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Sept. 26, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:10:31
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 118
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Time Text
There are those who know how to move us forward and unfortunately we're being drowned out by a very powerful, very naive opposing force.
And the key is to not listen to it and certainly not allow wise voices to be shut down.
Husband and wife Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying are evolutionary biologists who spend their time exploring human nature.
They're both on the political left with careers as professors, and they've offered lectures on topics like the binary nature of sex, the inability of equal wealth distribution to improve us or our system, and other leftist taboos.
The two had been at Evergreen State College in Washington State.
Then, in 2017, they decided to speak out again to radical orthodoxy.
I am talking about terms that serve the truth.
You said some racist s***.
Can you apologize?
I did not.
I did not.
That sparked outrage and protests, leading to their resignations.
They not only forfeited their tenure, but also their careers, as they knew them.
In our conversation, Brett and Heather explain the fallout from Evergreen, and how they had to speak up, knowing full well what it could lead to.
Now, they're hosts on the Dark Horse Podcast, operating as exiled professors.
Their new book is a hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century, evolution, and the challenges of modern life.
In our episode, we spend the hour breaking those challenges down.
We discuss the fundamental problem with the phrase, follow the science, how we save our collective consciousness, and what human civilization must do to continue growing and progressing while also maintaining our existence and our foundations.
Hey and welcome, this is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
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Just a reminder, we will be doing some bonus questions at the end with Brett and Heather.
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Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Brett and Heather, thanks so much for joining the show.
Great to be here.
So you guys first came to my attention because of obviously everything that was happening at Evergreen State College.
For people who missed that story, Brett, you both have sort of independent stories as to what happened to you at Evergreen State College, but I think I was aware of Brett's story first.
So Brett, why don't you start with explaining what exactly happened at Evergreen State College that made you sort of a national name?
There's no question I dread more than this one because it's a complex story and it's very hard to summarize.
But in short, we hired a new president at the college.
He empaneled a committee to generate some diversity, equity, and inclusion proposals.
They began to emerge.
The proposals were clearly ill-advised and a threat to the college.
They were also a threat to the very populations that they were ostensibly designed to help.
I felt it was my moral obligation and it was also my duty as a professor to comment on changes at the college, so I stood up at a faculty meeting the first time and I pointed out why these proposals were a hazard.
I knew that what would come back would be accusations of racism, but I felt that as a very popular and long-standing professor at the college and someone with Lots of contact in the faculty that I could withstand the accusations of racism.
But things descended rapidly after there was a day of absence in which the college administration teamed up with the diversity and equity folks and advocated that white people not come to campus on a particular Day I objected to that on many grounds.
This was a public college.
This was clearly a constitutional question and I was publicly accused of racism and then on May 23rd 2017 at 10 o'clock in the morning roughly 50 students I had never met showed up at my classroom disrupted it.
They insisted that I resign or be fired.
Those protests quickly descended into riots.
The president of the college withdrew the police.
Students roved the campus with weapons.
Students battered other students.
Students bullied other students in the hallways.
And eventually, Heather and I, in Washington, you have to file a tort claim before you can sue, so we didn't actually get to the point of suing, but as we were about to sue, the college finally settled with us on the condition that we leave, and we did so, and we have started another career, I guess, as podcasters and public intellectuals in the aftermath.
And Heather, you also came under fire for suggesting that, for example, men are on average taller than women.
Apparently this is very controversial stuff.
Yeah, this is very controversial.
That never drew the ire of people at Evergreen, as far as I knew.
In fact, one of the surprising things to people outside of Evergreen is that in our classrooms, actually, we had very difficult conversations far beyond the outlandish claim that men are, in fact, on average, taller than women.
But because of the material that Brett and I were teaching and is in our new book, we were taking on questions of what are the evolutionary underpinnings of truly horrifying human behaviors like murder and rape and genocide and war.
And we were able to do that because we had honest classrooms in which dissent was not just allowed but encouraged.
And, you know, we began every class by talking about the misapplications of evolutionary theory, things like the naturalistic fallacy, which imagines that what is is what ought to be.
And frankly, we had, for instance, you know, we had actual trans students, for instance, in our programs who came because they knew that we were going to.
We were going to insist on talking about the reality of biological sex, the binary nature of biological sex, and the more fluid nature of gender, which does not in any way put the lie to the biological reality of sex.
So, it was a year or so after Evergreen blew up on us that I was actually on stage with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose of the Grievance Studies Project and James Damore of Google Memo.
And I was making that claim that men are, in fact, on average, taller than women.
That a few activists, not associated with Evergreen, but from the same mold, pulled the plug, pulled the sound on the presentation.
And, you know, so that just reveals, as you are well familiar with, that the activism is hardly localized to individual campuses or indeed localized to campuses at all.
So in a second, Brett, I want to ask you, what do you think has happened to college campuses?
Because this is a kind of new thing.
I mean, we did see an attempt to take over universities and that was largely successful by some types of radicals in the 1960s, but this is a different type of takeover.
It's a really censorious takeover.
It's an attempt to close all the doors and prevent open discussion from happening.
I'm gonna ask about that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so Brett, I was asking a moment ago about what you think has happened to college campuses, because obviously you've spent most of your career on college campuses.
I went to UCLA.
I went to Harvard Law.
I've spoken at college campuses for probably the last 20 years.
And it's really only in the last, I would say, seven or eight years that things have started to get so radical that you actually felt like there was a threat to public safety based on saying things that might be deemed controversial.
Well, first of all, there was a threat to us in particular.
We were told by the police who had been withdrawn from our campus that we were not safe there, that they couldn't protect us, they had actually been forbidden to intervene.
So the threat was very real.
For several years after that incident, I was invited repeatedly to talk, and I was invited to testify in Congress on the question of free speech on college campuses.
And each time I was invited, I tried to make the point, this actually has very little to do with college campuses, and it has very little to do with free speech.
Speech is impeded as a last resort, and college campuses are simply the first place that we have seen this battle.
Now that may have sounded strange to people, but now that we've seen these very same forces spill out into public and affect almost everything, I think it's pretty clear I was right about that.
So what is happening on college campuses?
I think it's a confluence of two things.
I think there isn't a frustration.
People correctly detect that the system is rigged and that it is rigged against them.
Nothing seems to work.
The institutions are not trustworthy.
They're not serving the public interest.
And many people, young people in particular, recognize that they don't have an obvious path in their future.
So that creates a lot of desire for change.
That desire for change is meeting a frankly insane ideology that we have been coddling in a certain corner of the academy.
And Heather and I ran into this when we were college students.
The last round of it was taking place in the 90s and we encountered the claims that scientific truths, which really should not have been controversial, were actually political positions designed to capture power.
It was nonsense then, but what has happened is that by creating departments in which these arguments can be advanced unchallenged, we have created the impression that there is actually some body of knowledge that has been discovered that invalidates the gains of the West.
So the anger I talked about, which is justified, is meeting this nonsense belief system, and they are moving forward together.
And instead of challenging the features of our system that are indeed broken and in need of repair, what they are doing is aiming to tear down the system in the naive belief that something better will replace it, which is certain not to be true.
You know, Heather, one of the things that has been pretty obvious to those of us who've been watching is that I don't think it's a coincidence that the attacks in the academy and largely in public life have been on people who claim that there is such a thing as objective truth.
And that has centralized in science.
Science becoming a particular target of ire is very odd considering that science has taken us from life expectancies in our 30s to life expectancies in our 80s and record levels of prosperity and technological progress.
And has been such a contributing factor to the flourishing of human life.
And yet, it is science that is being attacked specifically because it does make claims that there are objective realities in the universe that seem to contradict this ideology, which is an almost bizarrely paganistically religious ideology, that we are free-floating souls that are capable of overcoming all aspects of the real world.
Yeah.
No, it's a strangely biologically essentialist ideology in some ways that really does make the naturalistic fallacy that says, if you are to understand what we have been, then that is what we always shall be and there's no changing it.
And in fact, Our argument, and this will seem strange for people who aren't familiar with it and who imagine that evolutionary biologists will always be talking about the genes, is that humans are, yes, the products of evolution, and understanding what that evolution has looked like provides much fodder for understanding who we are, but we are more software.
We are more about the software layer than the hardware layer of than any other organism on the planet.
We actually have more flexibility to become almost anything at birth than any other organisms do.
And so it's quite the opposite of a biologically essentialist view.
And the rejection of actual Actual evolutionary thinking by many in the academy does have a long history and it's largely about a misunderstanding of evolution, but it's also exactly as you say in service of an ideology which really can be understood as religion.
So when we look at sort of the attacks on science, it seems like the attacks on science have not only infused the academy, but they've actually infused a lot of our scientific institutions.
It's been of particular annoyance to me over the past year and a half to hear people saying over and over and over the phrase, follow the science.
And what they really mean is follow a particular person who says one thing about his perception of the science that may or may not be rooted in science.
Brett, what, I mean, you're both scientists.
You both live in these fields.
What should we, how should we approach science?
With what level of respect or cynicism should we approach the claim that you need to follow the science and from whom should we actually, who should we believe in this sort of sphere?
Well, this is a difficult question in large measure because the term science covers a bunch of different related things, right?
So science in one sense can be the compendium of wisdom and knowledge that we have accumulated It can be a process, but most fundamentally, science is a method.
One that people, if they think back to their high school education, could possibly formulate for themselves.
But the key thing to understand is that method is actually extremely capable of figuring out when we have a bias that is incorrect.
That is really its purpose.
It corrects our biases.
It takes the things that we think are true and forces us to see that they are not true.
And it only works when you do it properly.
It's very easy to do something that looks like science, that technologically uses all of the tools of science, but if you do it incorrectly, if you do not have a hypothesis that makes predictions and then run a test that meets the assumptions necessary to test whether those predictions are valid, Then it doesn't work.
And so what we have now is a very corrupt system of science that's plugged very directly into the market.
And frequently, instead of telling us what we need to know, it tells us what we want to hear.
Because although the system of science, the scientific method, is extremely capable, it is also fragile.
Because it requires very special conditions to work, it is very easily disrupted by things like market forces and corruption.
And so, when people say, follow THE science, you actually need to focus on the word THE.
That's the indication that they don't know what we're talking about.
If they said follow science, then we would understand actually they were talking about a method, and that it did not necessarily point to the people who were dressed as scientists, that in fact what it does is it points to people who have followed the method correctly, however they may be dressed, wherever they may be housed.
And, you know, it's frightening to watch people invoke science for things that are, as you point out, effectively a religious perspective, right?
Belief systems that are immune to falsification, that are marching forward with the advantages that come from having been discovered through the scientific method, which they weren't.
So Heather, why is this sort of stuff so seductive?
I mean, it really shouldn't be, because again, science works.
I mean, when the process and methodology of science are followed, then the result is verifiable, which means that it works in the real world.
And when we look at the realities on the ground of Of the parts of human nature that are unchanging and then the software parts that are capable of change.
It seems like operating in the real world is probably a better recipe for success than whatever else is being pledged.
So what is the drive that we are seeing from the most successful and flourishing civilization in history to take all of the tools that it has used to reach this point and then deconstruct those tools?
It's a frequent cause of bewilderment to me.
What exactly is motivating the drive?
Yeah, many things, many of which you have written about appropriately and successfully.
I would say that part of it is exactly the thing that we talk about in the book that we identify as hyper-novelty.
That we live in a world in which the rate of change is itself changing so fast that even we, who are best able to adapt of any organisms on the planet, cannot even keep up with the new conditions that we are creating for ourselves.
And what that means is that this method, which remains, the scientific method, which remains the best way to access the truth about the underlying reality in the universe, it is inefficient.
And it does sometimes demonstrate things that we think are true and then turn out not to be true.
This is exactly part of the problem with the idea of follow the science.
What you think is true today, even if you did use the scientific method to get there, may not turn out to be true once you have more evidence tomorrow or once conditions change.
So, in a hyper-novel world, in which complexity is rife, and in which people are just looking for ways to simplify their lives, to make meaning and to get some systems on set and forget, especially when it's something as complicated as, you know, how do I formulate my relationships?
How do I understand a pathogen that is taking over the world?
How is it that I figure out how to get my sleep back on track?
All of these are actually addressable with the scientific method, but most people don't feel like they have access to those tools.
And that is in fact what we're trying to do in our book, is provide a toolkit so that people, certainly we provide a toolkit for people with a lot of background in evolutionary biology, but our audience in the classroom was people with no exposure to evolutionary biology.
And those are the same people who we are also talking to in the book.
We had as students, we were college professors for 15 years, and we had as students people who ran the gamut from coming from very privileged homes to many students on Pell Grants.
We had students who'd gone through traditional schooling and a lot of students who had been homeschooled or unschooled or Waldorf-schooled or Montessori-schooled And, in fact, many of those students, many of our homeschooled students, were some of the most capable of problem-solving and working independently and knowing how to work on teams and such.
But they often came with substantial gaps because, of course, a parent teaching their child doesn't necessarily know everything they can know.
And what we were trying to do and what we're trying to do in life is reveal to people that everyone can actually follow the scientific method, that science does not require the lab coat and the glassware and the high-tech equipment, and that all of us should be able to take responsibility for our own decisions that we're making rather than simply answer to the authorities on the television.
And I think it's that you know what I give up I'm just going to answer the authority I'm just going to do what the authorities tell me to do which is part of why we've landed where we have. I think there's something else here though that that we need to confront which is the reason that we have a large number of people espousing nonsense about the way the world works and pretending it is scientific has to do with the way that our system has failed.
In one way, our system is incredibly productive and vibrant.
But it has been unfair.
And that does not mean, you know, what we are told now by this movement is that we will know it's fair when everything is distributed equally.
That's nonsense and it would actually destroy the system if that were the result of it.
But that does not mean that the way it is currently divided is a reasonable way to do it.
It's not even a good way to do it from the point of view of maximizing what the system produces.
The fact is, opportunity has been corralled by an increasingly tinier subset of the population, and so what you're getting is A lot of people who know that they are not going to be on the winning side of that equation for multiple reasons.
Because they haven't been given access and they've been harmed.
They haven't been given an education that would allow them to take advantage of opportunity if it emerged for them.
And this is causing frustration that makes it sound reasonable that we must tear this system down because this system is harmful rather than we want in.
Right?
So this is really a paired failing.
There's a failing on the right, where the right has imagined that because the system works, obviously, that it works better than it does.
And a failure on the left, where the desire for solutions has not been constrained by any process in which people who know how to build things have said, that actually won't work.
Right?
So we are facing a mythology that has filled a vacuum created by a very justifiable frustration.
So Brett, in a second, I want to talk with you about exactly that sort of reactionary move that we are seeing on both sides, where the right says everything is hunky-dory because the left is saying everything is broken.
And the reality is that, as you say, the bare bones of the system, the foundations of the system may be good, but we may need to fix up some of the cracks in the system as opposed to blowing it up from within.
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Alrighty, so Brett, you mentioned there, sort of the progressive versus the more conservative vision.
Conservatives may have a tendency to sort of ignore systemic problems because the idea is, well, the system overall works and the left's solutions very often seem to be directed at tearing down the system itself.
So the easiest thing to do is to fight the left as opposed to proposing solutions.
So in that category, you might say that the left's current attempts, for example, to get rid of testing regimens or to say that meritocracy itself is bad and needs to be replaced with some sort of more equally distributed Racial equity campaign.
The right looks at that and they say, are you insane?
What you're doing right now is destroying all possibility of success and efficiency and flourishing.
And really, and the left, instead of looking at the right and saying, OK, well, you may be right about generalized meritocracy, but how do we actually change the system so more people have access to the meritocracy?
They're just saying blowing it up.
So what do you think are some of the solutions that should be discussed by left and right to a problem that I think both would prefer to ignore in favor of these sort of reactionary defenses?
Well, there are a few recognitions that we just need to arrive at.
One is that equal outcome is not a desirable state for the system.
It will not function.
It's never been demonstrated to work.
And of course, it is a desperately unfair state if we were to arrive there, because it punishes those who have contributed more.
That said, an even distribution of opportunity is desirable.
To the extent that there are people out there who have tremendous capacity, but that capacity is squandered because they are occupied scrubbing other people's toilets, that's a waste of innovation.
These people are not innovating because they're too busy.
So, to the extent that what we want is a system that does what our system does well, even better than our system does it, but does it in a way that does not cause these spasms of revolt, we need to make sure that opportunity is distributed as widely as possible.
And it can't just be theoretical opportunity either.
It has to be realizable.
In other words, Freedoms people have but can't act on aren't real freedoms.
So we have to democratize the tools that actually make people capable of using these systems in order to better the world, to create beauty, to find insight, to engage in compassion.
All of these things require a system that solves people's needs more effectively than our system is currently doing for a large fraction of the population.
And if we thought in these terms, if we recognized that our system succeeds in certain things, but it doesn't succeed in distributing those things very well, we could continue to move in this direction.
And we wouldn't have the upside-down world where at the moment conservatives are now Defending the gains made by past radicals against new radicals who wish to tear it all down, right?
That is evidence that our conversation is incredibly broken.
That we haven't even gotten to the basics of what it is we're trying to accomplish and what the tools are that would be necessary to get us there.
So Heather, the sort of pessimistic side of me says that I hope that what Brett is saying is right, that the fix is possible because what people actually want is the opportunity.
What I fear is that there may actually be a revolt against the reality of unequal distribution period.
That no matter what you do, there will be unequal distribution.
And this is, you know, whether you're talking in terms of science and there are bell curves in terms of results in nearly every arena of human life, from height distribution to weight distribution to financial success, or whether you're talking about basic biblical worldview that the poor will always be among you, as it says in the New Testament.
That basic reality, which is that there will be uneven distribution of results, and that in reality, any system that tends to benefit people who are disproportionately, right now we are an information society, which means the people of high intellectual potential are more likely to succeed than people who are of average or low intellectual potential.
But the numbers of those people are necessarily, the people at the top of bell curves tend to do better than the people in the rest of the bell curve.
Is it possible that...
it.
Just too many people don't believe in the notion that Equal opportunity is enough that equal opportunity may not be enough because if I'm given the equal opportunity I don't succeed then it's kind of my own fault and Yeah.
I hope not.
I think not.
I may be wrong.
My sense is that those who are yelling very loudly about the need for equal outcomes are indeed very loud, and they do have increasing power, right?
They do have increasing power, certainly on campuses.
Yes, in media.
Yes, in Hollywood.
But that many of the people saying those things are just saying them.
and that it is actually a very small core group of true believers who really do believe in a destruction of an economic system that is functional in exchange for something that clearly would not function.
That said, the fact that there are so many people willing to parrot the ideas that sound like that kind of destruction and favoring equal outcome over equal opportunity is certainly worrisome.
I will say that the 15 years that I spent teaching in college classrooms actually made me less of a misanthropist.
I went into that work really thinking, you know what?
We're doomed.
There are just so many people who aren't interested, who aren't capable, who aren't going to be on board to help us make a better world.
From practically day one in those classrooms, those evergreen classrooms with extraordinary students, almost to a person, and not to say that they were all extraordinary intellects, of course not, but almost to a person, they had capabilities that even they didn't know about, and that I couldn't see on the surface when I first met them.
And many of them, because this was not an elite population, mostly we had elite students, but Evergreen took all comers almost.
So we really did have students from across the range of the American population, and most of them had been utterly failed by their educations to date.
Many of them had not been failed by their families, although that was the case for some too, unfortunately, but many of them had been failed by their education, such as they arrived at my doorstep and at Brett's doorstep in the classrooms really thinking they were incapable, that they couldn't think.
And if such people never run in to a professor who has the time or the incentive to reveal to them that they are capable, you will end up with people who actually can't think for themselves because they have never been told that they can.
I came away from that 15 years knowing, actually, that the vast majority of people can think, want to think, want to be given the information with which to make careful analytical decisions for themselves and for others, and that we are treating people like children, not because that's how they need to be treated, but for other reasons, and they're not good ones.
I would add one thing, which is the pattern that those who opposed us at Evergreen were people that we didn't know, and that our students remained quite loyal to us, and in fact remained enthusiastic about what we were doing, actually points to the answer to your question.
What we were doing in the classroom was taking the highest capacity tools of science and democratizing them, which was our job, was to share these tools with students.
And these students were of every description, racially, we had trans students, we had students from every economic class, including some very poor students who had eaten roadkill because their families couldn't afford anything else.
We had veterans, we had grandmothers, you know, just, you know, across the spectrum.
So I think the point is the experience that we were having in the classroom was so vibrant and so it was such a good proof of concept that in some ways what people saw on YouTube was us getting caught off guard.
What we were doing was working and we were attacked by people who swore nothing was working having not been in our classrooms.
And so I would just say, some of us have done something that indicates how this can be solved.
And we should be talking.
I mean, Jordan Peterson as well.
You can look at his lectures, and you can see that people really wanted to understand what his insight about the universe was.
And then, of course, he's been challenged in the same way.
So there are those who know how to move us forward.
And unfortunately, we're being drowned out by a very powerful, very naive opposing force.
And the key is to not listen to it, and certainly not allow wise voices to be shut down.
All right, so Heather, one of the things that has been obvious is that you're right.
I mean, I see this too, that most people are just uninformed about this stuff or not engaged.
And I just wrote a book myself about the renormalization of our institutions, including universities, which has really been done at the behest of a radical fringe.
And all it takes is apparently about 20% of any population in order to renormalize the rest of the population so long as they are intransigent and they are aggressive and they are incremental in their approach.
And it seems like the lack of pushback is really more to blame than the presence of the radicals.
It seems like there's just almost no pushback, or at least there wasn't since the last couple of years, from folks who considered themselves in the middle politically or center left politically, who might've agreed with some of the policy prescriptions of people on the radical left, but also disagreed with the entire approach of blowing up the system.
How do we convince people that it's important to actually mobilize an opposition to this, whether or not you agree with the right?
Yeah, no, that's a great question.
And it is one, indeed, that we've been thinking about for many years now, and I know you have as well.
And as you write about, and as you just said, the incrementalization of the progress that they are making is part of why it is so hard to reveal it to the exhausted middle, right?
There is no moment at which everyone has the shade pulled from their eyes and they can see what is true.
Right?
And so we have this sort of rolling revelations in which some people suddenly can see, ah, yes, actually it happened to me, it happened to a friend of mine, I saw that bit of footage, and now I'm beginning to put together the pieces.
So how can we bring everyone into an understanding that this is actually that important?
I don't have a global answer and I wish I did, but I think maybe a global answer isn't possible.
It's probably not going to be done by analysis.
It's more likely to be done by narrative, by telling true stories that actually reveal that this too could come for you.
And boy, there's a lot more to say, but I guess whenever Green First blew up, and we had been seeing it, we'd been talking about it among the few colleagues that we could talk about it with for a few years at the point that it became public, you know, it blew up in May of 2017.
But at first, when we were receiving so much private support from other people on campus who said, I see it, I know it, I can't stand up.
We felt differently than we do now about whether or not that was an appropriate response.
Really, we just felt so battered that we understood that most people would not have the core strength or really feel that they had any other opportunities if they took on the institution on which they were entirely dependent.
And we were both perhaps braver, but also more able to see that A, we wouldn't have been able to live with ourselves if we had not stood up to it, but also we thought that we had a chance of being able to escape into the world.
As much as Evergreen was in our entire world, it really, you know, more than most.
We had, you know, we had two tenured positions at this school and that was our entire income.
So, you know, we gave up all of that not knowing that's what we were doing by standing up to it.
But people see that and of course they're scared.
Of course they say, you know what, I have a mortgage to pay and I have children and I can't put them at risk by standing up.
But the question will always remain, You know, when you lie in bed at night and you're trying to fall asleep, what is plaguing you?
And if it really is a question of, I'm concerned that I only have one mortgage payment left in the bank and I may lose my house and that's going to put my family on the street, you're in a different position.
But many people actually have more of a buffer.
And if what is plaguing them is I was silent.
I was silent when I should not have been silent.
I did not speak truth when I know what the truth was.
I let someone else take the heat.
If there's any part of you that is saying you should be speaking, you should be speaking.
So, Brett, I want to get to some of the topics that are more specific to the book.
In the book, you talk about the sort of frontiers that humanity has attempted to breach and has pushed up against.
You talk about things like technological frontiers and geographic frontiers and resource frontiers.
And then you talk about what you call the fourth frontier, consciousness.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about what these frontiers are and why consciousness is, in fact, a frontier.
The thing to realize is that all evolved creatures are in pursuit of something that we humans call growth.
The idea is a population that is not growing is a stagnant opportunity.
And when a creature discovers a source of well-being that allows the population to grow, that is evolutionary success.
And so for creatures like us that feel things, it feels good.
But these things run out, right?
If you discover an island that's unpopulated or a continent, eventually your population grows to fill it and you're back to zero-sum dynamics.
So, in such a case, human beings will pursue technological solutions that will allow them to do more with the territory they have.
That's another frontier, but again, it's temporary.
Eventually people, like all creatures addicted to growth, We'll innovate other opportunities, like even if you can't come up with a technological solution that creates growth or find a new landmass, stealing resources from another population, potentially killing them in the process.
While that isn't real growth, it does feel like growth from the point of view of one's population.
So humans are very good at rationalizing such things.
And what our argument is, that if we look back into human evolutionary history, we know that human beings, unlike Every other creature don't have a niche in the classic sense.
Human beings have hunted marine mammals, they have terraced hillsides and farmed, they have recovered nests from high inside of caves to make soup.
There's a huge diversity of things humans have done to find sustenance in the world.
Why are we different from other creatures?
because we have a mechanism for rewriting our software, for effectively bootstrapping a new program for an opportunity that no ancestor knew anything about, and then refining it so it becomes extremely efficient at generating resources.
And this process, we argue, happens through a flip-flop between natural human modes.
One of these modes, when your ancestor's wisdom is well-suited to the circumstance you're in, we are in a highly cultural mode, where these things are efficiently transmitted, not necessarily literally, often through myth and other packages that efficiently transmit it to new generations.
But when we come up against a puzzle for which we don't know the answer, humans flip into a conscious mode and the key value of consciousness is that we can plug our consciousnesses into each other and we can parallel process problems and we can come out with solutions that are far greater than the sum of the cognition that each of us could do individually.
So, this is how humans figure out how to, what we call, niche switch, and it should be triggered at the point that you discover your ancestral wisdom is not capable of addressing your current problems.
This is a feature of the current environment like none before.
The problems we currently face are immense and worse than that they are changing so rapidly that they far outstrip our normal capacity to adapt to them so this is really one of the central messages of our book is that we have reached a point where not only the rate of change but the rate of change of the rate of change is so high that we are inevitably going to jeopardize our capacity to continue to function on planet earth
And the key is to recognize that that's what we're doing and to rise to consciousness and bootstrap the solution to that puzzle so that we can be here a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years from now.
So what do you think, Heather, are the problems that are so big that Brett is talking about right there, that require us to switch over from culture to consciousness?
Because obviously, as a conservative, I'm a very big fan of received wisdom of the past, and it seems to me that the shift from culture to consciousness, it could be triggered not by an actual problem, but by a perceived problem, and could result in exactly the sort of deconstructionism that we've been talking about before.
Namely, if you've exhausted the culture, meaning that Not necessarily the culture has failed, just that you've exhausted the culture, meaning that everybody's sort of reached the limit, right?
There was a point in terms of geographic limits where everything had now been found, and so human beings, if you're going to search for a new geographic limit, have to attack each other.
Could the same thing apply in the switch from culture to consciousness?
Where we sort of hit the limits of culture.
Everything is fairly good, but we are an aggressive species and we're constantly looking to grow and there's no more space to grow.
And so instead, we shift into consciousness mode and end up actually having an almost autoimmune disorder with regard to our culture.
You're absolutely right.
There is risk to this conscious mode.
There is greater chaos.
There's a higher error rate, for sure.
And culture, by contrast, is a time of stability.
It brings stability from the past into the future, but it only works when the future looks like the past.
And so we are certainly not advocating for a move into pure consciousness.
We are advocating for a recognition that there are things in our culture that are still functional and that we need to bring forward into the future without messing.
And that there are also things that due to the rate of change that we ourselves have created, and then other runaway processes that may be due to us but that are now out of our control, we need to act with innovation and we will make errors.
But we need to problem-solve, and the problems will look ways that nothing in the past has looked.
So it's not, you know, I get the concern for sure, and I have it too, and I know anyone, any sane person, I would say, should have it, looking at the world at the moment and looking what's passing for progress, right?
But we can't go back.
We can't go back to any imagined or real past, because that's just not the way things go.
And we would argue as liberals that we wouldn't want to go back anyway.
But even if we did, even if we agreed that we wanted to, it's not a possibility.
But we should be able to look and see what of the past is necessary, is fundamental, is still working, or can be made to still work.
in a rapidly changing world and move that forward and use, in fact, the sort of two paired concepts that we use throughout the book.
Two of them are the precautionary principle and Chesterton's fence, right?
And Chesterton's fence exactly speaks to this concern that if you have two people walking along a path and they find a fence, And it's irritating to one, he says, let's get rid of it.
The other one should say to the first, until and unless you can tell me what that fence is for, you have no right to get rid of it.
I don't care how irritating it is to you now, but you need to tell me what its function is or was, And then tell me whether or not it's still doing that function before you try to get rid of it.
So that is a conservative perspective.
But the longer in existence something has been culturally, the more likely you should apply Chesterton's fence to it.
And so we apply it throughout the book.
We talk about Chesterton's breast milk.
So, in a second, Brett, I want to ask you about how we do consciousness in an era where, you know, the sort of parallel modes that we're talking about have actually changed in terms of how we interact.
I want to get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Brett, you talk about in the book the shift from culture mode to consciousness mode, and you say that we have this enormous capacity for parallel processing that allows us to play off of one another and then almost grow exponentially by utilizing each other as resources.
The internet has really shifted how that's done.
So it used to be that one of the kind of natural checks on what you call consciousness mode was locality.
That you didn't have access to every other human being on the planet at the same exact time and that also allowed you to winnow out who you wish to share a consciousness mode with to a certain extent.
You knew who was dumb and who was smart in your local community and you'd find the smart people and attempt to shift policy based on what the smart people were saying to one another or the people who know the most about a particular topic.
And the internet has shifted all of that to the point where we can now almost shift into our own unique atomistic consciousness modes, where we find groups of people who agree with us, and we can do it right now really fast, and we can evolve these new consciousness softwares so incredibly quickly that it's almost more risky and fraught with problems than it was certainly before the rise of the interconnectedness that we now see.
You're absolutely right, and a theme of our book is hyper-novelty.
This is a case of hyper-novelty in the extreme, where even the way we interact with other human beings, which is incredibly ancient, I mean, even predates language, is is so radically shifting that we have no understanding of what this is doing to our ability to think.
I mean even the ghost in the machine, the algorithms that dictate whose insights we will see and whose we will not are having an effect on what we think collectively.
Our collective consciousness has effectively been parasitized by something which at best has narrow economic interests and at worst may have contrary interests to our well-being.
It may It may be attempting to shape what we can see about our own environment.
So the danger you point to is absolutely real.
In the book we talk about campfire as the historical mode in which this consciousness was deployed.
In the evening when one could not be productive with respect to farming or hunting, the group would gather and they would discuss problems and parallel process them.
So we have to figure out how to make campfire work and, you know, Twitter isn't campfire.
That's one of the things that we can say very clearly at this point.
It doesn't have the necessary prerequisites to function as such a thing.
But the other thing I want to point out is that this goes back to the question we were talking about with respect to the revolution that we are seeing in our streets and on our college campuses and elsewhere.
That revolution is very focused on preventing certain people from talking to other people, right?
It punishes you.
We're not supposed to be talking to you, Ben.
And we will be punished for doing so, as you will probably be punished for talking to us, though.
I'll be fine.
You'll be fine.
There's no doubt about that.
And we'll be fine, too.
But we're not supposed to talk to you.
And the reason that we're not supposed to talk to you is that there is a desire to exclude that which can falsify a cherished Myth.
And so to the extent that you're going to sell the idea that men and women are not different, that you can switch on a moment's notice, that it would be a good idea if the well-being of society was evenly distributed, that the West is a bad place that has always been about unfairness.
If you want to sell any of these concepts, what you have to do is block the stuff that can say that's not true and here's how you know.
Right?
This is why, as you started with, scientists are under attack, because we have a toolkit that allows us to say, actually, here's how we know that isn't true, right?
If it were true, it makes these predictions.
Those predictions don't turn out to be true.
Therefore, we have to assume it's false.
And us talking to people who are not exactly of our ilk is how we get smarter, because the blind spots of conservatives may be something Liberals can see and vice versa, right?
You put those two together, it's very powerful.
And so those who wish to sell us a false bill of goods have to keep us from encountering the things that would tell us that that's what's going on.
And it is important that we challenge their ability to tell us what we may listen to and who we may talk to.
It's fundamental.
If I can just add one thing, the fact that we talk across difference, ideological difference, demographic difference, whatever kind of difference it is, makes it more difficult to create dehumanizing tropes and memes.
And dehumanization of the other is one of the ascending tools of control. And we need to resist that at all costs.
We need to find the humanity in each other. And given that the particular kind of dehumanization that is happening now is largely political, it's across political lines, reaching across whatever aisle you find and shaking hands and breaking bread and looking each other in the eye and sharing ideas and recognizing that actually we probably largely share values. And we may not agree on where we are or how we should get where
we'd like to go, but we largely share values in the places where we don't make the other person Satan. Right?
We're still human and we just disagree with some of each other's ideas, that's it.
I mean, it is incredible how that basic idea has gone completely away.
I remember I was recently in a bit of a hoity-toity group of very powerful people and the subject of political polarization came up and they kind of threw the conch to me to talk about political polarization because, of course, I have been both subjected to it and obviously I'm blamed for it.
And one of the things that I said is that, you know, as much as I'm, you know, a very politically active person and I'm pretty strident about my politics, I make a point of talking across the political aisle.
If you actually want to solve political polarization, it's really not all that hard.
All everybody in the room has to do is get on Twitter today, find somebody who voted like you didn't, and say, this person is a human being and I enjoy talking to them, they have some interesting ideas.
Not one person in the room actually did it, but it actually is relatively simple, and it's kind of amazing that even so much as that has been basically treated as anathema.
Well, think about the game theory here.
You know, and we know, the very same thing from the other side of the political spectrum.
It is actually rewarding to talk to people that you don't agree with, but you respect.
You learn things from them.
It's a very powerful process.
Because it is rewarding, in order to prevent it from happening, it has to be severely punished.
And that's the point, is that what we are seeing is somebody gaming our system of incentives so that we forget how to talk to people that we don't agree with.
And that is, it's alarming and it's also an indicator of what they're up to, that it isn't honorable and it isn't motivated by insight.
So Brett, earlier you alluded to some of the big problems that you think that we are facing that require us to shift from culture mode into consciousness mode.
So what do you think are some of the biggest problems that we are facing right now as human beings?
Because on the one hand, I agree that there's some pretty big problems, but I think the definition of those problems is one of the root questions, right?
It's not hard to see how somebody could take the sort of Steven Pinker side that things have been getting progressively better and that the problems we face are by historical, sort of comparison relatively minor. On the other hand, we can kind of see that western civilization seems to be tearing itself apart a little bit from within, maybe not a little bit, and that the seams seem to be stretched. So what do you see as the big problems that we're facing?
It's a little, you know, we could go on for hours on this.
Let me just say, we informally talk about the Pinker problem.
Steven Pinker is right.
He may not be right in every detail, but he is overarchingly right.
Frankly, just the even simple details of our lives.
We live essentially, you know, better than monarchs of the past when you think of all of the things that we have access to.
I mean, I have the library of Alexandria times a thousand in my pocket.
There are incredible advantages of where we've arrived.
That said, it's not a complete perspective.
The danger of where we are is absolutely immense.
So if you sort of take the instantaneous measure of well-being, there's a tremendous amount of well-being, and it is widely distributed.
It is not fairly distributed, but it is widely distributed.
If you take the hazard of the moment, then you'll discover we've never been in greater peril.
That in the past, populations did endanger themselves, and some populations actually drove themselves extinct.
But it was never all of us together.
At the moment, what we have is a planet that is headed in a direction that cannot be sustained.
Just literally cannot be sustained.
We know we cannot continue to go in this direction.
We also know that we don't have a recipe for figuring out how to correct our course.
Markets simply are incapable of doing the job of figuring out what the hazards are going forward.
In fact, they have a very particular defect, what we talk about in the book.
The senescence of civilization is the result of the fact that processes that are extremely productive and useful, but dangerous, tend to accumulate in our system.
And as these things build up, they create greater and greater fragility.
So the biggest problem that we have to face is that we can't keep doing this and we don't know what replaces it, right?
That's job one.
And the second thing I would say, the other major theme of the book, Is that we are individually very unhealthy as a result of all of this technological progress.
And we do live longer, you're right about that.
But we live longer, we have anxiety that would not have characterized our ancestors, we are physiologically unhealthy, we are socially unhealthy, and all of these things are indicators that something That is, generating the menu of possibilities for us is simply off.
It's giving us things that are causing us to do harm to ourselves, and we have to stop.
So, Heather, I certainly agree with the second, because it's impossible to disagree with the second.
Obviously, we see mass obesity is the problem in the United States, not mass starvation.
And that is an indicator that something has gone wrong in certainly an opposite direction from what has gone wrong in the past.
Maybe you can expand a little bit on what Brett is talking about when he talks about the sort of senescence of Capitalism, the sort of accruing of specific problems that kind of builds up over time.
Maybe an example would be good there.
Yeah, well, I guess maybe this approach, and I do feel like we keep on doing an end run around your question directly.
It is easy once you find a thing that you can measure in a system, which, of course, capitalism is very good at.
To imagine the thing that you've measured is the thing that warranted being measured and is the metric that is what should be paid attention to in the system.
And it is thus also human nature to pay attention to the metric once you have it in front of you.
And so there is a reductionism that is being conflated with science.
So, there is science that is very narrow and there is science that is very broad.
An evolutionary approach, as we take in our lives and in our book, is a very broad, emergent approach.
We ask questions of why to try to understand what it is that we are doing and why we're facing the problems we are.
And the more narrow approach that we are finding so much evidence of in In our supermarkets, in our healthcare system, in the blue lights that pervade our homes and keep us from sleeping well, in the relationships that we can and cannot have and that young people are finding impossible to form because they have been told that there are a few things that they should be seeking and are not recognizing that actually we are all more than the sum of our parts.
Every complex system has emergence.
And so, you know, this is both an answer and a non-answer again, I think, but I point to the error of reductionism closer related to scientism, which is not the same as science.
That taking a scientific approach, trying to understand what the underlying reality is, means that you may have lots of answers that are true, but then when you add them together, you don't get the complete answer.
And at the moment, we have lots of little answers, some of which are probably true, some of which aren't.
And science, because of the way that science is now done in the West, because of the way it is funded in the US and in other Western countries, is very much favoring small-scale, reductionist types of science and not the holistic, larger-question science.
And that is a big part of why we are ending up where we are.
So Brett, in a second, I want to ask you about the sort of flattening of humanity, because I think that that's kind of what we're talking about on a philosophical level, is that human beings really are a wide variety of things.
We're a multifarious species.
We have all of these different aspects of ourselves.
When you ball those up together, they are more than the sum of their parts, and yet we have so many We basically have a toolbox and every tool in the box is a hammer.
And so it doesn't actually look like a toolbox.
It just looks like a box of hammers.
And I want to explain what I mean by that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about sort of the thinning of humanity.
This is a theory that I've been sort of thinking about a lot.
I've actually been thinking about a lot in terms of biblical story or myth, depending on your point of view about the Bible, and the sort of symbolism of how Adam is talked about at the beginning of Genesis.
What I was noticing recently when I was reading the book of Genesis is that Adam is described in about seven different ways, right?
He is made from earth, which you could theoretically think of as biological hardware, and then the soul of life is breathed into him, which you could think of as the software that you discuss in your book, and then he's discussed as lover, and then he's discussed as father, he's discussed as a listener in the garden, he's discussed as the maintainer who's supposed to plow and till the ground, and then the worker who's supposed to support his family, and in all of these different roles, Man, which is what Adam is, right?
The word in Hebrew for man is Adam.
Man is all of these things at once.
And yet, we live in a system that because of what you're talking about, the desire for some sort of measurable result that you can put on a chart, has basically flattened man into a series of sheets of paper.
So, you have homoeconomist, who is supposed to be Just a purely rational actor who acts out only through capitalism, and capitalism, theoretically, is supposed to solve all of your problems, and then when it doesn't, people get angry at capitalism.
Or you have, sort of, homo libidinus.
You have the man who's driven only by his sexual urge in almost Freudian fashion, and the only identity that he can find is in just how people pursue their sex lives, and sexual identity is everything.
You have the tribal man, who's only supposed to be a member of the tribe, and we can boil Who he is down to his intersectional characteristics.
And so we as a society seem to have segregated all of these things off as opposed to saying, well, actually we're all of these things and maybe none of them at the same time, Brett.
You're absolutely right, and this is one of the places that I think conservatives have the deeper understanding.
If you've seen a system that is coherent and complete, even if it is a mismatch for our present circumstances, there is something essential about it.
So what we can say about any ancient religious tradition is that it has stood the test of time.
And we can say that about nothing, no way of viewing humanity in the present.
It's all too new.
And so what we are stuck with is a very difficult problem.
The problem is, if the ancient wisdom isn't a match for the current world, and we are not in a position to take the time to evolve a new system, What are we to do?
How do we figure out which portions of the old we must preserve and refine so that they work in the new system and what we must generate de novo?
And I think once you spot the difficulty of this problem, you understand our current moment better.
It isn't a simple problem.
And in the book, we are very clear about the fact that we do not know enough.
Humanity does not know enough at this moment to blueprint the future.
We do not know how to describe the system that we need.
What we do know is how to navigate in the direction of that system, how to prototype and refine.
But we have to stop pretending that markets are capable of doing this job.
Markets are an evolutionary environment that does not have our long-term well-being in It is inherently biased towards the short-term, and it is putting us in danger.
If we are wise, what we will do is recognize that we have never come up with a better tool for figuring out how to do things than markets, but that they have no business telling us what to do.
They should not tell us what to want.
Because if we allow them to do that, what they will do is what we are seeing presently.
They will explore every defect of human character and exploit it to somebody's benefit, but not to our collective benefit.
And it's time we divided those two things.
So Heather, one of the things that occurs to me here is, and this does cross streams with where we are governmentally, and maybe just in terms of Western civilization more broadly, is the sort of fragmentation that we're seeing the actual attempt to solve the problem.
In other words, it's not just us falling apart.
I think that right now, you know, listen, I took my family, we moved from California to Florida.
One of the reasons we did that is we were seeking a different community, a different style of life, a different kind of, Outlook from from the place that we were living and so we moved and you're starting to see the self-sorting mechanism happen all over The West you're starting to see nations in the EU decide.
You know what the EU doesn't speak for all of us You're starting to see localism rising in the United States California wants to be California Texas wants to be Texas Florida wants to be Florida and at the same time there's this Broadening because everything has become so nationalized and internationalized because the systems of power have become so powerful whether you're talking about International corporations or whether you're talking about international governments or just federal government as opposed to state and local government it seems like the the system of fixing this which used to be Find communities and experiment within those communities
and create those campfires is now being overridden by these broad national systems Incapable of actually adjusting on the move Yeah, no, I absolutely agree.
And as you know, you're not the only ones to have left California.
We have both other conservative and liberal friends who have left California, finding what is happening there untenable.
And not because it's too liberal, really, because in many ways it's too illiberal and just simply incompetent.
It does seem like we are oscillating, as you say, too quickly between the individual level agency and the transnational reality that we all live in.
And yes, many of us are seeking the many layers in the middle where we can find community again.
And with the decay of traditional systems like like churches and other social groups and synagogues, it's becoming much more difficult and of course the last 18 months has made it even more difficult to find actual community with people whom you did not have before.
What we need is to spend more time in physical space with one another, looking each other in the eye and feeling the ineffable and sometimes unmeasured and unmeasurable things that are true about humans when they just share space with one another.
And that is and is not an answer to how to solve a planet's problems that has seven, eight now billion people on it, right? But the number of people who are simply feeling totally isolated and who have the vast majority of their social interactions through screens, which quite literally does the flattening that you were talking about with regard to what how we understand humans.
If we can reverse that, I believe that we can begin to reverse a number of the other failings that we are experiencing.
So I want to ask both of you a few final questions.
Starting with, you both taught in colleges.
What advice do you have for college students who are facing down some of the issues that you had on college campuses when you were there?
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over there.
Well, Brett and Heather, I really appreciate your time, and thank you for standing up for all the things you stand up for, and for the process of knowledge-making.
It really is an amazing book. You should go check it out.
A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
Brett and Heather, thank you so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Ben.
Thank you very much, Ben.
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