why growing disillusion of Europe’s bourgeois intellectual elite with the values of progress, liberalism and democracy that had been so important in bringing meaning to society.
- The crisis of meaning that fed the Great War as a vitalistic renewal of the German state and the disenchanted bourgeois world of the Anglo-French axis.
- Societal insecurity in Europe after WWI and fatal break by intellectuals with the moralistic guises of the pre-war view of the world and enter a deep mode of self-questioning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
- The Destruction of Reason, Georg Lukács , 1962 (republished Aakar Books, 2016)
- Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, Robert B Pippin, Wiley-Blackwell, 1999
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter (@theboi_uk) and on Facebook (battleofideas).
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Monday Aug 26, 2019
Monday Aug 26, 2019
For a long time the family has been viewed as the location of all sorts of social and moral problems and are where many of the key discussions in the culture wars have traditionally been played out. But recently the focus seems to have shifted from traditional issues such as marriage, sexual freedom or abortion to the questions of parenting – resulting in more instrumental, and less moral arguments approaches to family life coming to the fore. This lecture traces these developments and clarifies whether and why the family matters.
Lecturer
Dr Jan Macvarish, visiting research fellow at the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University of Kent; author of Neuroparenting: the expert invasion of family life.
Talking Points in this podcast
- Is the state necessarily a threat to the family or can it support family life?
- What are the core values of the nuclear family and are they worth reinvigorating?
- How does 'The Family' as an ideal and an institution relate to the family as lived?
- How might parental authority be reconstituted in the context of greater gender equality?
Bibliography
Neuroparenting: The expert invasion of family life, J. Macvarish, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
Parenting Culture Studies, E. Lee, J. Bristow, C. Faircloth and J Macvarish, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
The War over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground, B. Berger and P.L. Berger, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter and on Facebook.
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Saturday Aug 24, 2019
Saturday Aug 24, 2019
The debate surrounding Parkfield school in Birmingham and wider discussion on the role of sex and relationship classes within educational programmes, are just the latest incidences of schools becoming a battlefield for the culture wars.
Starting with developments in the 1870s when the state intervention in schooling in England & Wales became more pronounced, James Tooley explores the impact of the ethos of state control over education right up to today’s controversies over Relationship and Sex Education
Lecturer
James Tooley, professor of educational entrepreneurship and policy, University of Buckingham; author, The Beautiful Tree
Talking Points in this podcast
- In the 1870s, private non-profit and private for-profit schools made up nearly all the educational establishments, educating 95 per cent of children.
- State intervention in education reflected a desire to push forward a particular set of values, creating an early instance of the education culture wars.
- Schools were used to also keep the working class in their own station as opposed to increasing their social mobility.
- An affordable grassroots private school movement that would create schools of high quality at half the cost of state education is possible.
Bibliography
The Beautiful Tree: a personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, James Tooley, Cato Institute, 2013
Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, Edwin G West, 3rd revised edition, 1994
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.
You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our website
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter and on Facebook.
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Friday Aug 09, 2019
Friday Aug 09, 2019
This is the second podcast to the series Culture Wars: then and now, recorded in 2019 at the summer school The Academy.
The series explores the emergence and evolution of the culture wars, and aims to understand the intellectual, cultural, social and political ideas that shape them.
In this lecture, Frank Furedi introduces the concept of the culture wars, explores its historical context and outlines how changing conceptions of morality and the status of moral authority distinguish today’s culture wars from those that took place in the past.
LECTURER
Professor Frank Furedi, sociologist and social commentator; author, How Fear Works: culture of fear in the 21st century and Populism and the European Culture Wars
Talking Points in this podcast
- The dominant issues that serve as the focus of the culture wars today
- The emergence of a socio-political impulse to remove ourselves from the past
- The culture wars as catalysed by the corrosion of Western society’s confidence in its own values
- The importance of autonomy and sovereignty
BIBLIOGRAPHY
First World War: Still No End in Sight (chapters 6 & 8), Frank Furedi, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2014
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Preface) Lionel Trilling, Penguin, 1965
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Find out more: https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter podcast takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today. Subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud.
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/theboi_uk) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/battleofideas/)
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Friday Aug 09, 2019
Friday Aug 09, 2019
This is the introductory podcast to the series 'Culture Wars: then and now', recorded in 2019 at the summer school The Academy.
The series explores the emergence and evolution of the culture wars. Lecturers explore the intellectual, cultural, social and political ideas that shape the culture wars.
LECTURER
Angus Kennedy, convenor, The Academy; author, Being Cultured: in defence of discrimination; co-editor, From Self to Selfie: a critique of contemporary alienation
Talking Points in this podcast
• The Academy, and why we should value of scholarship, and the pursuit of truth
• What is meant by culture, the role for cultural judgement, and the rise of non-judgmentalism as a ruling principle in society
• An overview of lectures within the series Culture Wars: then and now
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Being Cultured: In Defence of Discrimination, Angus Kennedy, Societas, 2014
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, Roger Scruton, Brief Encounters, 2007
THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Find out more: https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy
IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter podcast takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today. Subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Podbean or SoundCloud.
Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/theboi_uk) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/battleofideas/)
Email us at info@theboi.co.uk
Friday Aug 09, 2019
Friday Aug 09, 2019
The following conversation between journalist Ella Whelan and the academic and author Dr Jan Macvarish was a taster for Jan’s lecture, ‘Family matters’, at The Academy - our residential summer school which took place on 20-21st July. https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy-2019
Friday Aug 09, 2019
Friday Aug 09, 2019
The following conversation between journalist Ella Whelan and the author and broadcaster Timandra Harkness was a taster for Timandra’s lecture, ‘The Personalised Century’, at The Academy - our residential summer school which took place on 20-21st July. https://theboi.co.uk/the-academy-2019