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Nov. 24, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:30
David Berlinski | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 78
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All these guys who proclaim themselves enthusiastic defenders of reason, the Enlightenment, are simply a part of a very long Judeo-Christian tradition.
and they are unwilling to see in their own faces the long tendrils stretching back into antiquity.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
I'm excited to welcome to the program David Berlinski.
He's senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
He's author of Human Nature, as well as The Devil's Delusion, Atheism, and its Scientific Pretensions, and many more books.
He's taught philosophy, math, English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, University of Paris, so we have a lot to talk about.
We'll get to all that in just one second.
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David, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
So, let's talk a little bit about your book, Human Nature.
The basic premise of the book is that there are a lot of folks across the political spectrum, it seems, who are very invested in the idea that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature.
That humanity is intensely malleable and completely malleable.
How pervasive do you think that feeling is in politics these days?
I couldn't tell you about politics, but certainly as an intellectual tendency, I would put the percentage of people prepared to deny essentialism at roughly 99.999%, leaving a minuscule minority to affirm the obvious.
Yes, there is such a thing as human nature.
Obviously so.
And it's an essential component of being alive.
Can you explain for a second what you mean by essentialism?
Because some folks who are watching may not understand the philosophical term.
When you say essentialism as compared to other forms of philosophy, what do you mean?
Well, let's take a human being.
The question is, are there any properties such that those properties are necessarily true of a human being in virtue of his or her being a human being?
One answer is no, there are no essential properties.
Human beings are infinitely flexible, infinitely changeable, infinitely malleable.
The contrary answer is yes, there are a suite of properties that necessarily define what it is to be a human being.
This thesis was part of traditional philosophy.
It was rejected in mid-20th century philosophy.
It was a very powerful attack launched against essentialism and metaphysics, let's say.
Quine has a famous argument.
A bicycle rider is essentially two-legged, but a mathematician is not.
But the bicycle rider may be a mathematician.
Which of those properties are truly essential?
It all depends on the way the object is described.
That's a powerful argument.
That's not a dismissible argument.
The question is, is it a valid argument?
And that's quite a separate question.
Why do you think there's been this attack on essentialism?
What's the purpose of the attack on essentialism?
The underlying purpose, one is philosophical, which is quite independent of everything else, but the other is political.
After all, the governing axiom of the 20th century has been, human beings are infinitely malleable, and we who hold the power are prepared to exert that power to change them at will.
This is, after all, what the essence of communism really is, an infinitely perfectible creature.
And if it has to be perfected by brute force, we're prepared to exert brute force for the perfectibility of human beings.
Without that assumption, many social forms of 20th century life become impossible.
We see that every day in the United States, for example.
Without the governing assumption that we can change human beings at will, certain tendencies are completely impossible.
Completely impossible.
A human being is necessarily self-identical, for example.
No one is prepared to deny that.
Is a man necessarily a man or a woman necessarily a woman?
That immediately provokes a firestorm of controversy and indignation.
The principle having been surrendered in the case of self-identity is absolutely incoherent.
On the other hand, if you maintain there are some necessary properties of a human being, you're on very weak polemical ground when you try to draw the line, say, at sexual identity, or at racial identity, or at personal identity.
So a lot depends on the intrinsic plausibility of the anti- or pro-essential argument.
A lot depends on it.
It's not a trivial philosophical issue, as we both know.
And it's a very, very interesting phenomenon that a relatively obscure issue, say, analytic philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s, turns out to be of tremendous importance.
Tremendous importance.
And you have to get the nuances just right.
No one knows how to do it.
You've linked the attack on essentialism in some ways back to the wholehearted belief in evolutionary biology and Darwinism, the idea that because human beings supposedly evolved from prior species and are evolving into future species, that there are no actual hard boundaries around what constitutes a human nature.
There's no such thing, maybe even as a human species.
There is no such thing.
There's no such thing as human nature, there's no such thing as a dog's nature either, if you're a committed believer in Darwinian evolution, because there's no such thing, au fond, at the bottom, as a species.
How could there be a species in Darwinian terms?
Darwinian theory holds that there are a continua of animal forms which gradually, imperceptibly, shade one into the other.
The dividing line between the dogs, if you go back and back in time, doesn't end abruptly.
It merges into what came before the dogs.
There's no point where you can say, that one is not a dog, but that one all of a sudden is a dog.
That's anathema to Darwinian thinking.
It makes no sense in Darwinian terms.
It happens to be true.
Could you make the argument, if you're an evolutionary biology defender, you're a Darwinian defender, Could you make the argument that, sure, over the course of time, there's evolution from one species into another, there's an origin to species, and then there's not really a terminus of species, it evolves into further species, but at any given point, if you stop the clock right now and you looked at species, you could actually draw distinctions between the species, because you're not looking at now a time-bound phenomenon, you're looking at today.
You're not looking at, over the course of history, one species evolving into another, you're just looking at how to categorize things now.
So, could you accept It's tough.
It's tough.
You have to go through the contortions you just underwent in that elegant sentence.
You have to say, let's stop the clock.
Let's look at objects as they are today, Friday, at roughly 11 o'clock.
As soon as we say, but, The theory of evolution is a dynamical theory.
It's a theory about what changes over time.
And you search for a panoramic view of what's happening over time, that sense of sharp boundaries necessarily must disappear.
There is no room in Darwinian theory for an essential view of the dog's nature.
There's just no room for that.
You can say, right now, sure, dogs are dogs and people are people.
I could see the difference sometimes.
Good.
Gesundheit.
You can see the difference.
But that's not the theoretical question.
The question is, is that difference simply an appearance, an artifact of evolutionary drama, or is it something fundamental?
Is there something irrevocably dog-like in the dogs?
Me, I think there is.
So in your book, Human Nature, you launch a series of attacks on widely read evolutionary biologists and philosophers and deconstructionist thinkers.
Not attacks, meditations.
Harsh meditations on a variety... No, not harsh.
Harsh I reserve for my friends.
You talk about many of these philosophers and it's sort of an attack on their attacks on essentialism.
It's at least a contemplation of their attacks on essentialism from a variety of angles and I want to go through some of those and talk about exactly what your critiques are.
So you begin the book by talking Specifically about Steven Pinker, the evolutionary biologist and sociologist over at Harvard University.
His argument seems to be that since the end of World War II, really since the Enlightenment, he has a new book called Enlightenment Now in which he argues that since the Enlightenment human beings are getting better, we're constantly getting better, and this is reliant on our own ability to change ourselves.
I have my own critiques.
I find his argument both incoherent and historically illiterate in terms of his willingness to read out of history some pretty awful things in history that have happened over the past few centuries.
But what is your chief argument with Pinker?
Let's put it this way.
In a certain way, I think Steven Pinker is absolutely correct.
Things have gotten better with respect to certain parameters.
We live in a time of great material abundance, perfect ease, a good deal of domestic tranquility, appearances notwithstanding.
Antibiotics have been an enormous success in medicine.
Life expectancy has inched up slightly.
There's been a tremendous improvement with respect to poverty in the third world.
Just an astonishing improvement.
Most of it due to agricultural revolutions, the green revolution.
All this is unquestionable, and I have no interest in questioning it.
My interest in Pinker and my critique of Pinker depends on what historians call periods.
What is the right period to assess the times in which we live?
If it's yesterday, I have no argument whatsoever.
Things were pretty good yesterday, they're pretty good today.
Who am I to complain?
Who is humanity to complain?
The 20th century, though, has not slipped into the past.
A very good English philosopher, Collingwood, said that the chief goal of 20th century philosophy is to explain the 20th century.
And we cannot do that.
The 20th century is not part of the species present.
We don't live in the 20th century.
But the period from 1914 to 1945 is extremely somber.
And a full assessment of the times in which we live must confront what took place in Europe and the world during those 30 years.
It was, in fact, a repeat of the Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 in the 17th century.
It was the worst century in human history in terms of excess deaths.
But beyond any of that, terrible as those things were, the 20th century introduced a new principle into political and social life, a principle of terror.
And we have not understood that in any way.
We have failed completely or even partially, for example, to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust.
And to say, well, things have improved since 1950, certainly true in certain measures, and ignore the rest of the 20th century, which is part of our living past, as the 19th century no longer is, seems to me a profound historical mistake.
It is not a serious kind of analysis.
My problem with Pinker that I've talked about in my own book with regard to his view of the Enlightenment is that it seems incoherent in a couple of ways.
First, he dismisses religious background of the Enlightenment as though it never existed, as though the Enlightenment sprang full-blown out of people's heads with no background.
Yeah, that's illiterate.
And that is foolishness.
He also tends to dismiss the fact that the Enlightenment that he loved so much Also had to do with the French Revolution, which didn't go particularly well, and had to do with many of the movements that would end up destroying most of the globe in the 20th century as well.
Meaning there's some pretty good stuff about the Enlightenment, namely the American founding, the belief in human freedom from government and all of this.
And then there's some pretty dark things about the Enlightenment as well.
There's a dark side to the Enlightenment when you completely disconnect it from eternal moral values.
And my problem with Pinker is that all the stuff about the Enlightenment that he requires to actually be the gas in the tank for the Enlightenment, Is the gas tank that he has already emptied, meaning he doesn't like religion very much.
He thinks that religion is wrong.
He doesn't believe in free will, but he relies greatly on the idea that we can change ourselves and that we have changed ourselves in line with higher philosophical thinking.
He defines things like increase in human flourishing by terms that would really be relevant and noticeable only to people who already believe in a Judeo-Christian worldview and are basically rejected by most of the rest of the world.
I find all of that deeply troubling.
In fact, he engages in You might say exactly the form of essentialism that so many people attack.
There are many interesting things to say about the Enlightenment, which of course is a very complicated historical and philosophical movement in European thought.
And it can't be summarized too neatly, but Vivian Gornick, writing in the New Yorker, reviewing a book by Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, She confronts the experience of Auschwitz with all the innocence of a woman who simply cannot understand what she's discussing.
She says, and I mention this in my book, in Primal Levy, a child of the Enlightenment could not grasp the fact that he was being treated as he was.
And that phrase, a child of the Enlightenment, The particular incident that Primal Levy records was that he wanted to lick an icicle.
He was so thirsty and his concentration guard said, no, it's forbidden.
And he said, why, warum?
And the guard said, hier gibt es kein warum, which in German means, there is no why here.
He couldn't understand that.
And neither do I suspect could you understand it either.
And Vivian Gornick simply says, he was a child of the Enlightenment, he was baffled.
But the question that never arises is, why did those Enlightenment values prove absolutely useless in the face of those experiences?
Why didn't they prevent either side From committing the atrocities, I'm talking about the fascists and the communists, committing the atrocities that they were so willing to commit.
That's a question that Pinker should have asked himself.
If he believed so strenuously in the puissance, the power of enlightenment ideas, why were they so useless?
And why do they continue to be so useless?
That's one question.
The other question is the point that you raised, perhaps not a question, a point.
I was talking to Christopher Hitchens.
We got together for just a few days, and I said, when you look in the mirror, Christopher, to whom do you owe that face?
Do you think it was just created just for you, a special act of creation, or is there 2,000 years of the Judeo-Christian tradition behind your face?
He didn't have an adequate answer, but he understood what I was getting at.
He probably didn't think it was a particularly penetrating question, but I think it's a very penetrating question.
All these guys who proclaim themselves enthusiastic defenders of reason, the Enlightenment, the progress, the forward march of humanity, the infallible nature of Their own moral sentiments are simply a part of a very long Judeo-Christian tradition, and they are unwilling to see in their own faces the long tendrils stretching back into antiquity.
And this is a historical failure.
It's a failure of the imagination.
So you've famously critiqued evolutionary Darwinism.
Is your critique more based on the science of evolutionary Darwinism or based on the misuse of evolutionary Darwinism as a sort of catch-all for explaining human behavior and a catch-all for explaining human change?
Which would be the more advantageous answer on my part?
Which would trigger a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm in you?
I suspect it's both.
And that's the real answer.
It's both.
It's a scientific critique.
Let's be honest, there's not a whole lot of science there by the standards of the serious sciences.
And it's a critique of the way evolutionary theory is used.
I think both are important.
Don't forget, the Nazis were great admirers of evolutionary theory.
They adapted it to their own purposes, but there's a clear connecting link.
Between what Darwin was saying in the middle of the 19th century and what Himmler was proclaiming in the middle of the 20th century, or the first three decades of the 20th century.
They believed in evolution.
They believed in evolution very sincerely.
They just happened to believe evolution culminated in a master race.
Could have happened another way at the end of the war.
Hitler said, well, he made a mistake about the master race.
It turns out to be the Russians, not the Germans.
Superior people of the East.
It's a quotation.
But you can see these ideas churning again and again and again.
I mean, what gave the Nazis that sense of entitlement that they were allowed to exterminate other people?
They didn't say it was a whim.
You look through the entire literature about Nazi Germany, read what these guys were saying themselves, they never said, well, we got together at the Wannsee conference, we decided it would be a good idea to kill all the Jews.
They didn't say it was just a good idea to kill the Jews.
We need to kill the Jews because they are parasitical on the body politic.
The imperatives of a purified biology demand their elimination.
That's what they said.
Where did they get those ideas from?
Well, you can go from 1859.
Every single generation, German biologists and doctors and physicians and social workers were saying the same thing.
First, they got rid of the mentally ill, the infirm, the crippled, the labored.
And then they went on to the Jews, and they would have kept going on.
This is the sinister thing about Nazism that very few people understand.
The Nazis weren't going to stop with the Jews.
They were going to continue with the Slavs.
And when they had finished with the Slavs, the SS wanted to stall on the Germans.
This is not well known.
At the end of the process, only the SS would remain.
That's the real goal of the Nazi state.
They had no hesitation at all about a policy in which the German people themselves would be put to that test.
No doubt about that at all.
So in a second, I want to ask you about your scientific critique of evolutionary biology.
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So let's talk about your critique of evolutionary biology.
This is what's gotten enormous amounts of attention from the press.
Nothing better.
And every time somebody steps out of line with the sort of catechism of evolutionary biology, they're immediately hit with a wave of You don't believe in science, you're actually just a religious fanatic.
Now, you're secular, you're a secular Jew, as you say, and we'll get to that in a little while, but what's your biological or scientific critique of evolutionary biology?
In a nutshell, presumably.
Or do we have lots and lots of time?
We have plenty of time, but you can nutshell it.
In a nutshell, look, you've got evolutionary biologists who say things like, evolution is as assured as the law of gravity.
But you never hear a physicist saying the theory of gravity is as assured as the theory of evolution.
Why is that?
Well, in a nutshell, my critique or my suggestion is that by the standards of the serious sciences, by the serious sciences I mean mathematics, the rich Incomparably rich body of mathematical science.
And the great theories of physics, Newtonian mechanics, Clark Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.
There is simply no point of comparison.
Evolutionary theory is vague, it's incoherent, it's unarticulated, it's imprecise, it doesn't exist in any kind of rigorous or serious form.
It's a series of folktales, some very interesting.
I like watching those programs on television as much as you do.
I know the elephant mating habits, mating habits of the elephant, that sort of thing, the seals, the Antarctic.
But that doesn't answer any of the really deep questions.
That said, of course there are parts of evolutionary theory that are perfectly respectable because they make local observations undoubtedly true.
Certain things seem to have a survival value.
You don't see a lot of albino antelopes wandering around the African desert for the obvious reason they get eaten up right away by the lions.
A lion born without teeth or claws needing dentures in a big way is not apt to be a successful lion.
Oh, we can all agree on that, that sort of stuff.
But if I ask a little more penetrating question, why, for example, I'm asking you this, aren't pigs born with wheels mounted on ball bearings?
You don't know either.
Ask an evolutionary biologist, why are there no roads?
Yeah, that's about the standard of explanation you get in biology.
And the questions are very real.
We can see the questions.
There's a very interesting distinction, if I may just go on for a second, when we turn to mathematical or theoretical physics.
The models are not terribly interesting.
I mean, let's be honest.
Anybody really interested in the universe or the stars or the galaxies or black holes, no matter how many times they appear on television with gestures of astonishment, I always turn off the tube and switch to something else as soon as one of those Nova shows comes on.
But the theories are wonderful.
They're rich, complicated, rebarbative, they're full of speculation.
You turn to biology, the theories are primitive, but the models are fascinating.
Everyone wants to watch kitten videos on YouTube.
Me too!
I like to see them too.
So there's this radical disjunction between what's interesting in physics, which are the theories, and what's interesting in biology, which are the organisms.
And there seems to be a symmetry at work.
We have very rich theories in physics and very poor theories in biology.
And that seems to me a fact that needs to be appreciated.
So you've suggested in the past that you are not an advocate of intelligent design.
And whenever somebody is critiquing evolutionary biology, they're immediately hit with, well, that's just because you're a Bible believer who is trying to invest the meaning of the Bible in science.
But you say that you're not a believer in intelligent design.
Where do you stand on the theory of intelligent design?
I'm not a believer in a whole lot of things.
I think intelligent design certainly should have a seat at the table.
And it's a serious idea.
It's a very old idea.
It goes right back to antiquity, that's for sure.
It's an idea that at first blush seems to confront the facts successfully.
Look, biological structures do appear as if they were not only intelligently designed, but brilliantly designed.
You take a look at any biological system, the level of complexity is so daunting as to be indescribable.
We do not have a theoretical description of any level of biological complexity, including the cell.
It seems to be a closely caused system that behaves in very mysterious ways, influenced by the organism as a whole, the organism as a whole influenced by its cellular structure.
We don't have a good grasp of that.
You know, there's an interesting institute just opening at Harvard, not Harvard, Oxford, for the mathematical study of evolutionary dynamics.
And it begins with the admission we don't have a mathematical theory of evolutionary dynamics.
And 150 years after Darwin, that seems to me a striking admission.
These are one of the kind of anecdotes you come across in evolutionary thinking again and again and again.
The theory is perfect.
It's irrefragible.
It can't be corrected.
It's a summit of human achievement, but we're going to go right back to the beginning and see whether we can make it better.
And nobody seems to have—Institute at Oxford opening up with a study of mathematical dynamics in evolutionary theory.
How come you guys didn't think of that a hundred years ago?
Where were you then?
And if it doesn't exist yet, how can you say the theory is as good as general relativity?
It can't be that good.
And that's part of the sociology, the current sociology.
You must remember that evolutionary thought, Darwinian thought, is supported by an immense and powerful lobby.
It's not only a scientific agenda, but it's a political agenda.
He who controls the education in terms of evolutionary theory has a very powerful advantage.
The idea that these people are motivated entirely by the fear that right-wing evangelical Christians are going to seize the reins of power and imprison women and otherwise enforce a biblical regime on the rest of us, that's just wishful thinking.
So what is the agenda that's connected to the sort of attempt to dominate the field and prevent anybody else from asking questions?
There is a status ranking within the academic world, I'm sure you know about, at the very top are the mathematicians, right?
They're at the very top because they're smarter.
Let's just admit it.
We're among friends.
Very, very few people are interested in mathematics and fewer still can do mathematics.
Just slightly below are the physicists.
The physicists will have another view.
They think they're above the mathematicians.
That's neither here nor there.
In the ranking, the status ranking, the evolutionary biologists are way below the molecular biologists.
At least they go into the lab and do something.
So there is a strenuous desire for an enhancement of prestige that runs right through evolutionary biology.
And when you get some guy coming out and saying, well, I've just read Leviticus and I have an objection to evolutionary thought, that's an infringement on prerogatives.
And you can understand that.
It's very common.
Used car salesmen suffer from the same kinds of affliction.
I don't think there's anything surprising about that.
What I do think is surprising is the success with which the evolutionary biologists have co-opted the media worldwide into acting as an extended propaganda arm for Darwinian theory.
That's really remarkable.
It's somewhat better now than it was, say, ten years ago.
It's improving.
The climate is improving.
Because people are not indefinitely gullible.
You know, the common reaction to the idea that this brilliant blaze, this efflorescence of complexity we see in the biological world is random variation and natural selection, most people say, you've got to be kidding, right?
That's not the explanation.
A few facts, it fits a few facts, but there must be a profound level of explanation with respect to life.
We don't even know why such a thing exists in the universe, which is otherwise bleak, boring, and very big.
So you've got this bleak, boring, very big place, and you've got the Earth.
Remarkable, right?
Why is it there?
Is there something in the nature of chemicals that induces within a chemical arena a desire to form something as noble and as lovely as yourself?
Does anyone really believe that?
Is it just the outworking of a blind chemical process or a blind physical process?
It may well be.
I'm not speaking authoritatively on that.
I don't know.
But it doesn't seem likely.
There seems some level of explanation is called for, and we cannot even successfully express the problem.
We just feel it.
Life is mysterious.
Life is grand.
Life is magnificent.
Life is full of mystery.
But what's really the scientific way of stating that, the mathematically precise way of stating that?
We know that life seems to have evolved in an uphill direction from every point of view.
But beyond saying that, it's like a little bit about language.
You and I are talking in English.
We could be talking in any other language.
The question that most linguists will not ask is, why is there a language?
And why do human beings possess a language and no other species?
What good is a language?
Don't give me a lot of complicated stories about survival, adventure, we could cooperate in hunting wildebeest or something like that.
That's beneath us.
We're not going to indulge in that kind of childish fantasy.
But it is a fact.
Human beings have a suite of properties which are very mysterious.
What good does language do?
What good does mathematics do?
So we can count one, two, three, and we know the numbers go on.
So, why is it there?
Why is it there?
My dog can't count.
Cats can't count.
That's really remarkable when you think about a cat.
A quarter inch more cortex and an opposable thumb, they would rule the world, but they can't count.
The story that you hear so often from folks who are, we've interviewed many of them on the program, who are big advocates of the idea that evolutionary biology explains morality.
It's always, well, you know, I grew up in a home where people sometimes read the Bible, sometimes not, and then I stumbled upon evolutionary biology and explained everything.
And that shifted my worldview.
I think the governing word is stumble.
It seems more, from a broader perspective, as though the actual motivating factor is not adherence to evolutionary biology, but adherence to atheism.
Meaning that once you've decided that God can't be any part of the picture, you now have to reduce everything to pure scientific materialism.
Once you've reduced it to pure scientific materialism, you're now forced to reduce all of the essential, that you say, aspects of human nature down to nothingness.
Like actually just read them out of human existence.
That consciousness is a myth, that free will is a myth, that language is basically us clicking at each other for purposes of being able to form large social groups, that love is simply a biochemical reaction.
We've now become the drunk stumbling underneath the lamppost for the car keys.
And if the car keys aren't there, then I guess we decide that the car keys never existed in the first place.
Well, I think you should never underestimate the attraction of a primitive worldview.
I mean, if it is tedious to develop a sophisticated worldview, simply appealing to Darwinian theory as a justification for your anterior prejudices is a very successful strategy.
The idea that there is a kernel indubitable kernel by which we can explain the panorama of human moral decisions, emotional decisions, commitments, and that it has to do with reproductive success is abysmally primitive, isn't it?
I mean, certainly there is a connection between reproductive success and the flourishing of certain patterns of behavior.
Nobody doubts that.
But the full grandeur of human life is certainly far bigger, far greater, far more significant scope than anything that can be explained in terms of the desire, the vagrant male desire to get laid, isn't it?
We all know that.
It's not an explanation.
It's part of a much larger picture.
So what do you see as the essential features of human nature?
We've talked about why it's wrong for people to reject that there are essential features of human nature, but what do you think are the actual essential features of human nature?
The ancients would say reason.
You say in the book that it seems like that has gone by the wayside in recent decades.
When you look at a human being, what is it that we all ought to be looking at as the feature that unifies us all?
I'm not sure I have an answer that would commend itself to your attention, but I think that it's a great mistake to overlook original sin.
Dr. Johnston was asked for a defense of the doctrine of original sin by his biographer.
And he said, concerning original sin, the inquiry is not necessary because men are so avowedly and confessedly corrupt that all the laws of heaven and earth are unable to prevent them from the commission of their crimes.
I think that's something that should be remembered, especially anyone paying attention to the 20th century.
Not only the 20th century.
The horrors slop over into the 21st century.
As we all know, what's taking place in the Middle East right now is not an exuberant demonstration of Enlightenment values.
Surely you agree.
I know you do.
I would say that any view of human nature, the essential human nature, cannot entirely be optimistic.
It must be balanced.
Certainly, human beings are extraordinary in many ways.
Essential aspects of human beings, I cannot imagine human beings without a language, and I have no explanation for the fact that they possess a language.
I cannot imagine human beings without a profound ability to love one another.
That's certainly a part of human life.
And I cannot imagine human beings without the capacity to be miserable misfits, unpleasantly violent individuals.
I cannot imagine human life without the separation of the sexes into two distinct genders.
Yes, two distinct genders.
I'm the last traditional upholder of the gender binary.
You can count on that.
These are all part of what I would regard as a traditional understanding of human life and human nature.
And I think if you want a very rich explanation, go to the novelists.
Go to Dostoevsky.
Go to Tolstoy.
Go to Turgenev.
Go to James Joyce.
Go to Thomas Mann.
They'll tell you what the essential aspects are, and they speak with pretty much the same voice, do they not?
Why do you think it is that so many scientists have put themselves in the service of what appear to be overtly anti-rational, anti-science positions?
To take the perfect example, the rejection of the gender binary, the suggestion that a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, that everybody exists on a gender spectrum, that gender is entirely disconnected from biology.
All of these premises are, on their face, logically self-defeating.
They contradict each other in a variety of ways.
They do not hold together as a cohesive whole.
And yet, you will see people who purport to be scientists, either overtly say that the science ought to be ignored, we've had people do that on this program, or proclaim loudly that the science actually backs this idea, even though they have yet to provide any study that suggests that gender is separate from biology.
They're idiots. - Good.
That's my explanation.
And that's a remarkably widespread successful explanation, isn't it?
There's a wonderful proverb in German, which means, against stupidity even the gods are helpless.
Is there anything that you would reject in that rebuttal?
I mean, just to take the devil's advocate view, I guess the most humane devil's advocate view would be, if they have no other solution for whatever gender dysphoria they are suffering with, my sort of libertarian sensibility suggests you're an adult, do what you want, if that's the best solution for you to live your life according to you, have at it.
But you seem to object to that.
Oh, completely.
Completely.
I share none of your libertarian persuasions in that regard.
I think society has a duty to enforce certain taboos.
In certain respects, the health of the whole demands, in many respects, the fact that certain individuals cannot satisfy all of their desires.
It's very unhappy, but we're all in that position.
We all obey the rules of society in some respect or other.
Somebody who has a tremendous desire to wear women's clothing, that's fine.
We used to call it transvestism.
Nobody really objects to a man who wants to wear a dress every now and then.
The question is the justification in society itself has now reached a transcendental stage where metaphysical issues are put into play.
It's not that certain men would like to wear dresses.
It is that they are claiming a philosophical entitlement to be considered women.
Legitimately.
You've given up your libertarian principles so quickly?
No, because libertarianism to me has to do much more with the government intervention or the idea that I'm going to control the behavior.
So you sound libertarian when it comes to women and men can wear dresses.
Sure.
Again.
That's about as far as I go.
Right.
I'm just saying that they're not women.
So I think we may agree on that.
Yeah.
It's the idea that you were proposing before that, I mean, would you be in favor of a government stepping in and preventing transgender surgery for adults?
At once.
See, this is where we have a distinction.
I would not.
And I don't think any physician who values the Hippocratic Oath should participate.
Well, I agree with that.
But it's when you get into the government forcing adults not to engage in behavior that has no externalities that I have a problem with.
Why?
Because once the government can participate in forcing behavior that has no externalities, then there is no limiting principle.
Sure.
So?
Well, you slide into charity pretty quickly that way, it seems.
True.
But you haven't given me an argument yet.
I mean, I understand the sentiment, but I don't think there's a serious argument behind the sentiment yet.
But the point is, it need not be a government decision.
But a social decision, for example, in terms of the ancient structure of violation and taboo.
And what we're seeing now in the West is a crumbling of any number of taboos, some silly, but some very important.
We talked about transgendered issue, but equally interesting and very little discussed is, for example, the ancient taboo against tattooing, which I find fascinating.
I mean, there are people now covered from head to foot in tattoos and flaunting them proudly.
And I must be the only person left in the Western world who remembered when that was a class marker and it wasn't considered a commendable class marker.
Only primitives who repaired automobiles wore tattoos.
Now it's a sign of a certain kind of social refinement, which is very interesting.
You see the taboo crumbling.
That's not terribly important.
Who cares if women are covered from head to foot in tattoos?
You don't have to get near them if you don't want.
But one tattoo crumbles in one part of the social world, another taboo crumbles in another part of the social world, and the structure, far from being free of taboos, puts the taboos in a different place.
For example, free speech.
I don't know whether you're aware of it, but free speech is relentlessly under attack.
I see that you are aware of it.
Well, the ancient taboo that you have no right to impede someone's free expression of his or her own ideas, that's now crumbling in the name of a defense against hate speech.
I'm the last defender of hate speech in the Western world, by the way.
I'm all in favor of hate speech, as you may have learned from reading my book.
But the taboo goes up in one place, it crumbles in another place.
So in a second, I want to ask you about your own religious perspective, because you call yourself a secular Jew.
I'm an Orthodox Jew, so I'm very curious about this.
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Okay, so let's talk about your own religious viewpoint.
So you've taken what sounds like the perspective that, I mean, you've cited to original sin, you've cited to religious principles that precede, ancient religious principles that precede the Enlightenment by several thousand years.
What's your own religious perspective?
You mean in terms of my own religious practice?
Well, practice and belief.
Practice, there is none.
Lira, I'm tempted to say, unfortunately.
It's not entirely any kind of decision that's under voluntary control, as you must know.
In my own case, any endeavor or attempt to come closer to either a religious way of life or religious experience has been a failure.
I say in one of my books—I forgot which one—I cannot pray, although I haven't made a very assiduous effort at prayer either.
I gave it a few tries, didn't get what I was asking for, and gave it up as a bad deal.
That may be a shallow, emeritricious point of view, but nonetheless it has been governing in my life.
So I can't say that my life has been a particularly flamboyant exhibition of religious commitment.
On the other hand, I'm very intrigued by religious ideas, and I take them as seriously as I take anything, which may not be as seriously as you would wish.
But I do take them seriously because I think there is a certain profundity, a level of truth in religious doctrine which cannot be expressed in my preferred terms, say mathematically or in terms of a scientific theory, but which is nonetheless very resonant.
I mean, there are no comparable words to express in the beginning was the word.
That seems to be a profound truth in some way.
If I could tell you more about that profound truth, I would, but I can't, so I won't.
But on that level, I think religion and the religious writings of mankind are a tremendous source of richness.
Tremendous.
When you look at the future of the civilization, where religion seems to be falling away in droves, I mean, this is really the pattern of the last, really since the Enlightenment, but accelerating in the aftermath of World War II when nihilism became the way of the world.
Do you see any I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.
because in the absence of some of the religious principles you've talked about, including the essentialism of human nature, it seems like we may be sliding inevitably toward a morass that is going to be worse than things are now.
I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.
In all of these discussions, it's terribly important to remember that what we talk about, the slide into an ill-defined morass of primitive relativism and moral self-indulgence, decadence, bestial indulgence of the appetite, as the Arab scholar bestial indulgence of the appetite, as the Arab scholar Al-Ghazali remarked, is only a local, a transient phenomenon in the West.
There are a billion people out there who take the Muslim faith very, very seriously, and they seem largely to be exempt from the secularizing trend that we're talking about.
And that's a fact that should be kept in mind.
We talk about the decline of religious beliefs, say, in the United States.
It's far advanced in Europe.
But it's not a worldwide phenomenon by any means.
I can't speak with any degree of authority about Chinese religious practices or Buddhist religious practices, but that's why you got Sam Harris on.
Doesn't he talk about that stuff all the time?
Yeah, he's a Buddhist, I think.
He believes in merging his mind with the eternal cosmos or something like that.
Me, that doesn't interest me particularly, but I would be very skeptical about, you The forthcoming elimination of what is plainly an aspect of human life, that is, an interest, a curiosity, a commitment to transcendental values that go beyond the finite lifetime of each individual.
So that does raise the question as to whether the future of humanity is going to come from or a decent future for humanity is going to come from either a revivification of some sort of religious understanding in the West or whether it's going to come from some sort of re-bursting of enlightenment in other parts of the world.
Early Islam was obviously a lot more I would ask to be forgiven for not answering that question because I don't know how to answer it.
Do you see a liberalization in more religious parts of the world, or a revivification of religion in more liberal parts of the world as sort of the direction that you'd perceive?
I would ask to be forgiven for not answering that question, because I don't know how to answer it.
I can tell you that I do believe that what we're undergoing now in the West, say France, Germany, Sweden, to a certain extent Spain, possibly Italy in the United States, is a I would strongly encourage you not to bet against the Roman Catholic Church simply because it's been around for 2,000 years.
Most successful bureaucracy in all of recorded human history.
Don't place your bets against it.
But what human beings will discover when they are profoundly disappointed by schemes of artificial intelligence or personal immortality or merging their intellects with an Apple laptop That remains to be determined.
I'm very skeptical about those ameliorative schemes for the future.
Artificial intelligence or mind-machine hybrid.
You've been very critical, I mean, in the book you're very critical of sort of the futurists who foresee this sort of thing.
You're very critical of Yuval Harari and his discussions of the future of humanity being inside your laptop, as you say.
Why is that?
Well, if you go back to 1912, and you would ask a sophisticated observer of the European scene what he would see in the next 50 years, the last thing on earth he would have predicted was the First World War, the Interregnum, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, and the rise of Soviet Communism.
They were not on the event horizon.
To take a few technological A few technological civilities, things that seem to work in an interesting way, like a computer, and say, this is the future of the human race, seems to me abysmal.
It is such a terribly narrow point of view.
It's again, to come back to the analogy used of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamplight because that's where the light is, it's not where the keys are.
We can do certain things technically now that are interesting.
There's no question that they're interesting.
No question that artificial intelligence, deep learning are very interesting.
But whether they answer the right kinds of questions or whether we know what the right kinds of questions really are, that remains to be determined.
I'm very skeptical of what they do.
I think the technology is being used because it's usable.
Exactly the same reason I use a portable telephone, which I happen to detest.
You've taught in major universities all around the United States, and the sort of deep ideas that you're talking about here on the program don't get taught at all at these universities.
In fact, they're held in wide disdain at the universities.
What happened to the universities?
Why are the universities the way that they are, do you think?
You know, I've been asking that question again and again, and I wish I could give you a coherent, a real answer, because what's been happening is a major tragedy in American life.
And it's also happening in English universities, that's for sure.
For some reason, within, say, 20, 25 years, one of the noblest American institutions has been absolutely gutted, revealed to be hollow at its core.
The principles that are supposedly defended, not defended at all, for example, free speech, free inquiry, free exchange of ideas.
The relationship between the faculty and students, completely transmogrified, so the students are now calling the shots.
The serious intellectual commitments outside of the core disciplines, say physics and mathematics, rendered entirely insupportable and nonsensical.
And a huge administrative cohort, largely female-dominated, interestingly enough, imposing a kind of dreary ideological conformity on the university itself, which no self-respecting man would wish to have any part of.
But why all this has happened, I don't know.
I saw it happening in the 60s.
Forgive me for boasting of my age.
It used to drive me crazy when my father did that, but now I find it just superb to be curmudgeon and address you as young fella.
You don't remember the 60s.
You couldn't.
But I was a senior figure in the 60s.
I was born in 42, 45, which was slightly before the baby boomers.
And I saw the collapse of institutional authority at Berkeley, at Stanford, and at Columbia.
And at Columbia, these were people I deeply admired, like Dean David Truman.
In the face of student protests, he just collapsed.
He didn't know what to say.
He didn't know how to defend himself.
And that's true, I think, throughout the American university system.
The people who should be defending the universities did not know what to do.
I remember at Columbia, they ransacked the university.
I was right there.
They went into the president's office, helped themselves to his cigars, a good idea at the time, I thought, drank his brandy, scuffed up his table, and caused a riot.
And I was outside on the street and speaking to some of the faculty I admired, like Sidney Morgenbosch, a professor of philosophy, and he said his great anxiety was that the university would call in the police.
And I said, Sidney, that's what they're for.
There's a riot.
Go club them on the head.
Drag them out by the heels.
That's what the police are for, making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.
That's what you're doing right now.
And he couldn't see the point.
He was willing to be a part of the collapse of authority.
And we've seen the collapse of authority across the board.
Scientific authority, we talked a little bit about transgenderism, but also intellectual and institutional authority.
A university has a right to defend himself.
It has the right to call the police and get rid of the miscreants.
Why not?
Let's talk about the statement that you made that you are in favor of hate speech.
So, I know my own defenses of hate speech.
My own defenses of hate speech is that that is a principle that does not exist.
Again, there's no limiting principle to what you decide is hate speech.
Hate speech can be anything you disagree with and historically has been used for exactly that rationale.
What's your attack on hate speech?
I don't have an attack on hate speech.
I rather like it.
It invigorates me to find a good hater.
And I always have more faith in a good hater than I do in a mealy-mouthed individual.
But remember the great lines from Robert Frost, some say the world will end in fire, some say ice.
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice from what I know of hate, I think that ice is also great and would suffice." You have to make a principled argument about the emotions or the attitudes in order to justify the suppression of speech on the grounds that it expresses hate.
And there is no such thing remotely as a principled argument, for example, to justify the claim that certain crimes are hate crimes.
Very often, an attack will be promoted in seriousness on the grounds that the person doing the attacking was hateful.
Well, obviously, he was attacking somebody.
He must have disliked them.
But, en revanche, on the other hand, suppose he was attacking and he was suffused with a loving sense.
He just simply wanted lovingly to club someone into the urine-stained pavement.
Would that be a lesser crime?
You need to make that argument if you believe seriously in hate speech.
To look into sort of the divide between right and left in the United States right now, what do you think is the most threatening?
You speak about these very deep issues of philosophy.
I don't think anybody in the United States actually understands these issues of philosophy.
It seems like everybody's arguing on the surface of the iceberg and yet is very angry about all this.
How much do you think people even understand the issues that they're arguing about?
Not at all, but the remedy lies close at hand.
I would encourage everyone within the sound of my voice to repair to their bookstore and see what the truth really is between the covers of a paperback edition.
That having been said, the question really is an interesting one.
I don't think there's ever been a time, maybe 18th century France to a certain extent, which That's some suggestive parallels where a series of abstract ideas seems to have percolated downward into popular consciousness, for example, essentialism, gender rights, transgenderism, hate speech.
I mean, there's a very long litany and a very long list, and become animating principles.
People act on them.
If somebody is convinced that you, for example, are an advocate of hate speech, God forbid me, I deplore hate speech, as you well know, They're apt to act on it.
I dare say you've been in some way affected by that.
I really don't know exactly your background, but I suppose that people try to stop you from speaking.
No?
Yes.
Last night at Stanford, yes.
Something like that.
On the grounds that you're hate-filled, or you're, to use the rhetorical phrase that's badly overused, spewing hate.
I don't know why these strange physiological terms have entered politics.
You cannot express hate, you have to spew hate, as if it's a rainbow arc.
Like projectile vomiting, which I observed when I worked in a hospital.
And only something that vigorous is adequate to the degree of distemper that hate speech provokes.
And of course, it has nothing to do with the content whatsoever.
It's just a convenient psychological strategy.
But if you look at, say, France from 1791 to 1794, and you look at the periodicals that were being published left and right everywhere in Paris, not so much in the provinces but in Paris, the same sort of thing.
Cheap Enlightenment ideals about citizenship and the rights of citizenship, the abolition of the feudal system, the destruction of the clergy, had percolated downward to the level of common bromides.
And people acted on that.
They acted very, very effectively, chiefly by killing a lot of people, which is what happens.
One of the little known facts about the French Revolution, it was the first serious genocide in Europe since the end of the 17th century.
That is, in the Vendée, which is the southwest region of France, estimates now are that 40,000 people were killed in an act of genocide, specifically killed, and many more.
Those estimates, by the way, go up to a quarter of a million, but it's very hard to make sense of the estimates.
Many, many aspects of the French Revolution are quite similar to things that are taking place today.
In terms of the rhetoric, the propaganda, the level of indignation, the synthetic anger.
Most anger that we experience in the United States or in Europe is synthetic.
It's the product of a confection.
It's like taking an egg white and beating it up.
It may increase in volume, but not in substance.
What are people terribly angry about?
A beautiful country, a high level of prosperity, but yet there's a rabidity to popular discourse that I myself find Invigorating.
That wasn't the verb I expected at the end of that sentence.
No, but it's a l'amour juste.
So in a second, I wanna ask you one final question.
I'm gonna ask you to do a little bit of vulgar politics, and I wanna ask you what your thoughts are on President Trump, who, of course, is the lodestar pound, which everyone apparently revolves these days.
But if you wanna hear David Berlinski's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe.
Makes sense?
And you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Well, David Berlinski, thank you so much for stopping by.
His book is Human Nature.
Go check it out.
It should be available everywhere, right?
I mean, Amazon, bookstores, wherever you can get it.
And they make great gifts.
They do.
Christmas is coming.
Human nature.
David, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
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