Here's a transcript of something I heard yesterday on Philosophize This! episode 108.
Context first: the episode was recorded in 2017, soon after Trump was elected POTUS. It introduces the Frankfurt School, a movement of neo-Marxist political theorists that emerged in interwar Frankfurt.
This is almost screaming "incoming Twitter fight", so Stephen West started with a disclaimer:
I fully realize how political the world has become in the last year. I fully realize that there are podcasts and shows out there that used to do great content that now have become first and foremost a soapbox for some political ideology and secondarily content for their listeners.
I just want to iterate that even though subject matters in the near future may trespass into places that are still relevant to modern politics, this is not the show becoming some bullhorn for who the next president should be—not that I even have strong enough political views to warrant doing a show on them, and maybe that makes me the perfect person to do this series.
[...]
I guess I just want to plant a flag in the ground here and make a couple promises moving forward.
I promise to cover these issues as fairly as I can. And I’m not just talking about the typical binary left/right way of looking at things—I plan on covering these subjects from multiple different angles that are interesting. If I can’t be comprehensive, I just won’t cover it.
Secondly, my hunch is that the majority of you listening, even if you’re a hardcore capitalist or Marxist, my hunch is that you’d welcome and be excited to hear a deep reading of the philosophy that underlies the other side respectively.
(formatting mine)
I think that talking about politics would be so much more constructive if we all took advice from this.
- Be charitable
- Strive to understand other points of view
- Don't proselytize yours