Sometimes our intrepid Decoders like to focus on a specific rhetorical technique or recurrent pattern that can be observed across the Gurusphere. Here, Matt and Chris take a look at a bite-size portion of the philosopher John Gray's recent appearance on Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast. Gray was invited to outline his critique of New Atheism, and his response is a remarkable monologue that encompasses a vast range of intellectual topics, philosophical thinkers, and historical periods. We travel from ancient religion to medieval peasants and finally to (almost) the contemporary era. It is a veritable tour de force of an erudite philosopher's mind palace. So join us for a hike around through that palace and see if you agree with our assessment that the notable features reflect some common issues in academic, philosophical, and guru discourse. Alternatively, you might find Gray's approach vibes with your interests, and that it is Matt and Chris who are simply showcasing their grumpy materialist perspective (again). It will probably be impossible to tell unless we first consider what Spinoza said to Oldenburg in 1665 while taking due consideration of the Kokutai doctrine as elaborated by the Mito School in Meiji Japan, but that, of course, leads us to ancient Egypt and the pharaohs...LinksIs Moral Progress a Fantasy?: A Conversation with John Gray (Episode #354)
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's Mini Decoding with Matt, the psychologist, and Chris, the psychologist slash anthropologist.
Two things, really, but we don't need to dwell on that.
What we are here to dwell on today is a very specific technique that gurus, also some other people, academics, perhaps in general, are a little bit prone to, but I find a roller...
Egregious example of it in content recently, so I wanted to highlight.
So this is a mini decoding, but a specific guru-ish technique.
Understood.
Understood.
I haven't heard this yet.
No, you have not.
And it's from a recent podcast with Sam Harris.
No, it's not...
Focusing on Sam Harris, okay?
We've already had enough talking to, with, about Sam recently.
This is not about Sam.
It's something that his guest does.
And his guest in this instance is a philosopher called...
What's his name?
I had it a second ago.
Called John Gray.
And it's from a recent episode called Is Moral Progress a Fantasy?
Again, this is not important, the kind of topic of that.
We're not hugely invested in this issue of is moral progress possible?
No.
You would think it is, but nonetheless, John Craig might have some arguments against that.
But let's set aside the philosophers' tendencies.
I don't know how to put it.
What they like to do, arguing things that seem like you should be able to argue them.
At the end of the episode, there is a segment where they address the issue of new atheism and atheism in general, because apparently John Gray was quite a strong critic of the new atheists,
which includes Sam.
So Sam invites him at the end, you know, maybe what would you raise as your criticisms about atheism, new atheism?
And it's his response.
Where we get to see the technique that we're looking at today.
So why don't I play the start of the response and then I'll stop it and we can see if you pick up on what I'm getting at.
Okay?
Okay.
All right, let's go.
So here we go.
I think we should close on...
Atheism and, in particular, your criticism of new atheism.
And I guess I'll just put it to you.
What is it that you think we got wrong about religion?
Oh, well, a number of things.
One is that religion isn't just or even primarily an intellectual error.
I mean, if you approach the human animal in the spirit of scientific impartiality, you would observe that however religion is defined, it's not.
Perhaps ubiquitous in every human being, but it's nearly universal in human culture.
So if you started with that assumption, you might think it served some needs, human needs, or had some kind of functions in human life, quite apart from whether or not it involved intellectual mistakes or errors.
So the first thing is a kind of intellectualist or rationalist theory of why religion is wrong.
And of course, I've been rather caustic about that in some of my writings, because what I observe as an historic ideas is that
Okay, so starting off...
I think that's generally okay.
Yeah, that sounded okay to me.
That sounded cogent, made sense to me.
He's saying, look, my issue is that religion is ubiquitous.
It probably does fulfill some kind of functions and it's maybe limiting to understand it purely in terms of it being intellectually fallacious or not.
Yes, and no issue so far.
That was a reasonable point to raise.
This is one of my objections of the New Year feasts.
But it continues.
...who believed they shed every blast vestige of religious belief.
I'm not speaking of you or even of other new atheists, but those who became dialectical materialists or Marxist-Leninists or even scientific racists, for example.
Many of them were atheists.
They thought they'd sort of...
But what they hadn't removed in themselves was a need for some kind of...
Worldview or belief, which sustained their sense of value and importance in the universe, which, of course, is one of the things that religions do.
And of course, we have to bear in mind here that whatever the meaning of the word religion, I don't think dictionaries, Pinker often uses dictionaries, I don't think they're that useful here, but whatever it means, it includes more than monotheism, because there have been countless religions in the world, ancient Greek religion,
Chinese religion.
Indian religion, most of the religions in the world, including what may be the primordial human religion, animism, have not, which probably all human and pre-human, early human and pre-human cultures sustained, was the idea that the world is full of spirits.
And the idea that, for example, one of the unexamined distinctions that is often invoked by scientists is between natural and supernatural explanation, but that only really arises if you have a monotheistic or...
Some similar idea of creation, if you think as the ancient Greeks did or the EU.
Let's take a pause here.
Take a little break.
Take a little break, yeah.
So what did you pick up there?
The next, he's kind of laid on a bit more, right?
He has, he has.
And it's easy to forget what the original question was.
So Sam asked him, what's your problem with the new atheist take on religion, right?
He started off okay in that first section, but now he's talking about that religions, you know, there's lots of differences, not just monotheism, it all goes back to animism, and only the monotheistic ones had a distinction between the natural and the supernatural.
What else did he say?
Well, he also pointed out that there have been secular regimes which have been quite brutal, and he implied that, you know, they were still searching.
Like, they needed to fill the gap.
Of religions of the Marxists and the Nazis.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, he pointed out that some of the new atheists anyway came to be known to hold unsavory opinions.
Scientific racism.
Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, so that's a ding against them in his mind.
But, yeah, it's all a bit tangential, isn't it?
None of it is really addressing the question yet.
It might be building to a point, so let's continue.
Congolese.
Pygmies and the Aztecs did and so on, that the universe was more or less everlasting, but there were various gods that appeared in it and that the world was, if you thought that the natural world was full of gods, full of spirits, you wouldn't make this distinction between natural and supernatural.
You would just do things without making that.
It's an artifact.
Much of what passes for atheism is an artifact of monotheism.
In that although the beliefs are negated or reversed or turned upside down or rejected or refused, repudiated, the conceptual framework is still there.
And you can get out of that conceptual framework if you try and inhabit the conceptual framework of ancient Greek religion or ancient Indian religion or ancient Chinese religion or Aztec religion.
Of course, in all of them, you'll find an interesting feature, which is that the gods are normally plural, although in Indian religion, they're sometimes said to be aspects of a single, impersonal god.
So they're impersonal as well as personal gods.
But also they're not necessarily in any way benignly disposed towards human beings.
And this even includes some of the early Middle Eastern religions from which Christianity eventually emerged in Gnosticism and other Middle Eastern traditions.
There is something like Zoroastrianism.
our ashes and then in some of its forms assumes the permanence of two principles in the world light and dark and doesn't in some of its forms doesn't even assume that light will eventually prevail it could prevail but it might not prevail oh chris i i'm really beginning
to feel i feel
I think he's got the point.
He's got the point.
He's ready for it to continue because, yes, so again, the kind of position here seems to be that there are religions which Or cultures which do not make a distinction between supernatural and natural,
and that the kind of contemporary atheism is a product of modernity.
So it's kind of trapped into the monotheistic or modern religious framework.
But if you go back, you wouldn't have modern atheists.
If you went to cultures where there was no concept of secularity.
You wouldn't have secular people because it wouldn't make sense.
Right.
But he also says that, yeah, like atheism is like a reaction against a monotheistic religion.
It's not so...
It's just really a different facet of monotheism.
Anyway, but he doesn't really support that point.
I don't think he just says it.
Chris, he's not, he's gishkeloping.
He's not actually answering the question.
Well, how dare you, Matt?
What do you mean?
He's giving illustrative examples.
It's just, these are all relevant.
You know, Zoroastrium, he's now talking about.
Maybe we need all of this context about how there's many polytheistic religions, but Indian polytheism is maybe not quite the same because it could be different aspects of the one God.
I mean, this is all we hope.
It's all necessary background for us to understand the answer he's going to give, we assume, at some point to the original question.
Let's see where it's going.
Let's see where it's going.
So there's a whole wide range of phenomena that come under some...
The best book ever written, to my mind, by a philosopher, at least, on religion, is William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, because he looks at mental kind of subjective experiences of a variety of people, including himself.
He's very aware of the diversity of religions.
And so my first reason is that religion, whatever else it may be, is definitely not an intellectual mistake.
Not primarily.
It's something much more profound.
And you can see that from its near universality in human culture.
And the fact that once monotheism, Christian or Jewish or other monotheism, was rejected, the underlying need for some framework of...
I think it's a belief or of ideas or of a worldview of some kind of which bolsters the human sense of importance, both as an animal, a species in the cosmos, and as the individuals who comprise it went on and was expressed in the 20th century in many different,
and the 19th century and even the 18th century, but certainly in the 20th century, in ideas of history which are very like.
Some Christian ideas of history.
So, well, I think we did have a little short summary there, right?
Yeah, he did circle back to an answer there.
Let's give him credit.
He explained that, one, he thinks new atheists have got it wrong because religion is ubiquitous, so, you know, it must be doing something pretty important.
Useful.
Yeah.
And two, that he thinks that people need a kind of underlying...
World view, a moral framework, and so on.
And that if you don't have religion, then people like atheists will just substitute it with something else, probably something worse.
Marxism, or like the history of 20th century bad ideas.
And the second one, you hear a lot, don't you?
You hear it from religious conservatives who will say that the problem with leftists is that they've abandoned the good old-fashioned traditional religion.
They've substituted it with all these terrible new secular religions.
Yes, and he did also manage to point in a book recommendation, William James's Varieties of Religious Experience.
A good book, but sort of an aside, an indulgent aside, given the length of the answer.
And the other point that he wanted to make is that there, what is that one?
That, oh yes, that there's more different types of religion than monotheism.
Right, so atheism and the new atheists are mostly talking about monotheistic traditions.
They're not talking about animists and polytheists and so on.
That feels pretty weak though, right?
Because any atheistic argument that applies to Christianity is also going to apply to...
No, I mean, that's just...
Well, hold on.
Hold your horses.
He wasn't finished, so we're probably cutting him off before he's going to bring up the better arguments.
In which history is a meaningful moral drama.
By the way, that's completely different from some of the pre-Christian writings on history of the Greeks and the Romans, because although there's a diversity there, the idea that there was any overall moral meaning to history was absent.
History was, and even in Aristotle, I mean, he talks about the regimes that come and go in biological terms, like summer and winter, things grow up, they have a youth, then they decay.
In other words, he took for granted something which is now.
It was taken for granted by, I think, practically everybody until Christianity took hold.
And even up to the 18th century, lots and lots of people believed it.
The Renaissance thinkers all believed it.
They all assumed that history was, in terms of its ethical and political aspects, was cyclical.
So that even the best regimes that could exist among humans would fade and die.
Machiavelli says that categorically.
They all took that.
When they rediscovered pagan thought, as they called it, they didn't become new atheists.
They took the assumptions of the ancient world as being truer than those of the Christian world that had followed it.
That's to say they assumed that the same errors, the same atrocities, the same evils would recur and that they didn't deny that there were better and higher, worse civilizations.
Quite the contrary.
They possibly now would be condemned as white supremacists in that way, although some of them.
I admire non-Western civilizations as being as good or even superior, actually, as some of them did.
But they certainly assumed there were better and worse civilizations.
But they also assumed that the best civilizations wouldn't last all that long and would fade away because of certain and replaced by others that would be worse, at least for a while, possibly long while, centuries or millennia, because of the contradictions within human beings.
Okay.
So we're traversing new territory now, aren't we?
We're now talking about how medieval people saw the world and how they were influenced when they rediscovered pagan thinking.
But either way, they saw things as cyclical and things really wouldn't get better.
But how has this got anything to do with...
Well, I think the argument here is that the new atheists are imagining that you can progress.
Beyond religious tradition and conventions to more enlightened, secular, scientific notion.
And he's contrasting that with...
But medieval peasants didn't believe that, so...
Yes, correct.
Renaissance poets and various other people haven't agreed that.
And I think what he actually wants to emphasize there is that it's a Christian.
This notion of progress, that society progresses and whatnot.
But then he had to deal with the fact that there were perceived hierarchies in better and lower societies.
But, you know, some of them didn't think exactly.
So anyway, he's ended up kind of dealing with the counter examples and whatnot.
But so that's the argument, right?
Is that maybe new atheists, again, they're just really a variety of Christians or react.
Yeah, but you could be...
Like, just being an atheist doesn't...
Like, progress isn't bound into it, surely.
I mean, have I misunderstood atheism?
Does it necessarily involve a notion of technological and social progress?
Well, maybe he would say the new atheists suggest that it does.
But again, Matt, you're interrupting him.
He's not...
This is...
It's building up.
It's layering up.
It's like a cake.
This is just the foundational level.
It's going to have a nice topping shortly.
So just have patience.
In what used to be called human nature, and one of the things about all these thinkers is that they assumed there was such a thing as human nature.
Machiavelli thought that, and his people who wrote around that time thought that, and they thought that these contradictions within human nature, propensity to...
Make catastrophic decisions to even make them willingly, which had been explored not by the ancient Greek philosophers, I think, so much as by the ancient Greek dramatists, actually.
They were constitutive of human beings.
They were coterminous with human beings.
And for that reason, wouldn't go away.
So Machiavelli was a great patriot in his way, a great idealist, a great optimist, almost, in wanting to have a republican form of government.
In Italy of his time, at least at the level of a nation, of a city-state.
But he thought that even that would, you could have it for a period, a fairly long period, but it would fade away.
It would be defeated by combinations of circumstances.
And that would happen inexorably and inevitably and over time and would be recurrently repeated and nothing would ultimately be learned except that.
Except that.
That's how history is and was and will be.
And that's essentially my view.
So, I think he was just reiterating the point there that there was, you know, who did he highlight?
I've blanked it out of my mind.
Well, it was Machiavelli.
Oh, Machiavelli, right.
But wasn't there a Greek person involved?
Well, he mentioned Greek playwrights, I suppose, like Euripides.
Okay, but so apparently Machiavelli...
Was somebody that held this cyclical notion that, you know, society would inevitably collapse.
I did read The Prince, but I don't remember that bit.
But maybe he wrote it somewhere else.
I've got a bad memory, I'll say.
But anyway, Machiavelli...
I did get that point, though.
Let me get this straight.
I mean, so yes, so he was traversing all of this thought, right?
renaissance medieval ancient thought which was not necessarily christian but it was definitely you know religious and spiritual and didn't you know that all had and in that world
that he identifies in all these worldviews, whether it's a medieval peasant or Machiavelli or a Greek playwright, is that things can't change.
I mean, they can't change permanently.
There can't be any kind of progress, like real change.
Things could be good for a while, then they become bad for a while, and things are cyclical.
And I think most people are aware of that, like medieval peasants have this, like,
Because there was very little progress.
I mean, for long periods of time, people couldn't really discern it.
So it was a more natural kind of view of the world and the seasons and all that.
So I get that.
So his argument is because he thinks that there can't really be any progress and a new atheism, according to him, involves an assumption that there has to be some kind of...
Human progress, a permanent change in the way things are.
I don't know why that is, I assume, to change from being religious to not being religious, like permanently, maybe?
Is that the change that he's talking about?
And for that reason, the new atheists have got it all wrong.
I mean, that seems insane to me.
But basically saying, because medieval peasants didn't think this was true, then...
Not just medieval peasants, the Machiavelli and Greek playwrights and Indian philosophers and so on.
But yes, that does seem the argument, but I think you haven't quite got it, Matt.
Maybe more examples will help.
So it has quite a lot of predecessors in modern European civilization, but it's not the view of practically any of it, because what most of the new atheists said was that they believed that ethics and politics were backward.
In that they could advance as rapidly and as consistently and as consecutively and cumulatively as ethics, but they just haven't for various reasons.
I don't believe that's even right.
I'm on Machiavelli's side there.
By the way, Machiavelli in that respect is a deeper thinker or a truer thinker than Hobbes because Hobbes recognizes that all regimes tend to fall apart and you have states of nature then supervening.
States and regimes are mortal.
But he does sort of occasionally, at least now, if only my thoughts, my way of thinking, my principles, his theory of the social contract, his rationalist sort of ideas could be adopted by a prince, then we could set up a state which would last a very, very long time.
Machiavelli never thinks that, because there's much more conflict within the human animal, even separate, even within the single human animal.
In Machiavelli, and it's from those conflicts that both what Enlightenment thinkers might call progress, let's call it betterment, and also what they would call regress, let's call it barbarism.
They both come from the same source.
And as I've put it, I always strive to put difficult thoughts in the simplest terms possible.
I've said civilization is natural for the human animal, but so is barbarism.
So just to be clear, Hobbes, He did have a similar thought, but he wasn't as, you know, he thought that if people adopted his philosophy, the system could last longer.
So he's a bit not as good as Machiavelli.
This was important to kind of veer off into.
And as we could see from this, John Gray likes to put difficult, complex things into very short, concise descriptions.
And he says, For humans, it's natural for them to create civilization, and it's also natural for them to be barbarous.
We are not purely good creatures.
And this relates to new atheism.
How?
This is my question.
Okay, okay.
I see the problem.
You haven't got it yet, Matt.
It's not finished yet.
Look, he'll help.
Both are natural.
I mean, barbarism can last an awful long time.
There was the long periods in the history of China, the wars of the warring states, in Russia at the time of troubles, and of course in Europe, in the wars of religion.
Immensely destructive wars.
30% of the population being killed off one way or the other in Central Europe.
A long, long time.
Then you have a period in which that experience is still so vivid in memory, and you have a period in which...
People explore ideas of toleration and peaceful coexistence, and they get partially embodied.
And I think, by the way, there might be a history of ideas, difference between us, because my view of that, of where toleration comes from, is it comes from Job, ultimately from the Book of Job, and from certain elements in Christianity.
In other words, it comes from theism, not from the secular enlightenment, because the further away the secular enlightenment got away from Judaism and Christianity, the more illiberal.
It became, and you eventually get things like, oh, because Comte, who certainly was an Enlightenment thinker, everybody thought he was, and he thought he was, but he was a complete anti-liberal.
He hated liberalism, except as a sort of transition point between medievalism, which he liked, which he admired, medieval Catholicism he admired as an organic society, as he called it, but was based on magic and religion,
so that wasn't good, to a new society, the technocracy, which would also be organica.
Did that help?
You've pieced it together.
We're now on the comp, I think, don't we?
I feel like he's taking us by the hand and taking us for a walk around his mind palace.
This reminds me a bit of Jordan Peterson.
He's clearly a guy who's got a lot of interests, likes reading philosophy, likes reading history, likes reading the classics, and he's passionate about them.
And they're all woven in there, in this magical mystery tour that he's taking us on.
But I keep coming back to the question.
What has this got to do with the point?
Is he just rambling?
Is he senile?
Is he an academic?
Is he a professor?
I have questions.
He is an academic philosopher.
I don't think he's senile.
But I do think this is extremely indulgent because, yes, we are pausing that and stuff, but you have to realize that's breaking up what is an unbroken...
Monologue, right?
This has been going now for about five or six minutes.
And he's now, what is he doing?
He's detailing the wars of the world, all the history of conflict.
And Nye has gone down to talk about Comte and his philosophy and what his views about technocracies and whatnot are.
And well, let's see, maybe we'll get back to it.
We have to have faith.
We have to assume that this is all necessary background.
To the definitive answer.
Based on science.
By the way, I think it's no accident, I know one often says this, but I think this is true, that among Comte's disciples was the French leader, intellectual leader of Action Francaise, Charles Morat, the anti-Semitic, pro-fascist thinker.
He was a great admirer of Comte.
And he thought, this is what we want.
I mean, for most of his life, Morat was an atheist.
In fact, he probably died an atheist, I suspect, but I can't know that.
But he favoured propping up.
He liked the clerical fascist regimes of Europe for propping up or keeping alive a certain kind of neo-feudal order.
And he detested liberalism in all of its forms.
And this sort of brings out the point that the associate, when people talk about liberal Enlightenment values, they're talking about something that really exists in the Enlightenment.
There is a tradition of it in Locke and Mill in different forms.
Utilitarian rights-based and some continental European thinkers, Benjamin Constant, and others that really exist.
But there are also lots and lots and lots of Enlightenment thinkers who were either non-liberal or actively anti-liberal.
Some of the founders of modern criminology, for example, Lombroso, Cesario Lombroso, he thought of himself as an Enlightenment thinker and he said, based it on Comte, because Comte said, ultimately, human sciences are all based on physiology.
It's easy to see how that could turn into racism, as it then did.
In the Nazis, who, on the one hand, revived Christian anti-Semitic demons.
So we're now...
Well, at least we're getting closer to the modern period, right?
We've got the Enlightenment.
We're into Lombroso and his kind of physiology of criminology and this, right?
And you can see...
Sometimes the little thing that he wants to throw in, that there was an admirer of Comte who was a pro-fascist and probably also an atheist.
He can't be sure, but he's pretty sure he was.
And he appears that he liked fascism, right?
And there were Enlightenment thinkers who weren't liberals, so that's a problem, right?
That's another ding against the New Atheists, I think.
Yeah.
I mean, well, I've got to hand it to Sam Harris.
I mean, the man can monologue, but he can also take a monologue like a champion.
I'm imagining him sitting there impassively, like a rock, just absorbing it all.
Yeah, and it's not done, man.
We're not done.
So, Lombroso.
He had some problems.
He's probably an atheist.
What else?
On the other hand, said that it could be formulated in scientific terms, which of course was false, but it gave their movement a kind of ideology which was consistent with the modern idea that science is the paradigm of knowledge.
So there's a whole variety of reasons why, and in my book, as you remember, my seven types of atheism, there are seven that I distinguish.
Not only seven, I'm sure there could be more.
And there are only two that I strongly condemn, five of them.
And like the last two, which is the kind of atheism one finds in writers such as Schopenhauer, not Nietzsche, although I have learned a lot from Nietzsche.
He was a radical humanist.
He thought that a small category of human beings could impose...
Sorry, we need to talk about Nietzsche a little bit because you might mistake him for...
For one of the good atheists, but he's not.
He's one of the five...
Well, no, I think he's going to say that he is a good atheist because you might mistakenly classify him as a bad atheist, but he's a good atheist for reasons that we're about to hear.
Okay.
It was a certain meaning on history by the act of will.
I think it's a complete fantasy and illusion.
And he also thought that he was the son of a pastor.
He was much more steeped in Christianity than Schopenhauer, who I think stepped outside of it more radically.
Well, Schopenhauer was basically a Buddhist with a bad attitude, as far as I can tell.
Well, I know you're interested, but yes, he was.
The part of Buddhism he never really quite took on board was compassion.
Yeah, as evidenced by the moment he...
Didn't he hurl his landlady down a flight of stairs or something?
He knocked her down a flight of stairs, and for some reason or other she irritated him.
And when she died, he wrote, I can't remember, which means the burden goes, the old woman has died.
So he was pleased that she was out of the way.
He was certainly not a practicing Buddhist of the kind that most Buddhist, but he did
So we had a sidetrack there, partly because of Sam's fault.
Schopenhauer?
Yeah, not the atomic bomb guy.
So he liked Buddhism, but he doesn't practice compassion.
He pushed his...
Person down the stairs, Nietzsche.
Actually, it turned out he didn't like some bit about Nietzsche.
I was wrong.
So Nietzsche, not totally bad, but kind of a bad atheist.
But Schopenhauer's family, he had some religious involvement more.
So it's unclear.
Does that really, is that so important?
But okay, we must be rounding the point.
The time is running out of the podcast.
Take a step that others didn't take, which is when he rejected the Christianized philosophy of history that Hegel, his contemporary whom he hated, and he actually put his lectures on at the same time as Hegel's, but nobody came to Schopenhauer's lectures, so it didn't really work.
He thought that Hegel was sort of a court philosopher of Prussian authoritarianism, which I think to some extent he was, as well as a mystagogue.
Also unreadable as well.
A very unreadable way.
Schopenhauer is very readable.
Very readable.
Wonderful stylist, even in English.
He thought that history was what the Buddhists, but even more the Hindus, the Vedantic thinkers thought it was, namely a troubled dream, a succession of troubled dreams that had had no meaning.
And that was a view, you can find it in the ancient world, the pre-Christian world, in Gnosticism and in other traditions as well.
But it was definitely not the view that was accepted.
In 19th century Europe.
So Nietzsche was much closer, oddly enough, to the European consensus of his day in suggesting that some human beings, a small category of human beings, could impose that.
By the way, I recently reviewed...
So Nietzsche...
Lichy had a view that was...
I've got lost.
Hegel, he didn't like...
Schopenhauer didn't like Hegel.
He put his lectures at the same time, but nobody went to them.
And then there was the...
Hegel had a view about time being a dream or something, and ancient people all...
So we're back at the point that ancient people...
Have different cyclical concepts.
Yeah, that's right.
History is a dream.
Nothing really means anything in history.
And this has all got something to do with new atheism.
I mean, I think it does thematically, right?
Because he kind of, you know, he tied it to his kind of critique about new atheists assume progress.
But essentially all he said so far is some people Haven't fought like that throughout history, including some Enlightenment figures.
I've said it there in two sentences.
One thing that you'll notice, and he just did it here, but don't worry, he'll do it again, is that when he reaches a kind of end point of a thing, he will then say, by the way, or on that point.
Or on the other hand.
Yeah.
Continue on.
And maybe Sam doesn't get it.
You know, it is the case that sometimes people don't pay attention to whether the other people have already understood their point and they continue to provide examples and illustrations and elaborations.
But it does feel indulgent.
Like, the thing which strikes me is, like, isn't there a sense that, like, maybe you've been going on?
For a while.
And why it's nice to give examples and go on tangents, like, there's another person there, right?
And sure, it's an interview, but, like, you know.
If you're being asked a pretty specific and pretty straightforward question, I think it's a good idea to try to give a succinct and straightforward answer.
I mean, it's not clear that he's answered the question at all to me, except as far as what you just said, which is, In his view, somehow atheism requires some degree of progress.
I don't know why.
New atheism.
I seriously do not know why.
Do you know why?
Why does atheism...
New atheism.
He said five types of atheists are okay.
Sorry.
Why does new atheism require that there is progress, social and historical progress?
Yeah, because he's saying that the new atheists have like a naive childish view of the world that sees that you can go from...
Tradition and convention and religious dogma to science and reason.
So yeah, that's what I thought too.
So his point is, that's silly because nothing can ever change because Machiavelli or Hegel and blah-de-blah.
Yeah, he doesn't agree that there's progress, but other people have also said that there's no progress, including the Enlightenment thinkers.
This doesn't make sense.
Imagine if you said, look, Chris, you said, Matt, I'm going to go on a diet.
I'm going to become a vegetarian.
I'll go, don't be silly, Chris.
You can't do that because nothing ever changes.
You can't.
That's silly, right?
You weren't a vegetarian before.
How can you change from not being a vegetarian to a vegetarian?
Hegel said this and Nietzsche said that and the agents believed this.
You need to go on for quite a bit longer.
Isn't that a stretch to say that?
Like, you could say that about anything, any idea, like, or atheism, what about democracy or anything?
No, no, that's impossible.
Yeah, well, I think he, in general, he doesn't like the New Atheist because, in general, his broader thing is that the assumption of progress is wrong.
Like, so, New Atheists, insofar as they are embodying a desire for a progress in thinking, are wrong.
Yeah.
But his arguments here, yeah, there does seem to be...
This is my issue, right?
Like, you strip away all of the name-dropping.
And, you know, he's a very erudite guy.
He's obviously, you know...
Yeah, he knows the people he's talking about.
He is learned.
Good God!
He is learned.
But, I mean, this is baffling with bullshit, isn't it?
Like, you've got, like, the fundamental bones of his case is just what we just said.
And when you just say it like that, it sounds pretty stupid.
But if you...
It just sounds weak.
Well, it's just a weak argument.
You know, it is.
But if you add in this great, big, long, discursive tour of all of Western thought from the ancients to...
Not just Western thought.
No.
It's true.
Well thought through all of recorded history, then, you know, maybe you don't notice that that's the fundamental point he's making.
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
Let's see.
It's almost at an end.
It might come to a kind of summary point.
Some of your listeners may be the first book by Bronze Age Pervert.
And this was in the New States one.
They can look it up if they want.
I think there's a paywall, but you can look at two or three articles without paying any money.
And there I went back to Ayn Rand, who, of course, emigrated from Russia.
And when she emigrated from Russia...
I think 1922 or 1923 or something like that.
But from about 1890 to about 1920, the dominant, the biggest intellectual influence in Russia had not been Marx or Marxism, it had been Nietzsche.
And there were Nietzsche and everything.
Nietzsche and liberals, Nietzsche and communists, Nietzsche and nationalists, Nietzsche and orthodox Christians, everything.
And one of the things that entertained me in, I've never been a Randian, but in her first book, We the Living, was the sections that she later took out in which she says, which the hero.
A thinly fictionalized version of herself says to her Bolshevik lover, I detest your ideals, but I love your methods.
So, maybe not, Matt.
Maybe we should give up at this point because...
I am beginning to lose hope.
He's got the unwind and a book review he wrote of Bronze Age Perverts books.
Bronze Age Perverts being an online alt-right guy.
But is it necessary to go into Ayn Rand's history of emigration and her jokes that she makes in individual segments of her book that you like?
Again, the level of indulgence seems very high.
And this is something that every academic is familiar with at a conference where it's kind of comedy trope where somebody says, it's more of a comment.
And they proceed to blather on endlessly about their ideas without really posing the question to a person who ostensibly they're supposed to be engaging with.
And maybe John Gray, I hear that his books are more tightly written or whatever the case might be.
But I think this is really, it is an academic disease, but it's a philosopher disease and a guru disease.
That they really go on elaborate, like, verbal wanderings, danderings, around.
And they like to sprinkle it with the people that they've met, with the big books, the weirdy tomes, the figures that they know.
And I guess some of it is relevant, but, like, it did his points.
We really need all of these examples at this length, because we're not finished yet.
I mean, we are.
We're going to stop here.
But, like, we're at 1920.
No, we got slightly past the Enlightenment, but we're still not up.
Could have been talking about Dawkins and Hitchens.
Yeah, I mean, this is...
The New Atheists.
He's got one of them right in front of him.
Yeah, it's incredibly self-indulgent, isn't it?
And it is like Jordan Peterson.
It reminds me of him a lot.
But, you know, it's also a gish galop, isn't it?
I think it can be...
Yeah, what's someone supposed to say at the end of this?
Yeah, so that was your complaints about the New Atheists.
And that's one of the things that people do, is that...
They kind of layer in so many things that by the time that you have the point to respond, and usually at the end, they'll say something controversial as well.
Well, and another point is blah, blah, blah.
And then your option is, do I try and work my way back through all of that?
Or do I move on to the next question?
Because we've only got like five minutes left right now, and this is going to take to debate his characterization of Nietzsche.
Is that worth your time?
But in most conversations that you have in life, people would observe a social cue where, oh, I've been monologuing for quite a long time.
And you did just ask me a pretty straightforward set question.
So let me just say, this is what I meant.
And move on.
But this is not the way of podcasts and gurus.
It's almost a desirable characteristic in podcast world.
I mean, it's not.
It's not desirable, but some people, I think, mistake that for illustrating the profundity and depth of your thought, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think a good way to evaluate these things is, one, you've got to be more concise.
If someone asks you a direct question, and this is not a question that he's not unprepared for, he's written books about this, right?
So, a bit like a PhD student who's asked to give the elevator pitch or the three-minute...
Description of what they're doing for their PhD.
You should be able to distill it into a nicely organized little response, right?
And he didn't.
So that's his first crime, right?
He's spoken for far, far too long on too many relevant points, as you said.
The second crime is that he just hasn't answered the question, not to my satisfaction.
Like, imagine if you set an essay test for a student and he said...
Oh, and they submitted this.
Explain the main objection to new atheism from so-and-so's point of view.
And imagine if they gave you and you were 2,000 words in and you were traversing Ayn Rand's immigration from Russia, then you would fail them because that's a shitty answer to the question.
And this guy's a professor.
He should be doing better, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
It does remind me, you know, of...
Tucker, Carson, whenever Putin said, to answer that, let me first provide a brief history of Russia.
And like 35 minutes later, he's still talking about Peter the Creator or whatever.
So, yeah, it does feel a bit like that.
And the thing here is just to say that this isn't an isolated example where this...
It's kind of particularly noticeable.
When I was listening to it, I just realized after a while, wait, this is the same.
It's the same question.
And it goes on.
But this happens a lot.
You may have heard it on other podcasts recently with other guests where people do this.
And there are options.
The other person in the conversation can interrupt them and be like, but the thing is that, especially in an interview context, there's a sort of dynamic where That would be rude in just terms of the actual interaction habitus that we have.
Like if you say, sorry, you're going on for too long.
We really need to get to the next question.
That is taken as like you being rude and the person is your guest.
So you shouldn't do that.
And the audience, at least some of the audience definitely doesn't like it, right?
You shouldn't.
Let them finish.
Let them elaborate further.
Oh, yes.
Some of them don't.
Though if you go to Sam Harris's Reddit and look, a lot of people picked up on this monologuing tendency and they were not happy about it.
Yeah, I'm sure they apply that consistently.
I hope they do across different people that they might be more positively inclined to who, if they have tendencies to monologue, that they would also not like that.
That's neither here nor there.
It's just a common dimension.
So, yes, I thought this was interesting because it's a particularly bad example or good example.
It's a good example of a common thing.
Yeah, of a bad tendency of people.
And I suspect that philosophers and academics and older philosophers and academics are probably in the Venn diagram of...
Prolific monologues, right?
Like they're right there.
But it's also got to do with that style of thinking, isn't it?
And we talked about this a lot way back when we covered Jordan Peterson, where that sort of poetic scattergun kind of thing, where there's this thing and that thing and that thing, and they're sort of thematically related in some vague fuzzy way.
I think there's a kind of person for whom, both in the audience and the people who do it, for whom that kind of thing is...
Yeah, reasoning is appealing.
I've sketched it out in like an impressionistic, allegorical sketch that I just find it incredibly frustrating because I just, maybe it's just a personal, to some degree, maybe it's a personal preference, but I, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, well, I get it.
Well, that's all for today, Matt.
We had a look at the piece of content, but yeah, maybe you should listen to the rest of it if you want to find out where it goes.
There's still a lot more time to cover.
So how long, instead of interest, how long in totem was his answer?
How many minutes?
I genuinely don't know, but it's over 10 minutes.
Over 10 minutes.
And it's not done yet.
Because it's hard to tell.
Because it bleeds into another point.
And then they start discussing that.
So it never actually comes to that.
I feel like we'll never get to hear just a clear, direct answer to the question.
I think he did.
I mean, he'd give it.
Somewhere in the middle.
It's just that it was those kind of weak points, which is some people don't believe in...
Some people don't believe that historical change is possible.
So the new atheists...
Lots of people have been religious throughout history, so it's probably doing something.
And if you don't have religion, you'll replace it with something worse.
So these are all...
Change is impossible anyway.
So, you know, don't try to think that the world could...
Get better because it will collapse.
Societies will eventually collapse.
Cool, cool, cool.
Something to think about there.
So, well, that's it, Matt.
Anyway, that's it.
Sorry, professor.
What's his name again?
John Gray.
John Gray.
Sorry, Professor Gray.
No right to reply.
Sorry.
You're not coming on.
All right.
And just one point, though.
The thing is about Euclides.
Right.
Shut up.
Sophocles!
Sophocles had a mistress that he didn't like much.
Oh, really?
Althusser.
Didn't he beat his wife to death?
Yeah.
The Marxist?
And he was Marxist.
And he was an atheist too, wasn't he?
Or he knew someone who was an atheist.
He was probably an atheist.
I can't say for certain.
But he did kill his wife and he was, you know, a historical materialist.
And those are ideas that, you know, fertilized the tyrannies of the 20th century.
Right, the Nazis.
I mean, yes, they reference some Christian things, but not in the way that the Catholic Church would approve of.
