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May 22, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE MASCULINE VIRTUES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep584
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This is a kind of special episode.
I'm going to discuss the fundamental question of male and female with Senator Josh Hawley.
Author of the new book, Manhood.
But I'm also going to dig into evolutionary psychology and biology to examine the meaning of sexuality in the larger scheme of human history and human survival.
I'll also continue my discussion of materialism and whether there is room in our material bodies for that immaterial object called Hey, if you're listening on Apple or Google or Spotify or watching on Rumble, please subscribe to the podcast.
I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
A little later in this podcast, I'm interviewing Senator Josh Hawley about a very interesting new book that he has that is called Manhood.
Now, it may seem odd for a U.S. Senator to write a book that is not about politics directly.
It's not about the deep state.
It's not about taxes.
It's about manhood.
And, of course, some of Hawley's critics on the left are trying to mock him and make fun of him, like, oh, he's kind of a wimpy guy.
It's a little surprising he's writing about manhood.
And, of course, what they're doing is they're attacking a caricature of manhood, as if to say that masculinity or manhood...
It comes down to the fact that you look like, you know, you basically have a Schwarzenegger body, or at least the body of the old bodybuilder Schwarzenegger, or you can fight like Chuck Norris.
But this is really not what Josh Hawley is talking about at all.
It occurred to me, as I was thinking about some of the things in that book, that there is a real crisis in this country of male and female, of what is a male, what is a female.
And of course, Josh Hawley is advancing this debate by going beyond what is a biological male or a biological female to what are the male or masculine virtues.
In other words, what are the virtues that go with being a male, that males or Or men or boys should aspire to.
And conversely, you could ask what are the feminine virtues that women and girls should aspire to as well.
The interesting thing is that the left today doesn't just attack masculinity.
They do. Toxic masculinity.
They attack masculinity and femininity.
And they attack both in the name of a third thing.
And the third thing is, you could call it neither male nor female.
The idea that somehow sex and gender are a continuum.
There's a kind of a spectrum.
You might have sort of male at the one side, female at the other side, but lots of people occupy intermediate positions on the spectrum.
Now, biologically, of course, that's absurd.
There are a few people who have ambiguous or intermediate sex organs, and this is a kind of anomaly or even a deformity that's been recognized for centuries.
It's treated in various ways, but somehow the idea that there isn't a sex distinction makes absolutely no sense.
And yet it is being promoted even by magazines that are science magazines.
Here is the... Laura Helmuth is the editor of Scientific American.
She shares an article.
And here's her tweet.
White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways.
P.S. Nature is amazing.
P.P.S. Sex is not binary.
Now, first of all...
Even if this were true, and it's not true, but let's say it were true that there were multiple sexes in the sparrow community, were not sparrows.
So this would have nothing automatically to say to human beings because the animal kingdom differs in all kinds of ways from us.
I mean, if you're a gorilla, you might have a mating strategy of grabbing the female gorilla, stupefying her with blows, dragging her to your cave, and basically raping her, and that happens on the Nature Channel all the time, but it's not exactly recommended for human beings.
So simply pointing to something and the animal came, that's how they do it over there, the sparrows do it this way, Dinesh, doesn't really go very far.
But the point is that the article, the very article that she links to make this claim that, quote, sex is not binary, I'm now going to read what they're talking about.
And by way of introduction, by and large, when you're talking about these sparrows, you have...
White-striped and tan-striped sparrows.
So you obviously have white and tan-striped males and white and tan-striped females.
So this is where we get the four categories.
You can call it white-striped male, tan-striped male, white-striped female, tan-striped female.
And I read the following.
White-striped males are more aggressive than tan-striped males in these chases.
White-striped females will also take part in chasing, but tan-striped females don't seem to do much to defend the territory.
To oversimplify, we could call them super-aggressive males, more nurturing males, somewhat aggressive females, and super-nurturing females.
And then the article says, it's almost as if the white-throated sparrow has four sexes.
Now, the article is speaking metaphorically.
It's talking about traits in terms of being more or less aggressive.
Now, in the human community, we know, for example, that there are placid and easygoing males.
There are aggressive females.
This hardly means that human beings are made up of four sexes.
And the article is actually pretty clear.
When it says it's almost as if the white-throated sparrow has four sexes, they're saying it doesn't have four.
It has two sexes.
And the two sexes are biologically defined by the males producing sperm and the females producing eggs.
So in sexually reproducing species, you just have these two gametes that are responsible for reproduction.
There are only two sexes, and this is true not just in the human species, it's also true.
Welcome to my show!
We're in a very odd position in the culture where fundamental distinctions recognized throughout the world and that have been recognized since ancient times that are now supported by modern biology and modern science are denied even by the editor of a prominent science magazine.
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Again, it's PatriotMobile.com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. Several years ago, there was a book that was published with a very odd and interesting title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
And the book was written by a prominent medical doctor and he was writing about people who have rare and exotic psychological disorders.
So in this case, there was a guy who literally thought his wife was a hat.
And it is long recognized in the psychiatric and psychological communities that you have people who come up with all kinds of fantasies about themselves and about others.
And this is sometimes called, in the literature, the as-if personality.
The as-if personality refers to someone who doesn't face the world as it is, but they face the world as if it existed and In my mind.
So I can say, for example, in an exotic sense, I think I'm Napoleon.
And someone goes, well, how do you know you're Napoleon?
You're not short. And he goes, well, yeah, but in my mind I'm short.
Yeah, but you didn't, you know, you didn't conquer large parts of Europe.
Yeah, I know, but in my dreams I did.
And, well, you're not, you don't live in the 18th century.
Well, yeah, I know, but it feels to me like I do.
So, what do you do with such a person?
They're living in another world, a world in a sense of their own mind, and yet they're very earnest about it, and they will not face reality as it is.
And so, the job of the psychiatrist becomes to sort of attempt to do the difficult job of bringing this kind of, well, let's call it a kind of madness, it's certainly a kind of disorder, into line with reality.
But then, in the psychiatric community, it's a common experience that the patient who you're trying to do this to digs in, and the patient refuses to accept reality, and they begin to use language in a way that distorts and annihilates simple truths.
They refuse to recognize those truths, and then they turn around and attack the psychiatrist for being a hater, For being vengeful, for not sort of taking them seriously, for not respecting them, for not giving due deference to the way that they see themselves.
And this is what is going on.
There's a very interesting article about all this, which says that this is going on broadly in our culture, but the trans phenomenon is just an extreme example of this.
Now, how is it going on in our culture?
Well... The writer goes on to say, Because they don't relate.
They don't think about themselves.
They don't think about themselves in a reflective way.
And they don't think about others in that way as well.
They flip from one image or meme to another.
And so, because they have these virtual worlds, I mean, let's think about the way that these people operate.
They create avatars.
They buy, quote, Virtual real estate on Meta.
So they live in this kind of imaginary world, and they, at some point, have difficulty connecting that back to the real world.
And so it's almost, you could call it, a mass psychological disorder that is going on throughout our culture.
People live in virtual worlds and it's not easy for them to kind of come back to the real world.
They somehow think that the imagination and reality are the same thing and that you can change reality by describing it in a different way.
One of the clients of this particular writer is someone who's described in this way.
She has no relationship with her own body.
I mean, let's think about that.
In other words, she doesn't realize that her body is a given.
I am a male. I am a female.
These are the cards that were dealt to me in life.
I've got this particular...
I'm either attractive or unattractive or so-so.
I've got black hair instead of brown hair and so on.
But no, because she plays video games online, she inhabits her avatar, she interacts with the avatars of other players that she's never met in real life.
She thinks that identity is something that is sort of invented or made up.
And so, what this writer is saying is that we have all kinds of people, including a lot of young people in our culture, who seem to have a psychic life that is meaningful to them, but they don't actually have one.
They appear to have friends, but they don't have any friends.
Their emotional lives are essentially an empty tomb, and their words have no relationship to the truth.
So, So as a result, they, even when they, and some of these people actually have credentials.
They graduate from good colleges.
They become champions, let's just say, for example, of the trans lifestyle.
Here's a guy named Jack Turbin.
He's always invoking the scientific method, but he doesn't really believe in the scientific method.
If you tell him there's an irreducible reality of two genders, he then goes, no, there isn't.
So in other words, here's a guy who will engage in misleading citations, factual errors, but it doesn't really matter to him because he is merely trying to marshal whatever facts that he can to show that there's no such thing really as male and female, that gender is some kind of made-up thing.
There was a joke many years ago of a guy who wrote an article, actually two people, called, The Penis is a Social Construct.
The idea being that penises don't exist.
This is just a social invention.
And it was intended as a parody.
It was actually published in a journal, but it was intended to show that these journals don't know what they're talking about.
They will publish the most complete nonsense as long as it's packaged in academic-sounding language.
But ironically, today, it's not a joke.
Today, the same kind of argument, the penis is a social construct, actually appears in some form in various medical and scientific journals, and what it represents is a detachment from reality.
In other words, the world of as-if, the world of the imagination, the world of make-believe, is not only colliding with reality, but in some ways, overcoming reality.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Senator Josh Hawley.
He has a remarkable book out that I've really, right in the middle of reading, is called Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
We're going to talk about it starting in the next segment.
Senator Hawley represents Missouri.
Before his election to the Senate, he worked as a First Amendment lawyer and law professor.
He also served as the Attorney General of Missouri.
By the way, his website, joshhawley.com.
Senator Hawley, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me.
Let me start by asking you, there now appears to be both from the final report from Durham, as well as from what we've learned about the 51 intelligence officials saying that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
We now seem to have...
I guess I'd call it election interference at the highest levels of the police agencies of government.
I mean, these agencies supposedly are supposed to be politically neutral, nonpartisan, and yet we see not only are they getting involved by their own whim, but they are coordinating in 2016 with the Hillary Clinton campaign, In 2020 with the Biden campaign.
So isn't this a very serious matter?
I was a little disappointed that it seems like Durham just concluded by saying, well, okay, I hope that the FBI gets this act together, these guys fix it.
But it's not going to be fixed unless we make them fix it, right?
Sure. I think you're absolutely right about election interference.
I mean, what this basically shows, the Durham report, is you had the Hillary Clinton campaign successfully weaponize the FBI to interfere with and really try to rig a presidential election in 2016.
And they just about got away with it.
I mean, they opened the investigation, no basis, we now know.
They went and lied repeatedly, the FBI did, lied repeatedly to a FISO court, the secret court, in order to get wiretaps on Trump associates. That, of course, was totally without foundation.
And then they just laundered through the media the notion that the FBI was investigating Trump for collusion and it turns out on no basis. So this is behavior at the FBI, corruption that I think really threatens the foundations of this country.
I mean, how would you like to have the FBI choosing our presidential candidates, choosing our leaders?
That's basically what they tried to do in 2016.
And of course, 2022 with the Hunter Biden laptop.
So this is a pattern of corruption.
We have got to root it out at the FBI. The leadership has got to go.
I think there's no question about that.
Leadership of the Department of Justice has got to go.
And we've got to think about structural reform, too.
I mean, at one point, Lisa Page texts Peter Strzok and says something like, we're not going to get Trump, are we?
And Peter Strzok replies, no, we'll stop him.
We'll stop him. So you've got people in the FBI taking it upon themselves.
To decide who they think should be the president.
And then, like you say, the same playbook, which was used in 2016, is then repeated, obviously, with a little different set of facts.
Now we're dealing with Biden, not Clinton.
But again, the Biden campaign, through Anthony Blinken, contacts Mike Morrell, the former acting CIA director.
He then writes the letter.
He recruits all these guys to sign on to it.
And then Biden holds up the, basically during the debate with Trump, acts like the letter's been spontaneously generated.
I mean, just the theatricality of all this amazes me that these people with a straight face who are all in on it act like these are independent things coming out.
And of course, the media is playing its own execrable role instead of examining this stuff skeptically, actually propagandistically pushing it out.
And we know now from the Twitter files that the FBI was working with the big technology companies to shut down any discussion on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
They were using that letter from the 51 intelligence officers that we know now is based on nothing.
You talk about propaganda. That was the propaganda.
I mean, what was coming out of the Biden campaign was the propaganda.
What was coming out of the US government was the propaganda.
And the FBI is out there telling Twitter, telling Facebook, oh, don't let the Hunter Biden story circulate.
That's Russian disinformation.
That's not true. They knew it wasn't true.
They had the laptop. So I think you're absolutely right in terms of the pattern that we see.
And the question is, what are we going to do about it?
We've got to change the leadership.
And then we got to ask ourselves, you know, is the FBI, are they really up to the job of actually doing the law enforcement tasks they're supposed to do?
Are we going to need to break them up and give those law enforcement tasks to other agencies that actually want to police criminals and not interfere in elections?
How do you think this can move forward?
Because it seems like with the House investigations, they're putting out a lot of information.
A bunch of whistleblowers come forward and talk about what it's like in the FBI. But then the FBI puts out a benign statement, basically saying, oh, you know, all these problems have long been fixed.
We've already taken care of them.
So why are you bringing this up even now?
So, they act with sort of brazen indifference as if to say, well, listen, if you're going to pass a new law, you're going to need the House, you're going to need the Senate, and you're going to need the President.
And guess what? The President's never going to be on board with this, so you can talk as much as you want, but as long as we have the media and as long as we have one of the branches of government, in this case the Presidency, you're out of luck.
Well, we know that the FBI will never police itself, never reform itself, never fix itself.
I mean, I think what we need is we need a full-fledged congressional investigation.
The House investigation is tremendous.
We need a church-style commission like they did in the 70s, when they uncovered all of these abuses by the intelligence agencies against Americans.
We need to do that now.
We need subpoenas to overturn every rock at the FBI, to look under every rock at the Department of Justice, so-called, to figure out what it is that they're doing and why they are targeting people on the basis of their political views.
And then we're going to have to consider structural reform.
I mean, we really are.
The FBI, to me, in its current incarnation, doesn't seem too focused on law enforcement.
It seems real focused on interfering in politics, real focused on trying to change the outcome of elections.
We cannot allow that to go on.
When we come back, I want to talk, pivot, and talk to Josh Hawley about his new book, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
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I'm back with Senator Josh Hawley.
His website, joshhawley.com.
Twitter, at Hawley, M-O, Missouri.
And the book we're going to be talking about, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
Senator Hawley, it's a little unusual for a senator to write a book that's not about public policy.
It's not about the border or even taxation.
It's a book about manhood.
Can you talk a little bit about what Made you think that this is the book that you want to write.
Are we facing a sort of...
I mean, we've heard a little bit about the crisis of femininity in America with, you know, men showing up in women's bathrooms or biological males wanting to be in women's sports.
But the implication of this book is that we're facing a crisis of manliness, perhaps no less than a crisis of femininity.
The two maybe go together.
How did you decide to write this book?
Well, I'm a father of two little boys, and that's really what got me started thinking about this.
My boys are 10 and 8 now, and I've got a baby girl as well.
But thinking about my responsibility as a dad toward my boys to help them grow into the men that they're meant to be, the men that this nation, frankly, needs them to be, it got me thinking about this issue.
And the truth is, for years now, decades now, The left has been telling men that to be a man is to be toxic.
That if you're a man, you make America worse basically just by drawing breath.
And I think we have got to send a different message to men all over this country.
Men are in crisis. And you look at the suicide rate.
You look at the depression rate.
You look at the drug and alcohol abuse rates.
They're off the charts.
Clearly, something is not right.
And also, fewer men than ever are in the workforce.
So we've got big problems when it comes to men.
And I think at the root of that is the left's lies to men.
We've got to reverse that and say to men, no, you are needed.
We need you to take on responsibility.
We need you to be strong.
We need you to be providers and protectors, provide for your family, and to go out there and change your life, change your family, change this country.
We seem to be at such a strange point where the left has gone from...
I mean, I suppose if I think back a few decades, they would deny that there are masculine and feminine virtues because they would say things like, of course, there are men who can be caring and should be doing the dishes, and there are women who are out in the workforce.
But we've now reached a point where even the biology that separates males from females is being challenged, as if to say that somehow sexuality is on some kind of a spectrum...
And it's not this or that.
It's not M or F. It's not male or female.
So, to me, this trans phenomenon is only one part of this larger picture.
But talk a little bit about the masculine virtues.
If you had to list the top three masculine virtues, for example, what would they be?
Well, what I do in the book is I look at the different roles that I think men have historically been called upon to play, that our great faith tradition, especially the tradition of the Bible, calls men to play, and I talk about the virtues associated with those.
So, the virtues of a husband, you know, somebody who can commit, somebody who can be counted upon, the virtue of a father, someone who can lay down his life for his children, someone who will give his life away for other people, the virtues of a warrior.
Someone who's willing to be courageous, willing to take a stand that's unpopular, willing to be criticized, willing to go out there and take a risk.
And then I give three more as well, the virtues of a builder, of a priest, and of a king.
And I try to look at each of those, tell stories about each of them from my own life, from the Bible, from American history, and hold those up as role models to men and say, man, you know, this is historically a Who we've been called to be.
This is who we need to be now in this present time to really transform our own lives and again to transform the destiny of this nation.
Men have the power to do that.
We need to call them into that.
Now, the virtues of a husband, of a father, even of a warrior are to some degree self-evident.
I can see right away where you're going with this.
But when you say the virtues of a king, that takes me by surprise.
So, what are the virtues of a king that an ordinary man or young boy should learn?
Yes, this is a great question.
You know, this is something that if you look way back in American history, you'll see this idea that, you know, every man a king.
I mean, every man is supposed to have the ability to govern himself and then to participate in this great project of liberty.
You know, one of my childhood heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, used to say that in America...
Every man, every individual has the responsibilities of a sovereign, of a king.
So what's a king able to do?
Well, he's able to order his own life, right?
He's able to get himself up.
He's able to discipline himself.
He's able to motivate himself.
And then to have the virtues of a king means to be able to bring order, to bring structure, and to bring liberty and flourishing to those around you.
And you do that by living for others, learning to give your strength away, to give your strength to other people, and to use it to see them flourish.
And I think the kind of power that men can have if they will live sacrificially, if they will live oriented towards others, is incredible.
And we need to call men up, young men especially, to that vision and say, use your life this way.
Use your life to transform the lives of those around you.
You use the phrase self-government in an unusual sense.
When most people think of self-government, they think, oh, we live in a democracy.
We vote every two and every four years.
We're self-governing in that sense.
But you actually use it in the sense that means the government of yourself.
In other words, self-control, deferred gratification, putting limits on your own appetites.
Talk a little bit about why that kind of self-government is important, not just to be successful in life, but also important for us as a society.
Yes, it's because the two kinds of self-government are connected.
The ability to master yourself, to say, you know, I'm not just going to live for my passions in the moment, whatever they may be, according to my whims.
I'm going to discipline myself.
I'm going to get a goal in life.
I'm going to orient myself towards what is good for me long-term, what is good for others long-term.
That self-mastery is connected with The ability to live in a free society and the ability to sustain a free society.
We need men who are strong and independent personally so that they can be strong and independent politically and can keep this liberty that we've been given.
Our founders understood that.
They linked self-mastery, personal self-discipline, and political self-government.
That's a tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, back to the Bible.
I think we need to recover it in this day and age.
We need to say to men, this is why we need you, to be strong, to be good, to learn to discipline yourself, because we need you to defend liberty.
When we come back, a final segment with Josh Hawley on his book, Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
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Don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. I'm back with Senator Josh Hawley.
We're talking about his book, Manhood, the Masculine Virtues America Needs.
Senator Hawley, this book is a pleasure to read because it moves from current events and personal experiences to the Bible.
But there's also an evocation of ancient Greek philosophy.
Now, there was a man roaming the streets of Athens named Epicurus.
And you say that, you argue that the Epicurean philosophy is in some ways the root of modern liberalism.
So, say a word about what that philosophy is and how does it connect to what the left is pushing in the culture today?
I think we can boil it down like this.
Epicureanism says that the self is God.
Pleasure is God.
There's no meaning in the universe.
There's no inherent purpose written in the cosmos.
It's all empty and meaningless.
You've got to find your own purpose and the only way you can do that is just to pursue pleasure.
That's really Epicureanism in a nutshell and that's really what modern liberalism boils down to.
It's pretty much all We're good to go.
There is a purpose in the universe.
It was created with a purpose.
We are part of that purpose.
Men are part of that purpose.
And to reclaim that sense of destiny and to protect our liberty, we need men who are willing to step up and say, no, the self is not going to be my God.
Pleasure is not going to be my God.
I'm going to serve others. I'm going to pursue the greater good.
I'm going to serve my family, my God, and my country and put those things first.
When we talk about sacrifice and we talk about virtues of courage and so on, it may seem that those are somehow disconnected from happiness.
But when Jefferson spoke about the pursuit of happiness, or even when the philosopher Locke talked about happiness, he talks about virtue as a means to happiness.
But, of course, I think the key distinction here is between happiness and pleasure, isn't it?
Because happiness sometimes involves deferred gratification.
You put pleasure to the side for now because you actually want this longer-term thing that's going to, in the end, give you more satisfaction than you could get from momentary pleasure.
So are we saying in effect, you're not denying that happiness is an important goal of human activity, right?
You're just saying that the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure in the way that Epicurus advocated, that's not the right way to go.
Yeah, when Jefferson talked about happiness, he was talking about the fulfillment that comes from being all that you can be, from having a life of purpose, from living into your destiny.
You know, that's fulfillment, that's true happiness.
And I think the modern left though, they don't take that view at all.
For them, it's just hedonism, as you say.
It's just momentary whims, momentary pleasures.
The problem is, you can't really set pleasure against the suffering of life and have the balances equal out.
for someone who is really experiencing the difficulties of life, encountering the hardships that life inevitably brings for all of us, and I share some of those from my own life in the book.
When you're up against that kind of hardship and difficulty, you've lost someone, you're struggling with a disease, you're struggling with a loss of a job, to say, oh, just go pursue pleasure, make yourself happy, that's not an answer.
That's why we have the largest rates of depression in this country we've ever had.
People don't have a sense of purpose.
The real path to happiness, as the Bible says, as the American founders knew, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, the real path to happiness is the path of self-giving.
It is the path of the pursuit of truth.
It is the path of service.
And we've known that for centuries.
We need to get back to it and hold those role models up again.
Isn't it true in a way that the trans phenomenon is a kind of substantiation of what you just said?
Because if it was the case that, hey, I'm in the wrong body, I really need to be a woman, I'm going to go undertake all these hormones and surgical treatments...
That should make me the happiest person in the world because I'm getting exactly what I wanted, and yet we notice that these people are very depressed, high rates of self-doubt, they're all in therapy, very high rates of suicide.
I mean, in some ways, the most violent critic of the trans phenomenon are the trans people because then they say, life isn't even worth living at all.
I'm out of here. So I think what you're getting at is that something has become very disfigured in our culture, and yet...
Sad to say, powerful institutions in our culture, not just the media.
Look at the medical community.
They're on board with all this.
They're encouraging it.
And do you think they're doing it for ideological reasons or just because it's a way to make a whole lot of money?
Yeah, it's probably both. I mean, I think we can't discount the role of money when it comes to these gender clinics that charge huge sums of money for these gender reassignment surgeries and gender hormone therapy for children, often without their consent.
You know, money's a big factor, but I do think ideology is key.
And for the left, I do think their radical trans ideology is We're good to go.
And you want to be a boy, then there's something wrong with you.
If you're a girl and you want to be a girl, then you should reconsider.
It's crazy stuff, Dinesh, and it leads to boys in women's sports.
It leads to men in girls' locker rooms.
It's insane. It's crazy.
And we should be bold in calling that out.
And saying that, no, actually, there is such a thing as permanence.
There is such a thing as eternal truths.
There is such a thing as eternity.
And we ought to live in accordance with that.
And you know what? There is such a thing as biological sex, male and female.
That's good. We're different.
That's good. That makes us complementary.
And we should preserve that and fight for that.
Guys, I think you can see why this is such an important book and one that you should check out.
It's Manhood, the Masculine Virtues America Needs.
Josh Hawley, thanks very much for joining me.
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Feel the difference. I'm discussing the phenomenon that is known as materialism, not the materialism of buying a bunch of stuff, but the materialism that says that we live in a closed universe.
All that there are in the universe are physical objects.
Atoms, molecules, quarks, electrons, everything is made up of that.
And all of that operates in accordance with scientific laws.
And there's nothing beyond that or outside of that.
So there's really no immaterial reality.
What we call immaterial reality is nothing more than the configuration or the interaction of these material objects.
Now, I've been trying to raise some objections to that, and I started with this idea of myself, the I. I also mentioned the idea of consciousness.
And here's an interesting question to think about.
What is the Darwinian account of consciousness?
Why do creatures need to be conscious at all?
Yeah. You could say, well, they need to be conscious in order to survive, Dinesh.
But that's not true, because quite obviously, creatures, including man, could do exactly all the things that we do now, operate in exactly the same way, cross the street, for example, when there's a car coming, or pursue food and reproduce in the human way.
And we could do all of those things without being conscious.
There is no Darwinian necessity that we be conscious.
And as I think the evolutionary biologists have thought about it, they've agreed that this is in fact true.
And they say, well, there's got to be some explanation of consciousness.
Well, we're going to come up with that.
Give us some time.
So this is a kind of, I call it a promissory materialism.
We believe consciousness is kind of an epiphenomenon, an extension of material reality, but we'll kind of explain later how atoms and molecules can somehow come together to produce something as radical and as original as subjective consciousness.
But hey, if somebody tells you, I don't have an explanation, but I'm going to have one in the future, well, that's obviously no explanation at all.
And until we have such an explanation, we cannot take something that is so fundamental, so irreducible as consciousness, the starting point of all our experience, and somehow say, yeah, we're going to account for that.
Why would we let conjecture and sort of unpaid intellectual IOUs make us abandon something so fundamental as our own self-awareness?
Why would we accept the mental as a projection of some kind of physical entity when, as far as we know, it is our indispensable window to all the physical reality that we can ever experience?
Now, in addition to consciousness, put consciousness to the side.
There's also intention and purpose.
And intention and purpose are absolutely critical for understanding the movement of that material object that we call man.
Now, the philosopher Brian McGee gives a pretty good example.
Let's say there's a human body that is sitting across the room from me, and the human body raises itself into a straight position, transports itself across the room, locates a kind of a silver box, removes a cigarette, places the cigarette into its mouth.
Now, I know, observing this, that this embodied object, this person that I call Tom...
Now, I know what Tom is doing, even though I've never smoked a cigarette.
But nevertheless, Tom's actions make sense to me.
And the way they make sense to me is because I'm thinking in terms of what Tom's motive is.
What is his intention? What is he going for, so to speak?
Now, the philosopher McGee says, he says, listen, if you try to give a purely scientific account of what I just described, you would have to give it in terms of atoms and molecules and the law of gravity that's holding him to the ground and transactions between different atoms.
And he goes, it would make no sense to anybody.
Nobody could make sense of this action purely in, quote, scientific terms.
We cannot understand other people as somehow made up of matter alone.
This is Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist, I think now at Harvard, and he says, Human behavior makes the most sense when it is explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams.
This all seems really kind of obvious, but the point we're trying to make here is that the purely material or physical understanding, if you bring in a pure scientist who Or even, let's just say, a pure scientist from another planet who knows nothing about human beings, and all they know is that human beings are made up of matter or physical objects, and you say, give an account of what human beings are, who they are, what they're doing, why they're acting in certain ways.
There's no way to do that in purely scientific terms.
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Welcome to my show!
Our body is made up of independent objects.
I've got fingers and toes.
I've also got atoms and molecules that are separate from each other, that interact with each other.
But we don't experience our lives as a kind of agglomeration of separate things.
We experience our lives as a unity.
So I have a sort of multitude of thoughts and feelings and experiences, but I kind of pull them all into a single unified field.
Immanuel Kant sort of grandiosely calls this the transcendental unity of apperception, meaning all of our perceptions are pulled together into this sort of almost unified singularity.
The matter that makes up my body changes all the time.
And yet, I remain the same person.
Remember, first I was young.
Now I'm middle-aged.
Well, I guess a little past middle age.
One day I'll be really old.
But through all these transformations, I'm still Dinesh.
I mean, think about it. If I meet my college roommate, let's just say after 30 years, whom I haven't seen, I see him at the airport...
I might be surprised.
Hey, the guy now has gray hair.
Hey, he weighs a lot more than he used to.
But I don't say, who the heck are you?
I don't assume that...
I'm still assuming it's the same guy.
It's my roommate. It's the same fellow.
Even though his physical constitution has changed, even though his size has changed, his shape has changed, nevertheless, he is the same individual.
So, in other words, I'm assuming a continuity through time that, again, a purely material understanding makes no sense of.
Our self-conception is also rooted in memory of past experiences.
And without this memory of the past, even our idea of the self wouldn't have any meaning at all.
Imagine if I couldn't remember the experiences I had yesterday or five minutes ago.
Or I wasn't sure that those experiences were had by the same person.
I remember them, but I'm not sure they were my experiences.
They were the experiences of another individual.
In such a case, I couldn't speak about my past, because it would just be the past, not mine.
My future, my whole sense of identity would completely collapse.
So my point is, through our memories of the past and our expectations of the future, we maintain a certain continuity of Through our lives.
Our lives have a kind of a priori unity that we don't have any reason to give up or discard in our self-understanding.
Therefore, the idea that we're just this bunch of chemicals and the chemicals keep changing over time, this really doesn't make sense of our lives in any way.
Point is that the materialist understanding is guilty of a crude form of reductionism.
So what's reductionism?
It's taking something that is a holistic thing and picking apart its elements and acting like if you can understand the elements, you can understand the thing, the overall thing.
The physicist Paul Davies gives an analogy.
He goes, an electrical engineer could give a complete and accurate description of an advertising display.
In terms of electric circuit theory, explaining exactly why and how each light is flashing, Yet the claim that the advertising display is therefore nothing but, this is the key phrase, nothing but.
Reductionism always says this is nothing but that.
Human beings are nothing but atoms and molecules.
And so he says, if you're looking at an advertising display, and let's say it's an ad for Pepsi or Bud Light for that matter, he goes, just giving a scientific explanation of what you're seeing on the billboard is not going to do it at all.
It doesn't even bring you close to understanding what's going on.
So, Davy's point is that a human being is a collection of atoms, kind of in the same way that a Shakespeare play is a collection of words.
Well, yeah, it is, but that hardly tells you anything.
Or a Beethoven symphony is a collection of notes.
Yeah, it is, but that hardly tells you anything about the music itself.
So it hardly follows that Othello is nothing more than just words.
Or that the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, is somehow just nothing more than a kind of an assembly of notes.
There's a holistic unity to Othello and also to Beethoven's Fifth.
Fifth, that seems ignored and downplayed by describing them in this way.
So, too, are human beings made up of atoms and molecules, but that doesn't even begin to describe the unity that we experience in our everyday lives.
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