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July 8, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:07
Sam Harris | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 9
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What are the principles whereby we can navigate in the space of all possible experience and experience better and better lives and a better and better world?
So today's Sunday special featuring Sam Harris, the author of Waking Up and the host of the Waking Up podcast, will begin in just a second.
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Well, speaking of life and death, Sam Harris, thank you so much for stopping by.
Sure.
And, you know, there are certain weird things that happen in your life where you think, I'll never end up being friends with that guy.
And then you and I have ended up becoming pretty friendly, which is really kind of interesting.
So Sam Harris, for those who don't know, is not only perhaps the foremost atheist philosopher on planet Earth, he's also the host of the Waking Up podcast.
He's a neuroscientist and philosopher.
You should check out his podcast, it's just terrific, and all of his books are really worth the read.
I disagree with them strenuously, and they're really intelligent and really fun to read, and he's not trying to hide the ball.
So, Sam, thanks so much for stopping by.
Sure, yeah.
So, let's just jump right in with the fact that you and I are now sitting together, because that in and of itself is a weird thing.
What has happened in the country that we're now part of this kind of deviant conversation from the mainstream that seems to be growing in audience size?
Well, you and I are both part of this wing of the media where we're having long-form conversations on podcasts and on YouTube videos where we're reaching a surprisingly large audience.
And because of the format, we're not put in these weird rhetorical boxes where we have to struggle to make The other guy looked bad in the 45 seconds remaining, you know, on CNN or wherever it is.
And so we really can unpack an argument and we can search for There's a possibility of convergence in real time together.
You might not notice the difference if you're listening to this in any 30 second bit of conversation, but over the course of an hour or two hours, you notice that you're hearing a conversation that you're not hearing elsewhere.
We don't agree, as you say, about many things, but we're in the same media channel and we're approaching these conversations in a similar spirit of just Being willing to put our thoughts on the line and, based on a principle of charity, engage with the best version in our opponents.
I think that's really important because, as you say, when you spend your life in cable news, it's always finding the worst version of the argument and then bashing it with a club until it's dead like a baby seal on the ice.
But, you know, it's really interesting because the intellectual dark web, which is a coined term by our friend Eric Weinstein, at your podcast, where we were doing a taping of your podcast in San Francisco, and that, of course, is a conversation between three people who disagree on a wide variety of topics.
What do you think sort of characterizes this?
Because it's become really Controversial the term itself, there's been a lot of backlash to even the idea that there is an intellectual dark web.
Does it exist?
If so, what are the sort of common factors you think that unify the widely disparate viewpoints therein?
Well, I think it's what I just mentioned.
The fact that these conversations are happening in the dark with respect to the mainstream media.
I don't think most people at the New York Times or on CNN understand how big your audience is or how big Joe Rogan's audience is or my audience is.
It's just the numbers Uh, would surprise them, and the fact that people are listening with that level of engagement would surprise them.
And, yeah, ideological commitments aside, or beliefs aside, we're having conversations that are not really yet on the radar of the mainstream media, and yet we have analogous large audiences.
And, again, it's a spirit of intellectual honesty and adventure where we're not We're not stuck simply trying to win points.
I mean, you and I will debate many topics, and I think I'm right, you think you're right, and it will have the character of a debate, but in reality, as hard-hitting as any of those exchanges could ever be, I'm not approaching it the way you approach a formal debate at a theater.
It's more fun.
You get to turn it over and look under the other side of the rock and look at these viewpoints all the way through.
And one of the things that I think has happened that's driven this group of people together is the fact that the hard left has become so ensconced in identity politics.
I know that you obviously got into a very well-publicized exchange with Ezra Klein at Vox over this.
Wasn't that fun?
I thought he was deeply intellectually dishonest.
Shocker.
I thought it was deeply intellectually dishonest and then his suggestion that you were saying identity politics is bad is in and of itself a form of identity politics.
What do you make of this whole identity politics rising tide and what do you think the backlash to that's going to be?
Where is it coming from?
Well, it's coming mostly from the left.
It's producing a counter effect on the right, which is white or even white male identity politics.
And so it's natural to see that these two sides are amplifying one another.
But on the left, it's much more troubling for me because the left is the space traditionally where Self-criticism and wondering whether or not you might be wrong is just a paramount virtue, right?
But that has metastasized in this context to a kind of shattering of epistemology where on some level there's no such thing as truth.
There's just power.
We're just responding to differences in power.
And all of this is anchored to unchangeable characteristics like skin color and sexual preference.
And so it's just, you are, I now often describe this as just the most unhappy game of Dungeons and Dragons that ever was invented.
You have to negotiate these power differentials based on victimology.
You know, how many victimology points you have in this game.
And, you know, as a white, privileged, heterosexual, you basically have no points, right?
So you're not empowered to have a credible opinion on any of the most important topics of our time, right?
You're either just part of the problem with respect to all of these variables, and you're mansplaining or you're, you know, cultural appropriation or you're, you know, wading in here.
I mean, so this is what happened with Ezra Klein.
At one point he said, you know, we're two privileged white Jewish guys who shouldn't be talking about race at all, right?
Like, this is not something we can weigh in on.
And then when I changed the topic to anti-semitism it got no better for some reason.
It's a problem because clearly if we want to get to a post-racial society, if we want to get to a society where human beings can simply be identified as human beings, the endgame can't be taking things like race and gender and gender difference and sexual orientation Immutably, seriously.
These can't be just the ineradicable variables that define a person's position on important topics for all time.
If we get to Mars and we're still worried about skin color, in a Martian colony, we've done something wrong.
I think we need to reverse engineer what we think the The end state should be and clearly identity politics is not the game we should be playing.
Agreed and I mean obviously it's destroying the capacity to even have these conversations because there's no way to have a conversation with someone who is spending the entire time assessing whether your point of view is even worth being taken seriously as opposed to the rational nature of what you're saying.
And I think that's one of the factors I think that's unifying those of us who are having these conversations.
I think another factor that's unifying All of this is a belief in data.
Now, I know that you, obviously, are a deep believer in data and science.
I'm quite fond of data and science myself, although you would argue, obviously, that as a religious person, I'm not fond quite enough of data and science, and we'll get to some of that in a little bit.
But it seems to me that one of the downsides of the identity politics is the attempt to paint into a corner science as though science is an outgrowth of a particular Culture and is therefore irrelevant to general swaths of people.
So in the Ezra Klein interview, for example, when you suggested that group differences in IQ exist, and you weren't even saying that those group differences in IQ are attributable to environment or genetics.
You were saying, we don't know the answer to that.
If I don't want to mischaracterize your view.
And he was immediately coming back with, well, you can't say that.
And I'm not sure how we're supposed to have conversations when you legitimately can't cite data before you even start having a conversation.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, in defense of people who worry about this kind of thing, you know, it's obviously possible for data to be wrong and the conversation continues even once you have data, but what we should all be anchored to is a good faith, intellectually honest, non-smear merchant approach to analyzing what we think we know and why we think we know it.
And those principles of rationality and an empirical engagement with reality simply are not susceptible to an identity or even a political interpretation.
This is why reason is the only thing that scales.
If I have a good enough argument based on clear enough evidence, it should persuade you if you are being reasonable no matter what your background, no matter who your parents were, no matter how you were mistreated or not as a child, you know, if we build a reasonable robot, it should be persuaded by the right arguments and the right data.
So, rationality is, is the mode of argument where it doesn't depend who you are in order to, in order to reach This is why prototypical, prototypically reasonable or reason-based topics are so easily divorced from politics and things like mathematics.
Anyone who's going to argue that mathematics or philosophical logic is just a tool of political ideology and oppression just knows nothing about those topics.
But it's true that Virtually every other place that we really care about facts, and being right or wrong, has that character.
It should be true, ultimately, of journalism.
It's either Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy or he didn't, right?
It's a fact about a human being holding a gun, right?
And we either get access to the data or we don't.
So, the fact that so much of our discussion about what's going on in terrestrial reality is based on, or is filtered through the lens of people's political commitments is just highly dysfunctional.
It's just not something to be maintained.
We should be cutting through it wherever we can.
So where do you think that the United States is going?
Because obviously we've seen, you know, the rise of your audience is enormous.
You have a huge audience.
I think a lot of folks, you mentioned Joe Rogan has an enormous audience.
Jordan Peterson obviously has a very big audience.
A lot of these people have a very big audience.
Do you think that the rise of these new conversations is... Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Do you think that these new conversations are going to...
Turn into a new sort of brand of politics that ends up saving the country?
Or are you pessimistic and you think that the identity politics machines that are now operating at seemingly full blast on all sides, you think that those end up winning the day for the moment?
I don't know.
The future is a big question mark for me.
The present is fundamentally surprising to me.
I didn't think we would get Trump.
And getting Trump, I didn't think we would get the kind of reaction we see to Trump.
I could have predicted the reaction on the left, but it just amazes me every day that he is as untouchable based on his own missteps and gaffes and crazy utterances.
Just the fact that nothing sticks to him, it surprises me every day.
So I don't quite know how we got here.
I think you and I will be fine.
I'm very optimistic about our having conversations like this and this channel and media having a durable interest for people.
But whether it will affect any real political change in the near term, I don't know.
Because I see that the left is fully capable of playing what should be a fairly good hand so badly as to just amplify white populism and Trumpism for well beyond Trump's next four years.
I just think there's no mistake so idiotic that the left isn't capable of it at this moment.
And as you point out, or as we'll discover, I'm on the left on virtually every relevant question, except the ones we've been talking about, which is the virtues of identity politics and victimology.
So let's talk about your political viewpoint a little bit.
So you say you're on the left on a bunch of different issues.
Are you more on the left socially, as far as being libertarian?
Because, I mean, the truth is that you and I probably agree on the government's role in a lot of those particular areas.
Probably not on abortion, but on same-sex marriage, for example.
I think we probably agree the government should not be involved in these sorts of decisions.
But as far as economics, are you also on the left?
Are you more in favor of redistributionism?
And on what grounds?
Well, I think the government... I'm a fan of libertarianism up to a point.
I think the government should only do what it can do best, right?
So for me, nothing but free.
So then I think the arguments about what markets can do and not do, that's where it all gets hashed out.
I think there are things that markets just can't efficiently incentivize that we really, as a society, want to incentivize as quickly as possible.
So if it's a transfer to a renewable economy, I think waiting around for the market to get that perfectly right, which might only happen if we just run out of oil, I think that's waiting too long.
So I think it's good.
So for instance, the people who, and also we should recognize that the oil industry is already subsidized, so it's, So if you got those subsidies out, then there would be a clear competition with renewables.
But I think it would be rational for the government to, quote, pick a winner in that space.
Not a winner with respect to a specific company, but recognize that there are certain things we want to incentivize.
And one of them would be, say, to get off of oil, right?
Forget about global warming for a second.
Just, we want clean air, right?
So if we wanted to incentivize clean air, the market isn't necessarily the best way to do that.
Because if you are burning something horrendous in your factory, Uh, you can't adequately compensate me for, for the smoke that, you know, blows over the fence.
Right, their externalities, obviously.
Uh, so I think, I think the externalities, uh, uh, in many cases are, I think libertarians ignore them, or they think that, that far too blunt an instrument would correct for them.
Something like a, you know, a boycott.
You know, so if you're a massive polluter, you know, and I don't like it, I can organize a boycott against you, and in the fullness of time, that's gonna do its work.
Uh, I think that's getting truer and truer, right?
I think the power of a boycott now with social media is probably as sharp as it can get or has ever been.
It's easy to look back 20 years to see just how ineffectual those efforts might have been against big corporations.
I do wonder whether the government interventionism in environmental issues particularly is, in fact, a blunt instrument given that there are technological changes that take place that radically change the nature of many of these industries.
I'm a believer that in the next 20 to 30 years, very few people are actually going to commute to work.
I mean, the internet has made it essentially possible for you to work wherever you want.
It's made it possible for me to work wherever I want.
There's still factories out there, but that's a shrinking percentage of the American workforce.
I mean, you're seeing major retailers go out of business specifically because people are sitting home.
And it may not be efficient for companies to have all these trucks running on the road as opposed to having various forms of transportation.
So it seems like a lot of the time when the government – this is my worry – it seems like a lot of the time when the government tries to intervene on behalf of curbing those externalities, it ends up doing a lot more damage than it would if we would have been able to leave the market in place and the market would come up with solutions that would be better for a broader spectrum of people.
With that said, I think that depends on the immediacy of the threat.
And I think that's really what people are talking about when it comes to, for example, global warming.
How immediate is that threat?
How immediately do we have to deal with it?
And are any of the real solutions that are being put on the table capable of dealing with the level of threat that's being talked about by the IPCC?
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Okay, so, let's talk a little bit about some of the kind of root issues that I think people want us to get into, which is gonna be all the religion versus atheism, and rationality, and all the deep stuff that is actually more fun to talk about than politics, in my view.
And I get the pleasure of talking about it with you here, because I don't usually have the pleasure of talking about it on a daily basis when I'm covering politics.
So, since we get to do this, let's do it.
So, let's talk about where you think morality comes from.
In the religious view, obviously.
There are certain things that I believe are capable of understanding by any sentient human being.
So I don't believe that all human beings in the absence of religion are immoral people who go around murdering their neighbors and raping their sisters.
I think that, in fact, this is Pretty well-embedded in even Judaic philosophy, the idea that there is a sort of natural law theology where you, as just a normal person, know not to kill people and know not to steal and know to set up courts of law.
This is what they call the Seven Commandments to Noah.
But the idea is that anyone can basically discover these things.
And there are universals across culture about you're not supposed to murder your brother.
The biblical reading is that to reach a more sophisticated level of morality that leads to a sort of right-based society we see here, you at least need the catalyzing enzyme of a Judeo-Christian religion in order to get here.
That would, I think, be the most rationalistic argument on behalf of Judeo-Christian values.
But where is here again?
Here would be a civilization that values individual rights above the values of the collective, that says that people are to be treated, to use the biblical phrase, as made in the image of God, that we should treat individuals as made in the image of God.
That does not happen in the absence of a Judeo-Christian value system.
That's the religious argument.
Although that is more of a historical argument.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
It's a rationalistic argument because the deeply religious argument would be God said so, so do it, right?
But that's not the argument that I think is the most compelling because that only works if you believe in God and if you believe in Revelation.
So that's not the argument that I tend to make because I don't find it intellectually convincing.
It's an argument from authority, which of course is not particularly convincing.
So I tend to make the historical argument, which is that history brought us to, the reason we are at this point in history is because without that particular catalyzing enzyme, you don't get what you have here, which is why the West and Western civilization crop up in a Judeo-Christian system, but don't crop up in, for example, which is why the West and Western civilization crop up in a Judeo-Christian system, but don't crop up in, for So number one, what do you make of that argument?
And then I want to get into so where you think morality comes from. - Right, well, a few points.
One, I'm not convinced by that historical argument.
I think you can cherry pick the data either way and come up with a different conclusion.
And even if I agreed with it, it wouldn't make the case I think you want to make, because it would be an instance of what's called the genetic fallacy, which is Even if we granted that our respect for individual rights, say, came from a Judeo-Christian tradition, it doesn't mean that it can only come from there or that it even is best gotten from there.
I would say that it actually hasn't come principally from there.
For instance, you could say that That Christianity, in particular, was responsible for, in part responsible, for the fall of the Roman Empire.
So Christianity undermined the notion that the Roman Emperor was a god.
It made it harder to recruit true soldiers, and they had to farm it out to mercenaries.
And it eroded what you might call traditional Roman values.
And then the Western Empire fell, and we ushered in the Dark Ages.
And insofar as there was a reboot to civilization at that point, it was largely the result of classical, the learning and philosophical insight of antiquity being preserved by, of all people, the Muslim community.
So, I think you can have it any way you want looking at history, but it just doesn't get you there in terms of the moral content and, in this case, the political or social content coming from the Bible or any other religious text.
So then why here?
Meaning, like, why in Judeo-Christian civilization, but not Islamic civilization?
Because you mentioned rediscovery of Aristotle and reuse of Aristotle in the 10th and 11th centuries was really beginning, you know, in the Islamic world long before Aquinas really repopularized it in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Yeah.
Well, one, I think it's, you know, from my point of view, it's impossible to ignore the influence of Islam.
I mean, Islam is its own ideology instead of dogmatisms that are inflexible and at odds with the spirit of science fundamentally.
And despite the fact that there was a brief period where there seemed to be some, you know, happy convergence between scientific and mathematical insight and Islam, for the most part, Islam has been hostile to, you know, real intellectual life and In a way that Christianity was hostile, even when the scientific worldview was struggling to be born in the 16th century and the 15th century.
What we have historically is a real war of ideas.
It can be crystallized in the moment where Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest.
By people who refuse to look through his telescope, right?
I mean, so that was the genius of religion paired with the emerging genius of science in that room.
Well, to be fair, I mean, Galileo was originally sponsored by the church and so was Copernicus, but there's no question there was a backlash from the church to this stuff.
Yes, and the backlash makes sense because there is a Intellectual progress on questions of how the cosmos is organized or where it came from or how life began.
All of these questions, the scientific answers to which are in zero-sum contest with the doctrines found in the books.
Now, it's true that there are religious people And now even the Pope, who have relaxed their adherence to tradition enough to make room for something like evolution, right?
But it's still, it is still a problem.
Not a super new idea, I mean, right?
Aquinas was talking about this in the 13th century and 14th century, the idea that if it was in science and it was contradicted by the book, then you're misreading the book, right?
I mean, that's a pretty old idea.
But that is to subvert science rather than the book, in Aquinas' case.
I mean, Aquinas thought heretics should be put to death.
His argument for that, for capital punishment for heresy, and Augustine made the same argument.
He thought they should be tortured.
So those two great lights of the Catholic Church gave us the Inquisition and gave us more than a century.
I think it's also fair to say that they were rather instrumental in the development of modern science.
So the Dark Ages, first of all I think the Dark Ages are a bit of an exaggeration in terms of the Dark Ages themselves saw a massive A massive growth in technology and architecture, for example.
I mean, Gothic cathedrals are built during the Dark Ages.
But the scientific world is, well, virtually every major university in the Western world was sponsored by the Catholic Church.
And I'm not a great Catholic defender, right?
But virtually all major universities were sponsored by the Catholic Church, which saw consonance between science and religion as a reason to actually investigate the natural world.
Well, no, I mean, again, I think that's backwards.
I think the reality is there was no one, I mean, everything that was good that was done anywhere at any time prior to, you know, pick your year, was done by some religious person.
I mean, there was just nobody else to do the job, right?
So you could make the argument that, you know, Catholics built every bridge in Europe until the Protestants came around and they built their half of the bridges.
I mean, so there was just no one else to do the job.
And we're human beings who want to pursue various ends, many of which require breakthroughs in learning.
So engineering got born in a religious context.
Physics was...
The first physicists were people who were Christians, who were, as is often pointed out, Newton spent half his time worrying about biblical prophecy.
Now, I think that was a waste, an objective waste of his time.
He also spent a lot of his time worrying about astrology, right?
So, you're trying to... Alchemy, yeah.
Yes, and alchemy.
And alchemy, insofar as there was anything to it, apart from sort of the internal myth-making that may be of use to some people, be edged into chemistry, right?
So there was often a real science at the back of a lot of merely mortal confusion where people were trying to work things out, you know, I would argue very much under the shadow of religious commitments that they need not have had and were not actually serving their ultimate ends.
And this for me is true in the moral sphere as well, because to take This is why the Bible, in my view, can't be the real repository of our moral wisdom in any sense, because when you go to read it, you are forced to ignore certain passages or reinterpret them rather aggressively.
To conform to what you now, in the 21st century, have every reason to believe is good or a direction worth going, socially.
So, you know, it is just an inconvenient fact that slavery is endorsed in the Bible.
It's explicitly endorsed in the Old Testament and it's certainly not repudiated in the New, right?
And, you know, Jesus told slaves to serve their masters and to serve their Christian masters especially well.
So, there's no place in the Bible Where you can get a truly compelling case against slavery, because the creator of the universe clearly expected slavery to be a human institution.
Well, except for abolitionists finding enough inspiration in the Bible to use it as their main text.
But they did that despite what's in the Bible.
Well, I think that that is... I mean, I don't want to... This shouldn't sound insulting, because it's not meant as an insult.
I think that, from a religious point of view, that's a simplistic reading of the Bible's role in human affairs.
Meaning that when any written document is given to any group of people, it has to be given to people in a way that they can understand.
It's not that slavery was endorsed by the Bible.
It's that slavery is universal among human civilization until modern times.
But it was... No, no.
There were...
There are religions that have different points of view on all these questions, right?
So it was possible in the 5th century B.C.
to have a take on ethics with respect to something like slavery or the killing of combatants or non-combatants that was quite a bit more modern and ethical and civilized
uh... then was founded that we is found in the bible so you need to take take a minute you might not like some of their other commitments but take something like jane ism the jane is amit gandhi got his non-violence from jane ism jane ism is just in truth a religion of peace unlike islam which is is uh... you know that the word peace is a euphemism for the word surrender there uh... or submission uh...
It's possible for people 2,500 years ago to wake up one day and even write a book which suggests don't harm anyone or anything, even a cricket.
Right, well that's fine, but the question is...
how many converts does Jainism have?
Meaning that the point of, if you're going to give a book over, let's say that, let's pretend that you thought that God existed and that you were he.
And it was your job to convey to a group of human beings what you think morality should be, understanding that they're going to take that and develop that because we do have this gift of human reason that we use to develop things.
And so there's a root text and then it is developed over time.
This is why I think Judaism is particularly kind of unique in this respect, because that's been an ongoing dialectic for literally thousands of years.
I mean, there's legitimately, you know, thousands of pages of tractates of just people arguing about these particular issues.
You would say that the argument should have started from the point of there was no text for them to argue about, and they should have just argued from sort of apriori reason, maybe.
I respect text, but I think the principle of revelation is a problem.
But just to back up for a second, I think it's certainly problematic for you as a Jew to argue that the legitimacy or success of religion is best measured by the number of adherents in the year 2018.
No, but the point of Judaism also is that, I mean, it says in the Bible itself that God is going to make, you know, great peoples of all of Abraham's sons, for example.
And as Maimonides put it in the Jewish belief, even the growth of Islam and Christianity, which are obviously based on a certain Judaic root, I think Islam less so, because there's an actual rewriting of the Old Testament.
the New Testament not as much.
Maimonides suggested that Christianity had basically been brought about as an extension of Judaism, which is the greatest, you know, Christianity is the greatest converting religion in the history of the world.
Right, but it seems strange to count the success in terms of numbers of Christianity and Islam, given that, you know, the...
The basic principle, the bottom line is the basic principles of Judaism, those have been embraced in a way that the basic principles of Jainism have not across time, and they've shaped civilizations in a way that is significantly better than the principles of Jainism have shifted any number of small people.
Or small group of people, not small people, obviously.
Well, so, again, it's just...
The fact that you and I could improve the Bible with very little thought, just by taking out... If we just took out the worst passages that have no possible redeemable content this year, or I would argue any other year, the Bible's already improved.
So the fact that we could edit it to anyone's advantage is a problem for the idea that this was written by an omniscient being and not to be superseded by any human effort now or generations from now.
And it's a problem not just for the Bible, it's a problem for the Quran.
And this notion of revelation is what gets us there.
Now, if you're going to treat all books as the product of just human minds, brilliant or not, and every shelf in the bookstore or library has the same status with respect to the merely mortal provenance of these ideas, Then you can pick and choose the best ideas.
Then you can be slavishly attached to Plato's Republic, and that can be your favorite book.
What revelation gets you is this notion that, no, no, this isn't just a book, right?
This is the product of omniscience on some level.
And that ties your hands intellectually, because then you are forced to make these acrobatic contortions around passages which clearly have no good application now and didn't even have a good application then.
And when you view it from the other side, when you think about just how good a book would be if an omniscient being wrote it.
It's very easy to see what could be in there that would still astonish us.
It's very easy to see what could be in there that would prove, just based on the time of its emergence, that this couldn't have been the product of merely human minds.
And there's nothing like that in the Bible.
To respond to some of those points, I think that there's a lot there, so I'm going to try and parse it as we go.
I think that one of the arguments that is made, certainly in the Talmud, is the idea that human reason was generated in order to help reason through the Bible, basically.
The Bible is not just, here it is, obey it, but it is also a constant conversation between God and man, in the sense that there is an active conversation that goes into the interpretation of these texts.
these texts.
And so what the Bible really is, is an anchor.
And the ship is anchored to the anchor, but there is still some slack in the line.
Meaning that it is not that you are now tied to this anchor at the bottom of the ocean.
There's still a boat that's attached, but human reason is designed in order so that you can wobble through with this anchor attached to you.
And if without the anchor, you end up in a land of utopianism and I think the history of the 19th and 20th century in the Dostoevskyian view would be a good example of how that happens.
And so the construction of alternate morality that is not based on any Judeo-Christian notions can take you in any number of horrible places that are significantly worse in virtually every way than the places that Judeo-Christian religion brought you for 2,000 years.
My My argument is not that Judeo-Christianity itself, Judaism on its own is everything that you need, right?
As an Orthodox Jew, my argument is not that.
My argument, which if it were, then I wouldn't be out there caring about science or about nature, as you say.
People who are fundamentalists don't care about any of those things.
They think everything you need to know is found in this particular book.
I don't think I know how to fix my car from the Bible.
But what I do think is that in the Straussian view, there's a tension between Athens and Jerusalem.
There's a tension between revelation and reason.
And that without either one of these things, that reason without revelation ends up in utopias of our own creation that end up in horrifying places, ranging from death camps to gulags.
And that revelation without reason ends up in theocratic tyranny.
And so you do need both of those in an interchange in order to have something that means something.
And the reason that omniscience matters is because if there is no belief in an objective level of moral truth, then everything becomes subject to interpretation.
Up to and including, if you were intellectually honest enough, laws like murder.
Because maybe murder doesn't apply to people who are outside my tribe, maybe it doesn't apply to people who are outside my family, or people I just want to kill for my own benefit.
So this is where we get into the alternative morality.
This is where I'm going to ask you about your moral basis.
Let me respond to some of that though, because there's a lot there.
So, it's not going to surprise you that I disagree with that summary.
This is the fun part, yeah.
So, to take your anchor...
I think there is an anchor, or at least a foundation, to everything we can discover or value, and it's human conversation, right?
And I think the morality, because I think Revelation simply didn't happen, right?
Right.
It's just human beings talking to one another at any point in history, thinking internally.
I mean, they've been extraordinary people, and they've had extraordinary insights, and they've shared them, and they've codified them in books.
So the morality or pseudo morality or barbaric morality that you find in various places in various texts was put there by people, right?
It's not that it came from some other source and that we need to be anchored to it.
It is the record of a merely human conversation.
That, I'll be the first to admit, has, in various parts, real value and real, you know, wisdom in it.
And that's, and hence, the reason why people are so attached to some of it, certainly.
But it's just, that's not unique for the Bible, that you can find that in, among Greek philosophers, or in various places in antiquity.
And you can find it in modern variants.
I mean, you and I, in one another's presence here, having a conversation that gets recorded, We can say something that is highly relevant to the question of how to live a good life.
And if we were doing this 3,000 years ago and it happened to get written down, it would be one of the lines that people would think had been revealed if they lost track of what its actual source was.
And so it's people like ourselves that have always done this work.
And so my basic framework here is that all we have is human conversation, and all we can appeal to are honest efforts to get at the truth here.
And the choice for me is between a 21st century conversation, where we avail ourselves of all of the intellectual tools we can get in hand, and that includes whatever is good in So if there's something that is in Ecclesiastes that is better put there than any place else in the canon of all of human knowledge, well then of course we want to keep that, right?
So how do you decide what is the good?
Because right now you're essentially playing Cottie under the tree, right?
You get to sit there and say, here's a good moral standard, here's a bad moral standard, and you and I will sit here and our conversation will be better than a conversation a thousand years ago.
This is a question that I asked you actually last time we spoke publicly.
And the question is, okay, so if that's the case, you and I tend to agree, I would think, on probably 95% of our central values about what it is that makes for a good life, right?
I think that we both believe in individual freedoms.
I think we both believe in the ability to Live as you choose, so long as you're not hitting anybody else in the face, as a general rule.
I think that we both agree on all of these things, and so what I asked you last time is, why do we agree on these things?
Is it because we just both happen to be super unreasonable, like we are just the most reasonable people who ever lived, and we just happen to be here at this time, and why didn't people a thousand years ago know this?
Or is it, you know, back to my original argument, the fact that we grew up probably ten miles from each other in a city that was built in a country that was built by people who believed all of these things that came from a book, half of which you think is crap, from a thousand years before Christ.
So I think the environment in which we grew up, insofar as this is a product of culture, is not mostly defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
It's mostly defined by secular politics and secular ethics, some of which are of a piece with those religions and other religions.
Something like the Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule predates Christianity, certainly.
It's in Leviticus, I think.
They'll have their neighbors themselves in Leviticus.
Yeah, and it's not unique there, too.
There are Greek philosophers, I think Epictetus articulated it someplace.
The truth is, it predates our humanity on some basic level.
You can see evidence of it in monkeys, right?
There's an expectation of fairness, even in monkeys, right?
So, this is a We're running a software program that is morally relevant to us, that is riddled with bugs, but that predates our humanity.
And so largely what civilization is, the good parts of culture that will lead to something that is durable at the level of civilization, largely correct for our merely hominid, merely evolved, merely Creaturely, moral intuition.
So, for instance, you and I have, as front and center in our moral hardware, a sense of disgust, right?
And disgust has roots below anything that could be considered moral.
It's just, you know, you could smell something bad and you feel like vomiting and that's... But the truth is, in terms of the evolution of the brain, the brain doesn't evolve new modules that can do fundamentally new things.
It has to evolve capacities that are predicated on the old hardware that was anchored to things like, you know, I'm going to vomit based on that smell, right?
And much of our moral thinking about the world is disgust-based or fear-based and it gets applied to things like how you feel about gay marriage, say.
So if you go into a Bible-thumping fundamentalist Christian context where you can find people who are just adamant that gay marriage is wrong, this discussed circuitry is tuned up through the lens of that social question.
And that's a... so I view conversation about ethical truth and progress in ethical space being more a matter of Reasoning and unhooking our reflexive, in this case, disgust-based intuitions from our sense of what is ultimately good.
I mean, there are things that you and I might not be comfortable with the first time we consider them, that we can get comfortable with by thinking it through or imagining things from other people's perspectives.
Or at the very least, that we think are immoral but still think that we have no business in doing anything about.
Yeah, and ultimately, There are cases of moral dumbfounding where you would have to admit that it's moral in the sense that you can't point to a victim, right?
Jonathan Haidt talks about experiments like this, like somebody who's having sex with a dead chick.
But it still disgusts you.
To take it out of the moral sphere for a second, if I told you, I have Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater, you know, it's been dry-cleaned.
Would you like to, would you try it on?
Right?
Now, everyone recoils from that, right?
But it's not, if you actually think about it, it's not something that, like, there's kind of a magical superstition intruding there, where you think there's something that's been deposited in the sweater, even though, you know, we dry-cleaned it, you know, 450 times, right?
So it's, and maybe a sweater is too charged, but to take something that, where there would be absolutely no question that his DNA, it's not covered with this creepy guy's DNA, it's something that you just, in order to recoil from it, you are thinking superstitiously, right?
So you can correct for those.
So you're making a sociobiological explanation for morality, like basically as an E.O.
Wilson explanation for the evolution of morality?
No, to the contrary.
I think that there are two very different ways to talk about morality with respect to our scientific understanding of ourselves.
One is What you just referenced, this biological, evolutionary, descriptive story of how we got here.
Why is it that we're the sort of apes that feel these sorts of ways about social interactions?
And why is our moral thinking anchored to those properties?
Then there's a completely separate question, which is the question that interests me morally, which is, given what we are, given where we are right now, what is possible for us?
How good could human life be?
And what are the principles of neurobiology and everything else, economics and sociology and genetics, anything that can be brought to bear to change human experience?
What are the principles Whereby we can navigate in the space of all possible experience and experience better and better lives and a better and better world.
And so that is a very different question because it presupposes, just on its face, that we have to, most of our job is to fly the perch that has been prepared to us.
And I think you and I agree on this, but I'm not sure why.
Okay, so here are the, I think, the two big questions that I have.
One is, Where does your concept of the good come from and why is it universal?
And two, you just spelled out sort of your differentiation from the socio-biological explanation for morality that we evolved over time and that our brains are evolved to perform certain tasks and we sort of naturally came to a level of morality.
But you're not a believer in free will.
So when you talk about reason, and you talk about the importance of reason, you and I fully agree on this, but my question is that, as a neuroscientist, if we are just pure material and we're just a bunch of neurons firing outside of our own control, obviously, because every...
Cause, every effect has a cause.
If it's just things happening, then why should we value reason?
Does it matter that we value reason?
Because we can't control whether we value reason anyway?
Are these conversations kind of pointless?
Because, or and then back to the first question, how exactly does reason play into the good?
Is that just a vague term for a particular system of neurons that convinces another particular set of neurons?
Right, right.
So two questions there.
What is the foundation of value and morality specifically?
And how does free will or its absence interact here?
So the foundation for me is, and this connects to other questions where our intuitions probably divide, and the questions about what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of life, those are questions that people ask, where religious people, by and large, feel like you need an answer, like there's where religious people, by and large, feel like you need an answer, like there's a meaning-shaped hole in the world and And I, given how I view things, think it's the wrong question.
What I see us as having is an opportunity.
We are in a circumstance where Based on the minds we have, there's a range of possible experience.
And we don't, and the horizon goes in both directions to the very, very bad and the very, very good.
And we don't quite know how bad things can get based on what we know.
We know they can get far worse than we ever want to touch.
And so it is with the good.
We don't know how good things can get.
And yet, we know the general direction where we want to head.
We know that if the world becomes more and more characterized by love, and joy, and creativity, and compassion, and insight, and fun, and we know that's all, that whole suite of, and you could list those characteristics as long as you want, but there's a kind of jewel with a thousand facets that we want more of as conscious entities.
And there's a far darker jewel with as many facets that we want far less of.
And this spectrum admits of seeming paradoxes, which we could both point to occasions where suffering has led to something good, right?
There's a silver lining to certain kinds of pain, right?
Or if you want to become a Navy SEAL and experience all the empowerment that comes with that, you have to go through the hell of becoming a Navy SEAL, and that's a test and a trial and And yet, there's a massive silver lining for people who come out the other side of that.
And yet, if you could sample a person's experience in each moment through that ordeal, it might be indistinguishable from torture, right?
So, that's just to say that the frame around which we put certain sensory experiences matters, right?
If I tell you that, you know, the pain in your bicep is because you've been lifting weights so much and you're making so much progress, Uh, you know, you'll feel one way about it.
If I said to an identical pain, well, you actually unfortunately have arm cancer.
It's a very rare cancer, but you've got it, right?
You'd be, you would feel the suffering attendant to that.
So, but all of this, these are all statements about what it's like to have a human mind and, and again, these are, I view us as having a navigation problem.
And the reason why I feel like There's a foundational claim here that need not even be argued for, that is far more defensible than a claim about revelation or anything else where you might try to anchor morality, is that all I need is the acknowledgement that
If we imagine a universe where every conscious mind suffers as much as it can, for as long as it can, with nothing good ever coming of it.
There's no silver lining.
We have a perfect hell that has been designed for every possible conscious mind.
I call it the worst possible misery for everyone.
That's bad.
If the word bad is going to mean anything, It applies there, right?
Now, if you're going to say it doesn't apply there, if you're going to say, well, yeah, that's kind of bad, but there are things that are worse, I don't know what you're talking about.
Because by definition, this is the worst possible misery for everyone, right?
So, as long as you are going to acknowledge that other states of the universe are better than that, Right.
Then you've given me my continuum of better and worse.
You're making a very St.
Dan Selman's logical argument here about the nature of bad.
And I'm not sure that... Well, no, no.
...you can imagine the worst island that you could possibly imagine.
No, no.
It's very different from that.
Because it's not to say that... Because that's clearly specious.
If I said to you, well, There's a perfect turtle.
Oh no, I agree with you.
I'm not defending the ontological argument.
I'm making the argument that you're sort of making an ontological argument.
It's not.
It may sound that way, but it's not.
There is... It's so rudimentary.
Because I think that you're failing to define a couple of terms.
Meaning that... So when you say the worst possible suffering, do you mean physical suffering?
Do you mean mental suffering?
And the truth is... Any combination that's the worst combined suffering.
But people...
I mean, it's all mental.
It's all mental in the end.
It's all a matter of consciousness and its content.
Right.
And I think you're, I feel like you're playing a little bit of a trick when you sort of presuppose that we share a common definition of suffering.
I think there are certain things where we share a definition.
Let's say we don't.
So let's say we have a helmet we can put on and dial in every possible conscious state for a human brain.
So you can wear the helmet and I can wear the helmet and we And, you know, we each tune it to state, you know, X551, right?
Right.
And I say, well, how do you like that?
So one thing that is implicit here, although it's not a defeater if it's not so, but I have an expectation that you and I will converge, perhaps not on every specific state as our favorite or our least favorite.
But there'll be whole families of states there that you and I will acknowledge.
Well, these are all fantastic.
Maybe, I'm not sure which I like better than the other, but this is really good.
I'd like to feel more of this.
And we'll converge.
And this is just based on the similarity.
So how do you not end up, if you're pursuing the ultimate, if there is such a thing as the ultimate possible good and this good is what you are, how do you not end up, number one, in sort of the brave new world You're drugging yourself the whole time for pleasure.
That's an interesting question.
And number two, this does bring to mind an essay by George Orwell that he wrote in 1940 about the rise of Nazism, and what he basically suggested was, why is it that everything is so good in the West?
Like, everything is much better in Britain than it is in Germany, and yet people are willingly joining up with this monster to go and fight.
And he said, because it turns out that a lot of people don't want freedom, a lot of people don't want Pleasure.
A lot of people are willing to forego those things in favor of a higher pursuit.
And you see that now with literally billions of people who, I think that the bush line that every human soul yearns for freedom, I don't think that's true.
I think there are a lot of people who misdefine freedom or think that freedom is something that freedom is not.
Otherwise they wouldn't willingly convert into these systems.
So I think that it is a little simple.
You know, no, but none of this contradicts the picture I'm painting.
It's just that all of these things, all of these differences among people will have explanations, and we don't yet have those explanations in hand.
But so take the simplest case, you know, you and I each put our hand on a hot stove, right?
Now, given our similarity neurologically, I would expect if the stove is hot enough, you and I will have indistinguishable responses, right?
And if you don't, if one of us doesn't have that response, there's something wrong with our nervous system.
So, but let's just say we met somebody who had a different enough response that we even couldn't converge on the question of, you know, hot stoves are not worth touching, right?
You have a masochist who likes a certain kind of pain that you and I find intolerable.
Now there's an explanation for that difference between us.
Now it's a, we, there might be, it might be an explanation that we would have some insight into.
Maybe this person has trained himself to, to feel this.
And it's, he just gets this, this massive, you know, opiate rush for, you know, it's, it's like, you know, uh, in Lawrence of Arabia, you know, apparently that's a true story about him.
Uh, But that's, you know, it's a, you can train yourself to feel a different way about certain kinds of unpleasant, classically unpleasant stimuli.
But again, all of this fits in a complete picture that we don't yet have about just why it is certain minds are the way they are.
So the macro question for me is, given all the minds as they are, where should we want to go, both individually and collectively?
And there may be multiple right answers to this.
It's not that there's just one sort of life that is the best possible life.
There's a range of different lives that, given a million years to talk about it, we might not be able to distinguish which is better or worse.
Like, you know, Is Chinese food better than Thai food?
There's a range of differences there which don't matter for better or worse, it's just different.
And yet, at the end of the day, if you really preferred one and I really preferred the other, We could find some reason why that's the case.
I mean, you might be a super-taster of certain tastes genetically, but then it's still coherent to ask, if we could really intrude in the brain and change our intuitions about better and worse, right?
If I could change your sense of the rightness of certain actions or the wrongness, we could ask this additional question of, whether that would be good.
Because that would be a new way of navigating the space.
And this brings you to your brave new world question.
So like, if it's possible to, let's say we had a cure for sadness, right?
This is an example I've used before, where we have a pill that perfectly cancels the feeling of grief, say.
So at what point after the death of a loved one, would you want to take this pill, right?
And the answer might be never.
And you would have a reason why that was the case.
But you could imagine someone who's just so destroyed by the experience of grief that they just can't get their life back on track.
Everything's going to be fine.
Everyone in their life is worried about them.
They're, you know, on the virtue of suicide.
At a certain point you'd say, well, let's just give you this pill and just see if we can bring a little daylight in there.
Even if you were against using it for yourself, right?
But presumably, you wouldn't want to take it 30 seconds after your kid was run over by a bus.
You know, you just see the worst thing that's ever happened in your life happen, and then you just pop this pill and you don't feel anything, you know, one way or the other about it, right?
You're ready to go to Starbucks, right?
That would be a complete fragmentation of who you are with respect to the love you feel or felt for your child, right?
Like, what does loving your child mean if
upon uh... immediately upon his or her death you want to cancel your grief and you feel great right so that we don't know what we did it'd be hard to find the right answer but and you know that this kind of thing is very likely coming by the way right it's it was very likely we will one day have a cure for grief and we'll have to figure out how to use it and there will be wrong ways to use it but i think what we want i think the intuition that that causes you to ask this question about Aldous Huxley and Brave New World is that we we have a
We're right to want to be anchored to reality in some sense.
And if we were ever faced with an opportunity of uploading ourselves into a simulation where just the world is a video game and nothing is real, right?
So like our states of happiness are totally divorced from the reality of our lives, right?
And our actual relationships and the conscious experience of other people, that would be a bad thing, right?
And yet, we could imagine a circumstance of maximizing pleasure in a way that's divorced from reality.
And that's an interesting argument to have, ethically, because I think our intuitions about that could change to some degree, and I think that there are ways in which we're already in something very much like a simulation.
To talk about what is real in this context is interesting.
But I share your bias here.
I share the sense that there are versions of pure pleasure, brave new world futures where everyone's a heroin addict, perfectly medicated.
That's not good.
But I think you can adjudicate that based on Other possible experiences in the landscape of all possible experiences that are clearly better.
And you would make an argument based on evaluating those experiences.
Okay, so this is one of those episodes where it's just, I'm going to be devastated that we don't have a second hour to actually go into all of these issues.
Because we basically scratched the surface on all of this.
But sort of final parting question because we didn't even get into rationality or free will exactly.
A couple places where I'm sure we have more disagreements.
But I have a very short answer to that piece.
Perfect.
Okay, so go for it.
So, rationality, and I think I might have said this to you on stage, at our event.
Rationality is not a... Successful moments of reasoning are not examples where freedom of will is even tempting to ascribe.
So it's... If I give you an argument, if you strongly believe one thing, and I give you an argument that persuades you, that just knocks down the row of dominoes in your mind, that leads you to think... Right, no, I understand your argument, which is a naturalistic response to a reasonable argument, and you don't have any control over that.
But you don't have any control over any moment where you finally see the light.
Where I give you a chain of reasoning and it works, that's a moment where you are changed by something extrinsic to your own volition.
So my basic response to that is yes and no, because you see people who clearly resist the impact of a reasonable argument on themselves.
Yes, but the resistance is what it is to be unreasonable or to be under the sway of wishful thinking or confirmation.
Right, but the bottom line is that from my perspective, that is somebody, if the idea is that reason is basically just eliciting a particular response, then people have the capacity to override their ability to listen to reason.
If you're going to ascribe that to free will, that's a different thing to ascribe.
But that, again, you don't need free will to explain that, but that is, take the reasoning piece.
If I give you the quintessential moment of it, I give you a column of numbers to add up, you have zero degrees of freedom if you're going to actually be doing arithmetic. - So then the question, so the final question here, Or is the argument a utilitarian, reason is useful argument?
- I'm not going to mention that question here, and just schmooze, but is the argument in favor of reason a moral, reason is good argument, or is the argument a utilitarian, reason is useful argument, or is it both?
Because I can imagine a lot of ways to convince people of things that don't involve me making arguments to them and that historically have been used to great success with horrible, horrific human carnage, obviously.
Well, you're not necessarily convincing them in that case, you're just... Forcing them, right.
Yeah, that's right.
Although, I would say that you can indoctrinate fully millions of people into... You would think this too, right?
Yeah, true.
That it's possible to indoctrinate people not using reason into fully formed belief systems.
Yeah.
So, when you make the argument for reason, are you saying that reason is morally better?
And if so, why is reason morally better than, for example, the appeal of passion, which has obviously motivated millions of billions of people over time?
Right.
Well, again, I don't think they're as separable as many people think.
I think you can't reason, and there's neurological evidence to back this up, and Antonio Damasio did this work decades ago, where if you have certain neurological injuries in the orbital medial prefrontal cortex, you can't You can't be moved by the products of your, quote, reasoning.
Because, I mean, reason has to be anchored to emotion in a very direct way.
And, I mean, you can actually feel this in yourself.
So, if I say something that starts to sound like bullshit to you, right, that feeling of doubt, you know, the feeling that you have detected errors in my chain of reasoning, that feels like something.
That is an emotion, right?
And if you couldn't feel that, you know, if it was all just cold and calculating and just... That's why sociopaths, you know, can't reason their way to virtually anything.
Well, they can, well... Or they can't reason their way to everything.
They can reason fine, unfortunately.
They just don't care about other people's experience.
So they're very manipulative in ways that you and I wouldn't... The reason itself doesn't arrive at a moral answer in any case.
Well, so for me, reason is the only thing that, as we talked about at the top of this, it's the only thing that takes us out of who we are and scales to some universal point of view.
It's not, you're not reasoning, if you're actually reasoning, what you're arriving at is not just true for you, it's true for anyone who could be in, it's true from essentially above on any given topic.
You know, it does offer the view from above or the view from any possible perspective, or at least it takes in the, into account the effect of perspective.
You know, so it's like, if, you know, it, Again, reason and scientific rationality, generally, is the thing that explains why, if you're colorblind, you don't see colors the way I do.
It's not that we can't get at what's actually real.
We can, because we can explain divergences of opinion.
Otherwise, you just have those divergences.
Well, we are definitely gonna have to have you back for a much longer conversation.
It's really a pleasure to have you here.
Thank you so much.
For folks who don't know Sam's podcast, I'm sure you do, it's Waking Up.
Sam's podcast is The Waking Up Podcast, and his most recent book is Waking Up.
So check that out.
Sam, thanks so much for stopping by.
It really is a pleasure to see you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, Edited by Alex Zingaro.
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