Distributism, Memory, and Evidentialism w/ Dr. Alex Plato
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- Опубликовано: 8 июл 2024
- Dr. Alex Plato is an associate Professor of philosophy at Franciscan university. He has done extensive study of Elizabeth Anscombe, Post-Liberalism, and Epistomology. He and Matt speak on Capitalism, Distributism, and Evidentialism.
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0:00 - Prayer's Repentance Message
5:00 - Defining Productive Property
10:00 - Family's Economic Independence
12:05 - Family Farms' Independence
17:49 - Enemies of Distributism
24:06 - Transcendent good true beautiful
29:56 - Philosophy of Technology
36:41 - Investing righteously
39:13 - The Grocery Box
49:22 - Role of Cities
51:29 - Building for Human Flourishing
1:01:49 - Building a Political Community
1:03:28 - Nature and Grace Distinction
1:14:31 - Feasting and celebration
1:26:36 - Building intentional community
1:38:42 - Technique vs. character
1:41:16 - Impact of literature on beliefs
1:51:24 - Philosophy club initiation
1:53:26 - Certainties and practical beliefs
2:04:12 - Epistemology studies knowledge
2:05:45 - Transition from Descartes to Hume
2:16:48 - Cast into flames
2:29:16 - God's design
2:35:04 - Belief and evidence relationship
2:41:34 - Coherentism challenges
2:46:05 - Reflective equilibrium model
2:53:25 - Disagreement on Hilbert's hotel
2:55:23 - Abductive reasoning vs. scientism 
Развлечения
It must be confusing to cite Dr. Plato's academic works. (Plato, 2024).
I can feel my brain growing as I listen to this interview
One thing that brought me back to God was The Case for Christ. I went from secular to born again to new age to athiesm and then Catholicism because of the robust discussions like this that I NEED. I am an evidentialist and gained a lot of knowledge from The Case for Christ. Im HOME. 🥰 Pints with Aquinas has fed my soul since I discovered it a few months ago. ❤
If you want more to eat, definitely check out Shameless Popery by Joe Heschmeyer.
Started a group like they are describing back in Jan, 2022. “Inklings of the “place”” is what we called our group as we were nearly 50/50 Catholic and Protestant. Met monthly, 6 month renewal/sunset agreement (dislike groups that linger on beyond their proper time), phones to be left at the door, poem or piece of literature read and discussed, anything written by the group welcomed, oh and a recitation of a poem as the entrance “fee” when attending for the first time.
Dang
The group has gone to meeting every other week since January of this year
Nnnn
I’m also a member of an identical group called the Inklings’s- cigars, beer, poetry, philosophy, everyone writes as well and brings things to the meeting. It’s been going strong every month for several years, before I was invited.
My vote is definitely that they call it the inklings
This!! As a Protestant I never truly had real assent of will to the Church. I merely leaned in on my own private judgement with matters of religion
I could listen Dr. Alex Plato talk for hours, he is so articulate, please keep having him back!
Allen Tate who was a Southern poet and convert to Catholicism stood for the Southern Agraian movement which was the American equivalent of the distributism movement. True American conservatism has far more in common with traditional Catholic thought than most think
They were Southern sympathizers and/or apologists I believers.
I'd love Dr Plato to talk about Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism and how the Nominalists stole the Great Ox's thunder.
They did in one of their previous convos on here
> ... putting people over services and products because I think an argument a lot of people would make about the good that Amazon has brought about is I can open up this laptop lid and within half hour or an hour I could build myself a library that would have made Thomas aquinus jealous yes that's incredible.
I live in a local village. A wealthy investor (not a local) bought off large swathes of a hill nearby. The steep terrain just below the top on both sides of the hill was bulldozed with large crawler excavators into terraces for vineyards in a matter of months. And then the heavy rains soaked the bare soil on the other side of the hill and caused a slow avalanche that now threatens the village on the other side of the hill. But here's the thing, all these hills around here are all already terraced for hundreds of years by hand. They were just abandoned and slowly degraded by erosion and flora. But transforming the land slowly, the environment has time to adapt. We're just doing so many things beyond our human capacities it's getting maddening.
I felt sick with anxiety and uneasiness (in a good way if that makes sense ) while reading Crime and Punishment. It was more intense than the feeling I get watching a horror movie. Edge of my seat. That book is incredible. Thanks to PWA for turning me on to Dostoyevsky. I love all the Brothers Karamazov references sprinkled throughout the episodes.
This is completely tangential to the topic. I was just listening to this the day after Protestant social media clutched their pearls about Pope Francis describing people as "fundamentally good", and Dr. Plato's anthropology articulated at the 52 minute mark is astoundingly almost word-for-word exactly what the Holy Father said.
Suggestion for the poetry club: “Pints with Plato”
Dr. Plato is one of the guests that I’d definitely listen to his own podcast if he had one
I feel like these are big ideas to chew on and I really appreciate Dr. Plato bringing these difficult concepts down to my level at least as much as he could. Thank you PWA for producing this conversation.
I was just thinking that Matt needs to bring Alex Plato back on
An Alex Plato + Tom Ward episode would be amazing.
If nobody else thought that it wouldn’t have happened, so in a sense, your thoughts formed this reality we now share
same
Would love to see dr. Plato and Dr. Jordan Petersen discuss capitalism and distributism.
I’m a member of a very similar group called the Inklings’s- cigars, beer, poetry, philosophy, everyone writes as well and brings things to the meeting. It’s been going strong every month for several years.
My vote is definitely that you all call it the inklings
He's one of my favourite guests ❤
Sheesh...talk about nominative determinism. Great discussion as always. Really enjoyed hearing from Dr. Plato.
I started a men's reading group a few years ago and it's been very life-giving. We started reading mostly fiction but are moving into more theology and philosophy.
For your lounge you could call it the "Garden of Steubenville". Easy callback to the Garden of Eden, as well as gardens naturally being places where beauty is created through active cultivation of the garden. In this case you would be cultivating knowledge.
I’ll come back to this episode when I’ve had enough sleep
Smart move. 🧠
Oh God, to have what Steubenville has all over this country. It is so tempting to uproot and move to Steubenville, but what about where I am? I don't have Christians so much around me, but I certainly do have pagans who are localists/distributist in practice. May God convert us all.
Many Napro doctors would say there are always alternatives to the mainstream contraceptives prescribed to women.
Great advice!
Never thought Cormac McCarthy would be mentioned in a Pints episode. I just finished “All the Pretty Horses”, and “Blood Meridian” is a true masterpiece, up there for consideration as the great American novel
Can we get Dr. Plato and Dr. Jones together for a conversation? I feel like I could watch that for at least 10 hours.
The beauty of the butterfly being lost in the overthinking to the point of destroying it through dissection seems similar to what many do with Scripture.
1:34:50 I started a small gathering in college where we would do this every third Thursday of the month. We called it “Man Cans and Poetry”. It didn’t last too long but it was a blast whenever we did it.
awesome
1:37:42 We need this both south and especially east of the BNA airport here in Nashville metro area!!! 🙌
Matt, when are you going to get the Dougherteys on? We have heard of them over here down under and want to learn more about how their farming and faith life meld.
I want to start one of these men's groups in my city!!
I believe Chris Hedges coined the term “inverted totalitarianism.”
Distributism? Awesome. Will have to listen. It doesnt get talked about much but should.
What are your thoughts on how to achieve distributism?
Read Tradition in Action. Distributism is like socialism
@@tomasn4744 No. More capitalists and subsidiarity is not socialism.
😢i
@@Veritas1234 Elect people that carry distributist policies. The American Solidarity Party.
My husband and I would love to open a group like this in Atchison/KC area!!!
That’s a good point here. How to make valuable the chain of value of production. That isn’t contrary to the good of price, because demand has being changing to be more conscientious with the environment 33:31
37:10 you can say they are not innit for the money which is not necessarily true. But what you can see is that markets work in a social way. And the conditions that make things hard 37:53 is when governments and big businesses (chronic capitalism) worsens efforts, but it’s not distributism.
51:08 but the way to build cities like that comes from the result of a market economy that alllows that. I’m from Costa Rica and live and work in Guatemala and you can’t really build a city like that YET. We have to build a market economy first.
@@samuelcampos2642 Thomas Sowell's views on a lot of this make the most sense as far as I am concerned. There are too many people who try and develop systems based on a belief that all or most people are good and free from error. Cumulative error can lead to many many problems but so can lack of charity. You could have an idea that sounds good with great intent, and it works out poorly or another idea that sounds wicked with bad intent and it works out better. Unfortunately, intent and the way something sounds has not worked out the way we think it would imo from human failings and reality. There was a boss I once had that said no amount of planning can bear dumb luck.
I agree they are planning something from the context of an existing system. No single small local community can even build a pencil on its own (wood, graphite, rubber, tin, tools, knowledge , etc.). Many things people rely on only exist within the current system. We need some balance between local (small) and larger without the larger eating the smaller, but that balance is hard to find.
What was that prayer you said at the top of the show Matt????
The issue is Usury...
That's it. No matter how local or how global the economy is - Usury is the issue.
If you have no Usury then good economics will flow. If you continue to tweak and change and alter little by little but keep Usury then it doesn't matter. It will be evil. Economics is ALL about morality and that's it. It's not a "science" that functions outside of morality.
What is the name of the prayer Matt was talking about in the beginning of the interview?
We named our son after St. Ephrem the Syrian. That was a sweet way to begin the video! (I’m like 3 mins in but I’m sure it’s great.) 😂
Im interested in distributism but there arent many good easily accessible resources on it
One of the issues with the internet is that it has perversely concentrated ownership. Matt is not seeing it within his community because it is a local community/polity. He is also top 0.1% of content creators so he has no issue with the alogarithms but it’s different for almost anyone else starting out, the cost of advertising is insane and we have done away with localism, this is largely because of not in spite of the internet.
The in media res😭
Comment for traction
51:45 Accurate!
What was the original prayer Matt mentioned right at the start? (like a litany of some sort) Thanks
Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian to the Most Holy Spirit
@@jonathanharvey6776 thank you
Getting into character is appropriate for reading Shakespeare, because most his works are plays, and the words are spoken by characters with intentions in situations. Not all poetry need be read like that.
What was that prayer Matt was talking about at the beginning?
I always worry when someone thinks they're going to "engineer" a society, no matter what picture they paint. There are always unintended consequences.
The thing is though, all societies are in fact engineered. Liberalism is engineered; “free markets” aren’t free. Etc. What you’re used to seems natural, but it’s driven by policy.
Everything but running around alone in the woods with sticks is "engineered."
I'd rather love somewhere engineered by the Church and her principles.
Thomas Sowell had this correct. Go read: Knowledge and Decisions, and The Vision of the Annointed.
You could call the groups "Inklings", taking inspiration from Tolkien and his group of friends, or something like Pier Giorgio Frassati's "Society of Shady Characters", which he started with a group of young men of his town. Just a couple ideas.
Mens Group for the book orientated boys sounds fun. But what are the more rugged blue collar Catholic men supposed to do? I enjoy philosophy, but sitting around listening to poetry doesn't sound pleasing. Yet I crave community. Any suggestions?
This describes my husband so well. Going shooting is what he does with his buddies, cigars around the fire, working on each other’s home improvement projects.
Toughest part of small business is finding young people willing to work entry level jobs, particularly in the trades. Hard work. They'd prefer to be a barista in a climate controlled environment.
You gotta pay them bro
You’re absolutely right.
The sole proprietors I know, have margins too small to pay new employees more than minimum wage. They keep their businesses above water by doing the work themselves.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the coming years.
@@lawrencesmith43 it’s unjust to pay your employees minimum wage. They can’t live on that. If they cannot afford to pay a just wage then they cannot afford to run a business. That’s all there is to it
@@catholicconvert2119that’s not accurate. You may have that obligation if they need to live on their own/support a family. There is a place for cheap jobs for high schoolers.
@@catholicconvert2119 Not to try and pick a fight, but unjust according to whose standard? The only thing that minimum wage tells me is that this is the amount I must pay employees; anything above that is, and must be considered as, generosity on my part.
Like if one of your favorite parts of the week is when a new Pints episode drops 🙌🏻
nice
I'm working on turning Dr. Plato into a Aristotelian-Nietzschean
I feel dumber after listening to this. I mean, I thought I was fairly intelligent; but, this left me feeling like a second grader in an advanced math class.
Dude Gabi one week and now a Plato?!?! Getting from Chesterton in Mt. Angel. Didn't realize you were Nick's twin😂
But how do you redistribute the capital? Distributism needs Socialism to work as Belloc admitted.
I am about halfway through the episode. Maybe it gets better, but I can only leave the same suggestion I provided when Matt had Dr. Jones: have a Catholic economist/social thinker that understands markets and the economy on to provide a counter point. There are plenty out available; Father Sirico is the first that comes to mind.
The combination of constant ad hominem attacks against capitalism (essentially defined as everything we hate about the post-WWII world) and rose colored historical lenses are particularly annoying. There's much to pick apart and the RUclips comment section isn't the place to do it, but I'll leave just a few examples from the first thirty minutes of the show:
1) guilds were often used to limit the ability for people to enter into labor markets to develop skills in trades and artificially inflated prices.
2) the subsistence farming praised by Dr Jones' is far, far more economically insecure than most professions in today's economy. There's a reason why Dr. Plato's family is no longer working on a farm and he's free to pursue a career in academia.
Couldn't agree more! There's plenty of good candidates, my fav is the guy who has "Cutting The Gordian Knot" podcast
He wasn't "attacking" anything.
1:18:00
28:00 an atomic bomb could be used to destroy large meteors or something to protect earth, but using it on people would always be immoral
2:45:18
“Passing Peace Pipeline” ?
“Piping Up” also works
So, distribution is people who can afford to start small business starting small business in their local
Community?
How is that scalable? Most people can’t run a business. Maybe if the irs was reigned in but you would have to have crazy money to do Matt’s cigar shop for an example.
It's a philosophy for the upper class intellectual.
Thursday. Please get rid of the auto focus cameras. That's horrible.
What? I forgot and what?
Topic of distributism would've been better as dialogue with Trent Horn or Tom Woods. No framework can remove sin. Using government to supposedly decentralize power to families comes with its own risks and dangers
As a Catholic org, why do I need to put my preferred pronouns for a membership for ACPA? Quick way to lose.
As a Catholic, a Chesterton fan, and someone who has read widely in economics, distributism makes me cringe so hard.
At first, it sounds like a good idea. After further study, holes emerge everywhere. Descriptively decent but prescriptively disastrous.
I guess it does depend on your 'win condition' though.
I haven't watched the whole video (to preface my question) but what holes pop up in the prescription of distributism? If not that, what kind of economy do you prefer?
It also depends on the mode of implementation. An ideal moves the mind to act in its concrete circumstance. Distributism is not some kind of totalitarian ideology implemented from above, but a mode of living where Catholic social teaching is taken seriously. I don't think it's really an economic theory, so much as a an attempt to tease out what is lacking in our particular circumstances and what Catholic social teaching says. I don't know that it goes much further than that. Correct me if I'm wrong.
What kind of holes? How is it "prescriptively disastrous?"
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The problem isn’t the idea per se, but the practice isn’t in any way doable.
@@benabaxter How on earth will the distribution of say land be achieved to those who have not? The answer is simple. Use government force to do it. It seems to me that is theft.
Several questions:
Who gets to choose who gets who?
How wouldn’t that be tyrannical at some point?
How does distributions would fix the problem free markets do make work?
I’m an economist and catholic and I feel there is a lot of misunderstanding about what allows growth and how it doesn’t go against Gods teaching.
It's local. Like a single neighbourhood. Where's the tyranny coming from? It's voluntary.
A good Catholic convert from Evangelicalism should know that Elizabeth Elliot, wife of Jim Elliot, is sister if Dr Thomas Howard, author of Evangelical is not enough and Catholic convert. 😃
I think you're misrepresenting The Grocery Box here. "The only things they sell" (39:20) are not locally produced items. There's King Arthur flour, Domino sugar, Red Star yeast, and Hershey's syrup, etc.. Please honestly represent the local organizations you're promoting, so that people have a real understanding of what locally run/locally supportive businesses can and can't do. If it's not sustainable for The Grocery Box to just sell locally produced items, be honest about that, don't sell your viewers a false view of an idealistically self sufficient community.
The local community cannot even build something a simple as a pencil much less MANY other more complicated things people rely on to survive.
I don't think that sharing certain fundamentals in common means a capitalist is an unwitting distributist. A capitalist (or some subscriber to a newly invented economic system of thought) could say that it is, in fact, the distributist who is the unwitting capitalist for sharing fundamentals in common with them.
Maybe that's a minor point, but it seems presumptuous at the very least.
But distributism came first. I can't say my father takes after me.
@@MeanBeanComedy This is missing my point. Nowhere did I say capitalism doesn't take its heritage from other economic systems. But just like us sharing with Jewish believers that the Old Testament is the inspired word of God (among other fundamentals) doesn't make Catholics unwitting Jews because they cropped up in time first, saying that a shared core of fundamentals between a distributist and capitalist makes someone an unwitting crypto-distributist is just as absurd. It also can be construed as condescending, despite what I assume is good intentions from Dr. Plato.
@@grimsithe959 Thomas Sowell expresses things better in this topic imo.
Hurrah, Distributism! There’s a new Distributist party here in England. Small, but green shoots…
The American Solidarity Party.
Cities destroy human skill outside speciality. This is why most cannot survive outside a city after 1 or 2 generations
Distributism is based.
The evidence for God’s existence debate hinges upon our experience and interpretation of it. How can Moses explain His encounter at the Burning Bush or on the Mountain to someone else? How about Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus?
I personally met Christ in a vision or some sort of taken to the moment of the Cross event. After that
an incurable disease I had went away. My hearts desired were changed for the good even issues I struggled to no avail with before. How can I share that with someone else?
But it is not simply the experience but and
event but also the interpretation. You can explain away anything if you wish. I have a good friend involved with a miracle that saved his life. He still refuses to believe. Christ said in the narrative of the Rich man and Lazarus even if the dead rise they will not believe.
Wishing Dr Plato would spend more time giving his students feedback in his classes than sitting here getting noticed. Speaking as a Franciscan parent with a student under Dr Plato.
Taking on too many classes in order to increase your income at the expense of your students is not ethical
Love seeks the good of the other if I’m supposed to love my brother I would say to Dr. Plato to reevaluate his priorities in this. God speaks to us in our circumstances.
Just message him privately instead of making a public scene, lady. 🙄🙄🤦🏼♂️
Dawson Europe was built by men working silently prayerfully in prayer, you will never find the perfect community. Start with silent prayer in your imperfect parish and home in your domestic church, and work from there. The medieval guilds didn’t spring painlessly from the dearth of the pagan world.
Charity and human error are the problems. In basically any system you come up with people who are perfect (free from error) and full of charity things would be fine. The cumulative errors (mistakes, waste, imperfect systems, etc.) and lack of charity (selfishness) is the primary driver of all the world's problems. Almost all problems from social, environmental to economic stem from these two problems. This isn't even getting into the fact that the material world itself is in a deeply flawed state and is only mentioning two major human flaws. So, any system man creates will have the cumulative total flaws of all humans involved on top of the ones in the material world. I think there is a reason Daniel described all human governance up to the end as beasts and John inspired by the Holy Spirit carried this on.
Yes, the Holy Spirit can fix anything, but I have yet to meet anyone I know who are free from error or full of charity. Also, as best as I can tell the deposit of faith seems to say things will remain like this to varying degree until the end. So, am left saying Maranatha and longing for heaven and trying to do my best until then.
Thomas Sowell has a better understanding of human nature and how that affects societal arrangements imo.
I am not this can exist in reality as it stands and create something that will thrive for human good and the family because human nature the current state of world. There are WAY too many ifs going on. There is no way out of the bar because the bar is the world. You are to be in the world but not of the world. But either way the world is in its fallen state and that is where we are in a fallen world waiting for Christ to return and restore the world (Acts 3:21).
The cell within society in which bubbles communities exists is more interdepend than being expressed. What community can make even a pencil on its own without the inter connectedness to the larger communities?
Sustenance farming in small communities have a great risk even the Incas understood this. They built storage areas in different regions as a form of insurance but not only that they understand different regions had different risk. So, there was an agreement if one area struggle the stored extra food could be moved around to the area struggling. They intentionally wanted different environments and regions in a single society knowing often disaster hit one area and leave another one alone. The Dust Bowl from human error or the many natural disasters can quickly destroy small bubble communities without help from a larger community to give help. They also understood that if one area struggled and wasn't helped it could quickly break down surrounding communities as they flee looking for needs.
Some form of local community is for sure a good thing. But it needs balance with some intercommunity relationship. How to balance this without it falling apart or the larger fish taking over it not likely to happen this side of eternity.
Re: what to call a group of men (or women or a mixed gathering?) who come together to read and discuss great poetry and bug ideas.. Culture Keepers comes to mind.
*big ideas 🙈
Technique is not limited to machines. The human mind/ technical thinking is the worrisome frontier for this "scientism".
What do U guys call capitalism? 'Couse nowdays there is no such a thing as "free market capitalism".
Real capitalism has never been tried before. Real socialism has never been tried before. 🙄 Economic cultists are so tiresome.
@@MrSmith-zy2bp If I know the history properly, the free market capitalism has been tried ín the US, ín England. I'm not saying that there was beautiful time, where everyone walked peacefully hand in hend, but that was the real capitalism. What we have now is a sugarcoated communism.
@@mkristof83 BS, what we have is managerial capitalism (see the works of James Burnham) and finance capitalism.
Thomas Sowell has the best view on this toic.
If you can’t see the ENORMOUS difference between Distributism and Localism, go watch It’s a Wonderful Life.
Hint: the good guys are distributists; the bad guy is a localist.
Mr. Potter, the globalist banking mogul who brings turns Bedford Falls into a mini Las Vegas, is a Localist?
Hilaire Beloc's 'The Crisis of Civilisation' - NZ$133.92 (Amazon)
Community building is still so viewed in this country with scepticism, but there are business built off the back of community building, and they will change the world. theconsumerrebellion