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Oct. 16, 2019 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:32:54
Douglas Murray | Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast #5

Douglas Murray, best selling author of 5 books including "The Strange Death of Europe" and "The Madness of Crowds" joins Bret Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast to discuss wide range of controversial topics. Find and Help Support this work below: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bretweinstein/ Twitter: @BretWeinstein https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein Support is also welcome via Paypal: https://paypal.me/bretweinstein Support the Show.

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Hey folks, welcome to another episode of the Dark Horse Podcast.
I'm your host, Brett Weinstein, and with me today via remote link is my good friend, Douglas Murray.
Welcome, Douglas.
Great to be with you, Brett.
Well, I'm really glad you agreed to join me for this, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.
I should confess up front that I have not read your book, but let me tell you something.
I did something better.
I had you read your book to me.
Now in this case, the audiobook is read by you, and while that's a lovely option in many cases, your voice is so resonant and your choice of wording and diction is so precise and careful that having you read it is Even more delightful than reading it on the page.
So for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing, I would highly recommend the audio version of this book, which Douglas reads, and I would suggest at least go through a few chapters at regular speed so you can hear just how carefully put together this lovely book is.
I also want to say a couple things about this book and maybe set the discussion in a particular direction.
In some ways I didn't need this book because my life, its trajectory, has put me in a circumstance.
I'm obviously thoroughly steeped in the various contradictions of intersectionality and the result of what happens when they're deployed into the world.
However, I do think that your book is potentially revolutionary from the point of view of steering our way out of the mess that we find ourselves in.
It was really so brilliantly argued and so thorough and so careful.
I mean, you really bend over backwards to look into these matters and let them indict themselves rather than Caricaturing the arguments on the other side, for example.
So, thank you for writing it, for one thing, and it has my strongest recommendation for people to pick it up.
Whatever sides of these issues they find themselves on, it is well worth us engaging.
Well, thank you very much for that.
I'm delighted you say that, and I'm delighted that the audiobook comes across well.
I did it myself, but you won't be surprised to learn I haven't actually listened to it myself.
No, that does not surprise me at all, as you've guessed.
But yes, it does come across wonderfully.
I don't know if other people have this experience, but I find that if I know somebody's voice well, then if I'm reading, I actually hear their voice.
So in some sense, this was a little bit like the experience of reading it, but it was just easier.
You know, I could turn it on.
It's been four days in the studio in South London locked up to do it but I actually had a whale of a time doing it funnily enough and I'm just delighted that Readers have been enjoying it or listeners have been enjoying it.
But, and I have to say a number of times in the recording process, I did what we call corpse as an Americanism.
When you corpse on stage, it's when you just can't stop laughing.
And the performance has to stop.
And I corpsed several times whilst doing the audio version of this book.
And I had to explain to the sound engineers, I'm not laughing at my own jokes.
I'm laughing at the unbelievable ridiculousness of some of the things I'm having to read out here.
Yes, that's one of the delights in the book, is that you read other people's words as they present their own argument, and the glaring contradictions and the total lack of self-awareness for some of these people is just utterly evident.
Yes, yes.
You just have to sort of show it.
You know, you don't have to tell particularly with it, do you?
Yes, and I love the approach.
It's very easy because the argument against the intersectional portrayal of the world and the plan is so absurd.
There's a temptation to really, you know, really bring the point home and you can oversell it very easily, but you've gone the other direction by very carefully Stating the case, letting them present it in their own words, and then interpreting what the meaning must be, it's very effective at, well, a number of jobs.
So, I said something about trying to set the interview in motion.
You've done a lot of podcasts and other interviews of late, and I don't want to duplicate them.
I don't think there's any need to.
But I think there's something else that we can do here.
So, Interesting, in the book you use a particular analogy in multiple places, and it's one that I was surprised and delighted to find you using, because I use the exact analogy, and in fact, I reference the same weapons system with respect to the position I've been in.
And the analogy has to do with mine clearing.
Mine, as in military mines.
And there's this weapon system which effectively a tank launches a missile that drags a cable behind it over a minefield.
The cable hits the ground, explodes, and detonates all the mines adjacent to it, creating a path through the minefield, right?
So some of us, for whatever reason, have the ability to endure certain challenges that come back when we engage certain topics.
Talking about trans rights, for example, or race has been fatal to uh, careers and, uh, it has caused people to retreat into private life and things like that.
But some of us are able to explode these mines and the hope, you know, the, the reason to use mines as an analogy is that once exploded, it creates the opportunity for others to, to come through.
So I sort of see us as strangely in the same business and that business is exploding mines that have been placed there to manipulate and corral so that others can, uh, more boldly explore the landscape.
So anyway, what I'm hoping is that in this discussion we can utilize that instinct towards mind clearing to explore some of this space in a way that might be productive.
I like the sound of it already, Brad.
Awesome.
Alright, so, by the way, awesome is an American expression meaning quite good.
Right.
Right, sorry.
I will attempt to resist making... Americanism for could be worse.
Right, exactly.
All right, so let's see, where to begin?
There is something Curious about the portrayal of you in the media and then the actual experience of you as a person in informal context and the experience of reading your writing.
Mm-hmm.
Do you consider yourself a conservative?
Yes, in lots of ways.
I'm not that wild about political labels and the older I get, the less wild I am about them.
My experience is that when you're young or younger, you need labels because you need to orient yourself in the world and you want to try to orient the world towards yourself and how you should view it and it should view you.
And the older you get, generally I think that becomes less important.
Yes, I mean, there's lots of things about me that I would regard as being conservative.
Probably, broadly speaking, I prefer things that are good to remain the same than to change.
I don't like change for change's sake, but I suppose that also these things change across borders, don't they?
I mean, lots of things about my type of Politics, such as they are, wouldn't be conservative, especially in an American context, for instance.
So all of these terms become slightly difficult to use at some level.
But yes, I'd certainly say I'm more conservative than I am a leftist, yeah.
Interesting.
So, the description that you give of a conservative, somebody who doesn't like change for change's sake, and you want things that work to stay the same, that sounds to me a little bit like being an adult, not being a conservative.
Well, the two may be the same thing.
Well, here's the question though, and this is why I raised the topic, is I would describe myself as a radical, and I would also, if I go further, would say I am a reluctant radical because I'm terrified of change.
The only reason I'm a radical is because I believe radical change is required by our circumstance.
But I am frightened by the tendency on the left to see only the upside of proposals and to get caught off guard by the unintended consequences.
Yeah.
So, and I've also said that I am a radical who hopes to live in a world so good that I get to be a conservative.
Now, my guess is you can translate all these things.
They're all effectively rephrasings of the same point.
And just as I can say, well, I want to be a conservative, but the world has to be in a position that change would be a bad idea before that makes sense, in the same way that that hints at the adult portrayal of conservatism That you paint.
When I read your book, or when I have you read your book to me, what I detect is the heart of a liberal.
Ah.
Yes.
I think it's very clearly there.
The main conservative newspaper here, The Telegraph, in reviewing The Madness of Crowds, said, you know, actually it's perfectly plain from this book that Douglas Murray is an old-fashioned liberal at heart.
Well, but I don't even want to say old-fashioned because, you know, the classical liberal label has become a bit of a shield for certain things.
I hear a bold...
A liberal vision, right?
Not just a desire for tolerance, but you embrace in this book, and in fact you make a very powerful argument for, you know, for love.
You mention it several times explicitly in terms of how we should be dealing with each other.
And not only do I resonate with the portrayal, but I do find it Very much outside of what most people would view as conservative.
So I see you trying to conserve structures that work, but I see you embracing a vision, and in fact, much of your defense is predicated on the fact that it's not that things are great, but that we are getting better.
We have been getting better at them, and that trajectory, you'd be foolish to upend it willy-nilly.
Yes, I think that's a fair summary of what I think, is that on all of the rights issues I'm describing in the book, it's unarguable that they've got better, and it's unarguable as well that at some stage each of them, for most of them along the way quite a while, have been opposed by people who didn't want anything much to change.
So there's obviously an inherent question there, which is always a question about the The battle that goes on between, you know, progressivism and conservatism, which is that, broadly speaking, conservatives fight the next battle they're about to lose, and then move on and change the ground accordingly.
And indeed, the progressives change the ground accordingly.
And actually, one of the only ways I think one can understand why our societies tend to be almost 50-50 torn between these two instincts is because it is exactly the difficult Question to work out.
When is it a good time to fundamentally alter an institution?
And when is staying with what you have a better choice?
Or when can a very soft form of that change be allowed to occur?
Yes, I mean, I don't believe in progress as
a teleological force or anything like that, but obviously it's demonstrable that things get better for certain groups at certain times, certain people at certain times, but of course the corollary of that is that they also can get worse, which is the bit I think in the progressive vision which is always missing, is that the assumption is that if you get through certain barriers it's inevitably going to get better, whereas many things that I think progressives and others see as being
forces that are holding people back are doing that and they're doing it for a good reason.
So I find this so interesting.
I agree with what you said about the decreasing utility of labels as you grow up, effectively.
And I think the reason for it is fairly obvious, which is that as a young person, you may very well sign up for a slate of ideas, and so that label correctly points to a bunch of positions you will likely hold.
As you grow more nuanced, your tendency to depart from parts of a slate, even if you embrace other parts, goes up.
And so the label is more noisy with respect to what you actually believe.
Yeah.
But when I... I mean, the nice thing about a book like the one you've written here, and your last one, is That it sort of allows a person to tromp around in your mind, right?
To get to see how your mental process works.
You sort of provide a window into various quadrants of your thinking.
And it's a pretty interesting tour.
What I find so fascinating is that you and I are supposed to be miles apart.
I'm a radical and you're more conservative than you are progressive.
I find we disagree on very little in this exploration.
Now why would that be?
Either it's something to do with us or something to do with everyone else, so we should get to the root of that.
Let's get to the root of that and let's blow up some minds along the way if we can.
I think one of the reasons is because what we actually differ on has almost nothing to do with values.
I would say in terms of what a desirable world would accomplish, right, I think you and I agree to a great degree.
Where we differ is on questions of How to get to a better place with respect to those values.
We might differ on where we are currently, although I suspect we don't differ all that much on that question.
And we may differ on our sensitivity to the particular hazards of change.
But in a sense, I think it's both something to do with you and me and to do with other people.
And the you and me part would be to the extent that you are serious about understanding these issues rather than posturing in an attempt to bring about something that you want, you will discover a A world of nuance, and you will recognize it's a complex system, you'll have self-skepticism.
You know, with the particular toolkit, one ends up able to have this conversation, and that the deal-breaker is if the values don't align.
But once they do, the rest is a question of where are we and where might we go, and how good an idea is it?
Well, if I can say that, I mean, it's that, but it's also...
And I think we've talked about this before, when we've met, is that one of the things that seems to me to be holding back all public conversation, and an awful lot of private conversation now, is the level of distrust, which may not be unjustified on occasion, but the level of distrust that you can allow yourself to go through a set of ideas with a person of different political views.
Because the fear is that that person, when you're at the edge of your own competency, is going to do something nasty on you.
You know, so in our case, we might discuss something which you are far more knowledgeable about than me.
We could find an awful lot of cases where that could occur.
And vice versa.
Possibly.
But anyhow, the point is that we could get onto a whole set of things which you know more about than me, and if I think that when I'm not looking, you're going to smuggle some communism into me, or vice versa, when we're on some competency of mine and you're not looking, I suddenly make you do Hitler salutes and things, then we're not It's not possible to have any of this.
And one of the reasons why all the traps are laid at the moment is that there does seem to be in society a genuine belief that when you're not looking, the other side are going to turn out to be Nazis or Communists.
And you can have almost no discussion in that situation, because nobody wants either of those things, and so nothing happens.
I'm fairly confident that if we get onto a particular issue of evolutionary biology that you can trounce me on, that, you know, you're not doing it in order to, you know, reopen a gulag and send me into it.
I'm confident of that, so I don't mind the discussion.
But that's the great problem at the moment.
And I don't know how much of it is sincere and how much of it is opportunistic and how much of it is just deluded.
But it is that.
It is that fear of what happens in the gaps.
I totally agree.
I have said elsewhere, one of the places Eric quotes me sometimes is, bad faith changes everything.
And to the extent that you detect bad faith, or even fear bad faith, a whole set of I've just noticed this, I notice it in television studios all the time, I notice it in radio studios, in public discussions, that that's what's going on, is this horrible trap.
And that's one of the reasons why we're playing all these strange language games at the moment, you know, where people want to read into what the meaning of words is other than their overt meaning, you know, the search for dog whistles and the identification of special sounds in the stratosphere, you know, all of this.
And yeah, that's everywhere.
That's our public discussion.
So I was going to say my fear in reading your book, something that just lurked for me every chapter really, was that I had the sense that the argument was so well presented and so thorough, you know, it's really a very up-to-date Exploration of this entire landscape and done by somebody.
I mean, you know, it's not written as a PhD dissertation It's written in a very accessible form, but it has the kind of encyclopedic thorough nature of a PhD dissertation and My concern is that there is one move to disarm it.
Okay, go on Well, it's unfortunately an uninteresting move, but it will be deployed automatically, which is that this book is so preposterous that no person who understands the arguments on the liberal side would dare engage, right?
And so the point that many arguments, many strategic arguments in the modern landscape come down to this, which is that which you cannot actually defeat on its merits.
You have to defeat by driving up the cost of engaging it.
Right?
So driving up the cost of engaging with Douglas Murray is the go-to move because Douglas Murray presents a very compelling case.
Even if you have a radical view of what needs to happen on earth, you can still hear this book loud and clear.
Right?
I mean, I don't know that somebody who wasn't aware of your reputation as a conservative would necessarily, if this book fell in their lap and they weren't sort of aware of the the argument that it sits in, that they would detect that you're a conservative at all from what you say here.
Yeah, I think that's possible.
So I hope that doesn't happen.
And I guess I would say maybe we have to invent a counter move, you know, an honorable one.
But I dare you to read this book.
If you think that this is a simple question, I dare you to read Douglas's book.
Yeah, I mean, there has been some engagement, there's been less denunciation so far, famous last words, of course, but less denunciation than I was fearing.
But then that was the case of my last book, too.
So I don't know.
I mean, one One possibility is that the people who ought to read it don't.
I was in a radio studio in London the other day with a writer for the main left-wing paper here who We were discussing her latest book and my latest book and it became clear before we went on air that she hadn't actually read my latest book and at the end of about an hour together on the radio our interviewer asked if we'd learned anything more about each other in the time we'd spent together and she said no because I've read Douglas and I know what he thinks.
You actually told me you hadn't read this book, and I know for a fact that you have not read any of my books before this one.
But I just love that.
No, he can't tell me anything that's new because I've not read his stuff, and I know what he thinks.
Right.
That is the exact object in question.
I was so annoyed, by the way.
I actually went to the bookshop the day before, got the stuff to get her wretched book off the trolley at the back where it was sitting, and bought it with my own cash, my own hard-earned cash, and then I read her book.
Yeah, that is, by the way, that is something I find I find an awful lot.
I mean, I read a lot of, I don't read everything sadly, but I mean, I read a lot of what, you know, people write that I disagree with, but I too rarely find the favour is returned.
Yes, and there's a lot of covering for the fact that people – I mean, at least in that case, she acknowledged that she hadn't read your book and she coughed up the – Oh, well, right.
But people will often not even do that.
But the amazing thing is that the argument is its own indictment, right?
I mean, and you made it very clear.
The idea that you know what Douglas Murray thinks and therefore don't need to discover what he thinks is, it's hermetically sealed.
I've got to tell you, by the way, sorry, it's on my mind.
I was in Sweden last year and there was a Swedish translation of my last book, The Strange South of Europe, and I had this very unnerving experience of being interviewed on Swedish national radio.
That wasn't unnerving.
That was absolutely fine.
But they interviewed me for about 10 minutes and then because it's me, they need a discussion about me afterwards.
And so I'm still sitting in the studio and two Swedes are brought on to have a discussion about me in Swedish, by the way.
Which is really unnerving, because they say Douglas Murray... I don't know if my fake Swedish should go out.
Anyhow, but the point is... It's pretty compelling.
I'm American, so I wouldn't know, but... It was a summary.
Anyhow, but the point is, is that I discovered after I said to this, I said, do you mind if I leave?
Because I don't really want to sit here listening to an argument about me in Swedish.
Anyhow, I sidled out, but I learned afterwards that apparently the A left-wing journalist and a journalist from Quillette were having the discussion, and the left-wing journalist said, there's nothing in this book that's new, and I've read and heard all this for years.
And the journalist from Quillette said, have you read the book?
And he said, no.
There's nothing in the book that's new.
That's why I didn't read it.
I mean, it's like, look, I just, I'm going to give you a microphone and I will let you indict yourself.
Uh, it's, it's the obvious answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, alright, you raised the strange death of Europe.
I will confess up front, I read a good fraction of the strange death of Europe.
I did not read the whole thing.
Doesn't mean I won't pick it back up.
Oh, are you looking askance at me?
Down your nose, possibly?
No, that was an askance look.
Okay, askance.
Alright, you're subtle with the facial expression, so I have to... I would have killed you if we'd been in the same room.
Well, naturally.
But let me ask you a question just to explore further down this particular minefield.
You make a very strong case in The Strange Death of Europe that Europe has succeeded in producing many things of great value that We ought to guard carefully against that which threatens them.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
And I think it's also, as much as that must be a controversial statement at some level, there's no analytical reason it should be a controversial statement.
It's obvious that it's true.
You make a very strong case for it.
A thorough exploration, but nonetheless, let's just say for a second that it is true.
And you discuss in that book, in fact, the focus of the book has a lot to do with immigration and the threat that immigration may pose to the achievements of Europe.
If it comes too fast and, yeah, too low.
So, two questions I want to engage with you.
One is...
The question of too fast is, at some level, it's an empirical question.
Is there a border of a rate of immigration that is too fast for something that has existed prior to that wave of immigration to persist through it?
Either there is or there isn't.
It may not be a simple number, it may be a function, but nonetheless we could find a rate and we could say above this rate something happens and below this rate it doesn't happen and so maybe we want to stick below that rate.
But then the other question is, let's say for example, let's just take the Enlightenment itself as a major European achievement.
The Enlightenment produces tools of great value, right?
Ways of thinking that are simply disproportionately useful.
It's not to say that there are not conceivable alternatives that would achieve the same ends, but in some sense they are a discovery rather than an invention.
Does it matter – it clearly matters to you that those tools are defended and preserved, right?
That they not be washed over by the view that, you know, that European culture is dirty and therefore let's wash it clean with other cultures.
Does it matter to you who's operating those tools?
In other words, if the population of Europe through some normal process simply transitioned to a different population, but the culture that the achievements of the Enlightenment were preserved and honored, would that matter to you?
I would say it wouldn't matter, especially to me, if the Enlightenment and more was preserved.
I mean, in that it's not just about, are we still carrying the Enlightenment through this period?
Because Europe is more than just the Enlightenment.
But yes, I mean, if, I mean, we know all societies change over very long periods of time.
The Greeks today are not what the Greeks were 2000 years ago.
But yes, I mean, it's the three things that I would say always matter in the immigration debate, or none of which are properly discussed.
One is speed, one is volume, and the third is identity.
And, I mean, in a way, the thing that links this new book and the last book is that I want to be able to think aloud about these things, because I think we're incredibly bad at doing so, and being bad at doing so brings a terrible cost.
You see, if we in Europe, for instance, had been able to have reasonable discussions in recent decades about this whole question, we wouldn't have got into the state we're in in 2015, when Germany Crazy presses the panic button.
And I think that's the case on a range of these things.
And I'm just struck by the fact that, you know, after years of what should have been a realization that we weren't having a proper discussion, we continued to not have the discussion.
You know, or that you get tiny little bits of it.
I mean, you'd ask about the issue of numbers, for instance, and I thought about this a lot, you know, when I was doing first-hand traveling around and reporting from the migrant camps in 2015 and after.
And, you know, there were some answers.
For instance, in the UK it was pretty much agreed by governments of the last decade that they were trying to get net migration to the UK down to the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.
Is there any meaningful difference between having a net migration of 99,000 a year versus 101,000?
No.
But it was recognized that there was something in that shift from a five to a six figure change that had definitely in recent years been one of the catalysts for an increasing public concern about the whole area.
And I think that with all the landmines I'm trying to clear in the madness of crowds is that, for instance, we all know that the term transphobia can, to be accused of transphobia, can do serious damage to somebody's career.
But we also know that we should not medically experiment on children And yet, we are stuck, like in that question that we've had with migration in recent years.
Well, we know there are two things, and we can't do both.
We don't know how to do both.
And that's why one of the things I wrote about in The Strange Death of Europe, which I'm told by quite a lot of politicians across Europe and elsewhere, they found very useful.
After the book was out, to consider it this way was I said, look, I think you might have heard me say this before, but I said, look, how about considering there are competing virtues, you know, taking Aristotelian approaches.
So there are competing virtues here.
It's not the case that it's, you know, Nice, generous migrants versus European Nazis, that it might be more complex, and that it is more complex, and that specifically in the issue of migration, mass migration, that it was a competition between the virtues of justice and the virtue of mercy.
And that if you understood that or approached it like that, you could start to approach it from a more reasonable position and one which you were more likely to arrive at some kind of, not just answer, but consensus over.
And I think, and that's what I'm trying to do with all of these landmine issues and the madness of crowds.
with gay, with sex, with race and with trans, is to say we all know it's all of these things are much more complex than our current public discussion allows us to concede.
So what would, for instance, on the TransLink, what would it look like to be taking this seriously, to be looking in a humane manner at the claims that are being made, and to try to hive off the decent and reasonable humane case from the absolutely batshit crazy no way we're going to do that brigade?
And I'm just stunned, as I say on issue after issue with this, that we're still finding it this hard, because it shouldn't be this hard.
So if I can rephrase it just slightly.
It's not that it shouldn't be this hard.
It actually isn't this hard.
It's being made difficult strategically.
And this is very confusing because not everybody on the other side is doing this.
But we are all caught up in it.
And so, you know, you do a very good job in the book, for example, of parsing the border between queer and gay.
God, that was a fun border, I tell you.
Well, it's a very dangerous border.
A really dangerous border.
I've been thinking about this for years.
I was so pleased to finally say it.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
I don't know if you saw it, it was some time ago.
I unleashed a tweet at one point, I survived it apparently, but the tweet was something like, if we were to eliminate the Q from LGBTQ, who would be excluded, right?
My thought being that the other letters surely cover whatever it is that Q is unless Q is a political ideology, in which case, why is it in this set of letters?
So in any case, the problem is that if you took – and I'm speaking from experience now.
At Evergreen, we did have a pretty high percentage of the population was trans.
and so I knew quite a number of trans students.
I never had an issue.
Would tell me, you know, I never asked about pronouns, but if somebody wanted me to call them she, they would tell me that.
And I would abide by it.
Never once did anybody ever ask me to say they.
That just didn't come up.
And nor did I find the trans folks I was interacting with Strident or trying to corral my behavior they were navigating a relatively difficult puzzle, but in any case if you took the folks who are not on a political mission who are really fighting a kind of human rights battle and
They could have a perfectly reasonable discussion, I have the sense, with those of us who are not in that community, who are trying to figure out what to do with a complex issue, how to be compassionate at the same time that we don't disrupt the ability to teach biology, for example.
So if you – in other words, if you took all the people who are ready to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs and that there is nuance and that they are necessary to navigate this topic, we could have a discussion and it wouldn't necessarily be easy but it wouldn't be a bloodbath.
But the bloodbath arises when you are forced to choose sides between artificially pure perspectives, and you are penalized for evidencing a commitment to nuance.
Yes.
There are categories of problem, by the way, it seems to me, that we don't have words for at the moment, which we should try to find words for quite fast.
I'm trying to find out.
There's not even a German word for the concept I'm about to suggest.
For instance, there is a type of problem which an interlocutor cannot solve with you, because to address it in a particular manner and get to what may well be the truth would be so disturbing to the foundations of their character that they wouldn't in some way be able to psychologically survive the experience.
And an example, it's not a perfect one, but would be Whatever one's views on abortion matters, it's highly unlikely that a woman who has had an abortion and who feels even an ounce of regret about it is going to be able to be persuaded by some male anti-abortion activist that abortion is always wrong.
Because it's going to open up something bigger than she wants to open up.
It's not a perfect example, but it's sort of one of the nearest I can get to.
I think that this manner of problem actually exists in our societies far more than we recognize.
And we've got to find a way of recognizing it.
And I realized this when I was writing about migration, was that the level at which for some people, rightly or wrongly, I think quite a lot of people wrongly, when they heard any criticism of any form of migration, including, you know, mass illegal migration, they thought you were talking about them.
Or their mother.
Or their friend.
Or the nice man who works in, you know, the shop.
And so they would never get beyond it.
And I think that there are There are, within all of these rights movements, elements of that where people are mishearing what the critique is, and are being led by other people to believe that it is the fundamental attack on their person that they can't survive.
It's a personal existential threat.
It is heard as one, and that makes it impossible to have a proper discussion.
And by the way, I should say, I do recognize, you know, the problem of that for people.
I mean, since The Mantis of Crowds came out, a few gay friends have said to me, I can't believe you've said that.
And I know what it is that they are worried about.
They're worried about me asking whether the hardware conclusion of recent years over the gay question is... I mean, somebody actually said to me, It's just so unhelpful at this moment.
Yeah.
Now my thing was, it may be unhelpful, but you know, for you or for other, some other people, but it's, it's also what I think is true and what the evidence is pointing to.
And, but I mentioned that only to save that.
To each of the gay friends who said that since this book came out, I've said the same thing, which is, I happen to be gay myself, and I don't know how that comes about.
But if I was told tomorrow there was a gay gene, I wouldn't feel anything very much.
And if I was told tomorrow that more recent studies had found there was more of an issue with, you know, I know, environment, but at a particular age, I wouldn't feel all that much.
But why is that?
It's because The gay bit is really not very central, if at all central, to my sense of myself or my worth or place in the world.
I don't find that it's the source of any real sort of meaning for me.
But I recognize that some people aren't in that position.
And maybe, I don't know, they don't have a loving family or others.
And it is an absolutely foundational thing.
And I don't know how one can... I don't think one should just dismiss that.
But at the same time, I don't think that facts can be elasticated to fit around them.
No, and it's very dangerous to try because later when it's discovered that you have gilded the lily, as it were, the whole thing comes toppling down and it's far worse than if you had just acknowledged the nuance in the first place.
I will say this is, I think, why...
Biologists and in particular evolutionary biologists find themselves in a funny predicament at the moment is that in a sense there is a toolkit for this and if I can just Give you an anecdote when I got to graduate school.
I was already very much interested in evolutionary biology but at some point I found the people who were Discussing it with respect to humans.
It was a particular group of about 15 or 16 people some of them quite famous actually
And I remember as a young graduate student, first year, I walked into my first seminar with these folks, and I may have been four minutes late or something, I walked in in the middle of a discussion, and the discussion was this brutally honest exploration of what human beings are up to, in which it was quite clear that the entire room had
either explicitly or not, agreed that nobody was to be held to account personally for what they acknowledged about human experience in this discussion.
In other words, nobody was posturing to portray themselves as particularly altruistic or whatever else.
I walked in this room and I heard this discussion in which there was just only a dispassionate analysis of people by a group who was clearly compassionate And my thought was, oh, thank God, you know?
And if I had said it out loud, they would have said, who?
But in any case, I think my point is that what you are talking about Is difficult because it is a skill that most people have not been they've not acquired it either through training or through their own discovery and that if there is hope for taking the lessons of your book
And exporting them so that more people can engage the argument at this level of sophistication, then it depends on people becoming comfortable with the tool, which means putting aside, you know, the story you tell about your gay friends being concerned about you poking at the question of whether or not Being gay is a hardware or software issue.
By the way, an analogy I also use and really, really like.
It's so useful to think.
It's a clean divide and everybody intuits it.
But here's the thing.
There won't be a gay gene.
If the data we have already is for real, and, you know, one can always discover that there's a problem at the level of the data that you're not in a position to know, but assuming that the data is what we think it is, there won't be a gay gene.
Can there be gay genetic influences?
Sure.
That could be, but there are patterns that are simply inconsistent with a gay gene, and what's more, I don't think the questions are insurmountable as to whether or not a gay gene could propagate evolutionarily, but it's not a simple question of how they would, but in any case,
To build the protection of homosexuals on the idea that there is simply no environmental influence and therefore, as you argue in the book, that effectively it would be immoral to hold people responsible for something over which they had no control, that's not a sound foundation.
Now it may be that people have very little choice, especially Uh, here we're gonna step on a big landmine.
Okay?
Or I am.
You go first.
Okay.
At least for males, there is likely to be not very much choice because the switch will have been flipped very early.
Right.
So in any case, we don't need a gay gene in order to fully support the argument for compassion and understanding.
But it was a useful crutch before we had enough information to know what was going on and people are understandably reluctant to give it up.
Yeah, by the way, the landmine you just deftly, deftly tripped over is one of the ones that fascinates me, because I say to everyone who complains about what I'm saying about the gay bit, that when I say, look, maybe it's a bit more, maybe it's a bit more mellifluous, even after a certain stage than we pretend.
And that a gay isn't necessarily, as I say, a one-way street.
Even the people who object to that deeply concede I might be on to something in the case of female lesbianism.
Because there's definitely more adaptability there than there is among male homosexuals.
For instance, there are some lesbians who have had horrible experiences with men.
I've had a terrible husband or worse and they end up falling in love with a woman.
I do not know of any case with a man who's married to the most horrible woman and as a result starts to screw around with men.
As a straight guy, it's hard for me to imagine a woman that horrible.
That's right.
That's it.
I'm leaving you.
I'm gonna go to the local gay bar as a result.
Yep.
But, I mean, if you think about it, look, the reason that this should be more flexible on the lesbian side is staring us in the face.
It's just obvious.
As you said, it's not that hard.
Gay men have a really, and you know, again, among the many amazing points that you make in this book that I've never heard anybody else say, but, you know, we're begging for an exploration.
Gay men have a problem.
producing babies.
The mythology of the moment may be that they don't, but, you know, Monty Python correctly nailed the fact that a pair of men don't have a uterus, you know, and therefore that invites questions about how it's going to be done.
Women don't have this problem.
In fact, a lesbian couple has a couple of uteruses.
Right?
What that means is that there is an opportunity Here, let's just do this straightforwardly in an evolutionary sense.
Human babies are extremely expensive to raise, and they are much better raised when people team up, right?
So, a straight partnership is a team, and its primary objective is the successful raising of babies, the production of resources, the nurturing, the delivery of information on how to be a successful human.
A single individual has a problem raising a baby.
There's just not enough labor.
It's too labor-intensive.
A pair of lesbians has the labor and the uteruses.
What they lack is a single cell.
Right?
All they need is a single cell to trigger a baby and then everything else they've got.
Right?
Now, there are plenty of ways that history can deliver a circumstance in which there aren't enough men around.
For example, warfare.
Warfare will eliminate men from the map.
Are we really to imagine that evolution will take a bunch of people who are perfectly capable of raising offspring and sideline them from that most fundamentally Darwinian objective because there aren't enough men around for people to pair off?
Oh no.
That's not how it's going to work.
Surely, people who have everything necessary to produce offspring of their own will team up and do so, especially if all they need in order to trigger the process is a single cell.
They'll find one, right?
And so the point is, lesbian couples make perfect evolutionary sense in many circumstances.
And that would mean that the ability to facultatively go in that direction at the point that it becomes a viable path forward should be there as a contingency plan built into women.
We can't make the same argument for men.
At some point I will make an argument for the evolutionary nature of male homosexuality, but I'm not ready to deploy it in public just yet.
I have to say, I do want you to do that, Brad.
Alright, well... Because as you know, I lay down that challenge slightly in the book.
Evolutionary biologists have been ducking this one for a long time now.
Yes, ducking.
Notice there's plenty of room under the table here for me to duck if I must.
All right, so where were we?
We were talking about the understandable desire amongst people who feel that they have something personal at stake to avoid certain kinds of exploration.
And then others of us find those explorations are necessary, even to the very protection at the focus of that concern.
Right?
I would say gay people are far safer if we explore this carefully than if we pretend the issue is simpler than it is.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I give the example of, actually, why gay actresses who want the gay gene to be discovered should be careful of what they wish for.
Because even if they did suddenly, rather unlikely though, both you and I think it is, even if they did find such a gay gene, what people would do about that, we've already had a couple of little glimpses of it.
I give the example that
Alice Drager gives in Galileo's middle finger of the unbelievable stampede that occurred when one scientist was rumored to have found a gay gene in sheep and as a result was experimenting on sheep and the gay rights groups were got up by Peter I think, the animal ethics people and they whipped up, the animal people whipped up the gay people to go for the guy who allegedly found the gay sheep and
And he hadn't, but they were so enraged that this man might have done and might be doing something terrible with it that might, for instance, be taking homosexuality out of the sheep pool.
And, you know, so we're clearly not going to be any good with dealing with this.
If it was what they wanted, either.
And that's sort of, by the way, I should say, that's sort of why I started with the chapter on gay.
Because I wanted to demonstrate in a way, the sort of subliminal thing, was I wanted to demonstrate to readers that I could do this with the one minority interest group that I've got any alleged involvement in.
To have any involvement in to say, look, and then we should also be able to do that on these other issues.
So it shouldn't be this hard for men and women to talk about each other, specifically for men to talk about women.
And we're making it much harder than it should be.
I sort of hope that that comes across.
That's why I've done it that way, let alone then I get under race and trans.
But just to say, look, this is a different manner of approaching these things we have to try to find.
And it has to take our purported characteristics, We have to lean on them less.
I think what you do in the book with gay actually... I think the book would stand without it, frankly.
I think it's good enough.
But I think the fact of watching you explore this in a place where you do have a dog in the fight is... it is exactly the necessary thing to demonstrate that the bad faith isn't there.
So in other words, this is again why I say the defense against your book has to involve people not reading it, right?
Because watching you do this in a place where obviously you have a great deal at stake in how society views gay men and, you know, doing it in a way, frankly, that as I was a little surprised as a straight man that
You dealt so carefully and effectively and insightfully with the way a straight man views male homosexuality, which is... Right, right, right.
Right?
I'm perfectly accepting.
I believe that male homosexuals are deserving of protection, but there is a way that I find I find the idea of being a gay man a bit distant.
I can't relate to it very easily.
That's why I say there is something that's problematic, to use one of the terms of the era.
I noticed it a long time ago because there is a certain type of woman who, for instance, with gay men, wants to talk dirty.
They want to talk sex with you.
And equally, there's a type of straight man who has a lot of questions!
Not even just about what it's like to have sex with a guy, but Questions about sex in general.
And what I realized was, a long time ago this came to me, that both parties thought that gay men were some kind of translation device.
Yes.
Which they're not entirely wrong on.
It's not entirely wrong.
Right.
And that's why, and you see, one of the things that I find fascinating about this is that actually, if you open up the gay bit a bit, you also get to some of the truths about male-female relations.
I loved that exploration.
I thought you slam dunked it.
Oh, that's very kind.
You know, that bit, the women chapter, was in some ways the most fun bit to write, because I knew that, you know, I think I've said before, but all the problems in this book, I sort of boil down to the fact that we're pretending to know about things we don't know about, trans, and we're pretending not to know about things everyone knew till yesterday, relations between the sexes.
And that although it's complex, it's not as complex as we've been pretending it is.
But, you know, some of the things of recent years, I did feel, for instance, in the post-MeToo period, that there was something that gay male relations illuminated on the truth of what we weren't able to talk about in the whole male-female, when are men taking advantage of women question, which was to return the question and say, are there occasions when women are taking advantage of men?
And because you can do exactly that play in the gay world, and I sort of carefully lay it out, everybody knows the situation in which, if you want to reduce relationships to power dynamics, That the person who the sort of intersectionalists would regard as being the powerless figure in a particular dance is actually the one commanding the whole dance.
And that the person whose society claims to be the person with unbelievable amount of power is a pathetic, vulnerable, manipulatable person in the wrong or right hands.
Yeah, it's a marvelous description.
It matches perfectly what I've seen so many times now, including at Evergreen, very personally, where this naked exercise of power is described as basically a cry of powerless people that is and always will be unheeded or something like that.
And it's, you know, it is one of a thousand ironies in this area.
But you demonstrate exactly the thing that I saw in that seminar, which is the ability to take yourself, not to pretend that your particular way of being in the world isn't who you are, but putting it aside with respect to what you conclude, right?
You do a very good job of that in the Gay Chapter, and then it does allow you To explore the same to use the same analytical tools with respect to race with respect to trans Which is in some sense the hardest of these My guess is that's why you left it to last in the book And then you know trans kids being the sort of gold standard of really heart-wrenching difficult issues but
You know, I said something to Chloe Valderi the other day.
I had a discussion with her and I said, you know, The irony at Evergreen was that we were watching the breakdown of a college, and it was breaking down over the beliefs of a group of people who, more than anything else, desperately needed a good college education.
And, you know, I can't quite make it... I can't put flesh on the bones enough, but imagine standing in a college Watching a microcosm of civilization break down when every tool that you should need to solve the issue was like right there rendered in, you know, concrete and steel, right?
We had the buildings.
We had the library.
In theory, we had a faculty.
Why don't we just take the perspective that is being advanced and take it as a premise, put it on the board, and then explore, if we extrapolate from this, where does it actually lead?
And I have the sense that your book is in, it is like, I don't want to say it's a textbook, that's not fair to it, but it is like the curriculum for such a discussion.
I'd like to think so.
I'd like to think so.
I'd like it if it became so, but I'm terribly conscious of what we're throwing out.
I mean, as you know, I write about the evergreen thing a couple of pages in the book, because it did seem to me to be one of the most emblematic examples of this breakdown of our day.
And one of the things that fascinates me again in this is that people who wish to read the world in these rather ugly power dynamic terms, keep missing out the fact that again, in that sort of situation, the power is exactly the opposite way around.
The students have the power, the authorities have none.
And there's all sorts of fascinating things that one can trace that to, I think, and you experienced it firsthand.
But there's an awful lot of cases of some of the madnesses I write about in the book where something similar is happening, where the grown-ups appear to have in significant chunks lost faith in the process that had got them where they had got to, and they had decided at some level to hand over the keys to the kids.
And the thing that's so disturbing about that is not just the loss of knowledge, the loss of opportunity, I mean, unbelievable loss of opportunity for those students and others, but that Anybody who's been through an education knows that there are always times when you wonder if you could do that, and if you could pull that move.
I remember it very distinctly from my student days.
If I try to use an insincere tool, will it get me through?
And the job, partly of education, Or not just education, being made into a citizen, a person in the world, is the adults turn around to you at that point and say, Sonny, there is no way around this.
You have to go through it.
You have to just do what you need to do.
You need to do the work.
And there is no cheap way through.
And I'm just amazed that in subject after subject and discipline after discipline and institution after institution, the implication is given and sometimes stated boldly, there are other ways around this.
For instance, you don't actually need to do the work.
You could pull an insincere card on a person in a more senior position, and that will get you to the same place.
Right, and the jaw-dropping conclusion from this is that these students are learning.
But this is what they are learning, is how to get by through this mechanism.
They are becoming expert at it.
And the question is, what world will we live in as these tools are refined?
They're going to be wielded by people in ever more powerful positions and I think this is one of the harder points to make.
Lots of people say, well, yes, okay, the evergreen thing was very dramatic, yay, all this, that, but it's a small number of people.
You're exaggerating.
I hear it all the time.
I think it's hard to compel people.
You know, it's like Well, okay, smallpox is terrible.
But, you know, the release was only a few cells.
It's only in one part of the country.
And it's like, no, no, no, it's smallpox.
Do you realize how dangerous this is?
Right?
So, yes, it's a small number of people wielding a tremendous amount of power, learning to wield it better, teaching others to do it, distributing the toolkit through the Internet.
This could hardly be more dangerous.
Yeah, and I just read this week about the case of the Seattle School Board's maths teaching curriculum, where they decide to do identity politics stuff in maths.
And you just go, you know, for those of us who were who are educated in the humanities, you know, our only hope always is that at least there are still some hard sciences around.
And this this crap isn't going to roll through that.
And whenever you see it rolling through that and you realize that the mathematics is going to be, you know, how is how do power structures rely on blah, blah, blah.
But you think, you know, if you do that, the bridges are going to fall down at some point.
You know, just nothing is going to be able to stand up.
And that's that's sort of the bit that that's one of the bits that worries me.
But by the way, I just wanted to say one one way through this or at least one way I've started to think about this is how.
How about we try to work out the unpleasant questions which everybody knows are legitimate.
I gave you one earlier about the male-female thing.
The obvious thing is, are there forms of female power that men don't have?
But there's one that struck me in recent days, which is, well, just let me line up because the point I'm going to make is going to be a problem, but if I don't give one more caveat.
Go for it.
In the book, as you know, I raise the issue of what could be regarded as gay privilege, which is that studies show that across their earning life, male and female homosexuals are going to earn disproportionately more in their career than their
And there's a number of very interesting reasons why that might be, from the rather mundane, well you know they don't have children so much so they can stay in the office later and thus get promotions and so on, to more psychological explanations to do with mimetic issues in childhood and much more.
But you might call this a gay advantage, and if you were interested, and one of the things obviously as you know that the book's trying to do is to say look, This stuff is not just in the humanities and it's not just in the social sciences departments, it has spilled out across the entire working environment of Hell yeah!
I'm sorry.
America, Britain, and other developed Western economies, and that it's a deranging game because it's an unwinnable game.
But I say, okay, if you're going to do that game, is this gay privilege?
And if you're trying to even things out, which is what this purports to do, why don't we look at taking some of the money from the gays and giving it to their heterosexual counterparts?
Hell yeah.
It seems unfair.
I'm sorry.
That wasn't a proposal.
I knew I'd get you.
And that's why I'm writing a check this evening to Mr. Brett Nona.
It's reparations for your suffering for being heterosexual.
Right.
Your untold suffering.
But no, but the point I wanted to make then was, okay, so there's loads of advantages that we know are there.
And I mean, one of the nice things about, you know, people now reading this book is the number of people who've written to me and spoken to me who I know and strangers who are saying certain things like, oh my God, this is a conversation It's a conversation my wife and I have over dinner and my wife said to me, like, darling, never say this outside of this room.
I like those sort of ones.
Anyhow, but there must be forms of piss-taking, we'd call it in the UK, but let's say just advantage-taking, to sort of de-load the language a bit.
There must be lots of advantages that do exist in society and which we pretend don't.
Here is one which is just so alarming, and I'm bound to get in trouble even just for voicing it, but are there on occasions, and this isn't to deny the history of racism, this is not to deny that there are inequalities, including racial inequalities and racial injustice that goes on today in America and around the world, but are there situations where there is an advantage to being black?
Are there situations where there is an advantage to being a woman, or being gay, or being trans?
Yes.
Yes, definitely.
I had one incidentally the other day in a television studio.
It's not exactly the worst oppression anyone's suffered, but I had a female black model, former model, discussing some of the issues in my new book with me.
She was very nice, and she just wouldn't stop talking.
And it's possibly because she was brought up in Scotland, Glasgow, and they just don't shut up in Glasgow.
But the reason I mention this is because she just wouldn't stop.
And she was, and I knew at the moment I saw her, she was uninterruptible.
Absolutely uninterruptible.
And she knew it.
And she knew it.
And she did as well.
She said, the host, Piers Morgan, at one point said, I just want to get Douglas in because he hasn't had a chance to speak.
And I said, well, you know, and I tried to come in and she said, no, I think he's spoken a lot.
I had to listen to him already.
And I just thought, OK, I can't do anything about this.
In this studio this morning, you have got a black advantage.
And you've got a female advantage already.
And the reason I mention this is because I think that a lot of people know this stuff.
I think she knew.
And I definitely knew.
And I know the hosts knew.
And there's a lot of those things going around in the society.
And we don't have any of it out ever because we have all fallen for the social justice interpretation which says there's only one type of power and it's elderly, white, heterosexual, cisnormative power.
And it means that there are these very, I mean, the example I give of my television experience is a very minor one and unimportant, but there are major weaponizations of this power.
happening at major institutions all the time, which everybody can see and no one can identify.
Beautiful.
Now, I want to take your last two points, because I think it gets even more dire if we extrapolate.
No doubt you will have seen this coming, but... Alright, so you've got these ideas that create a kind of power, an unacknowledged sort of power that schedules what can be said and who can say it and, you know, who gets to take up space in a conversation or something like that.
And you have these ideas that become unexplorable, right?
So we can study genetics, but it becomes difficult to study genetics anywhere around race or gender or sexual orientation.
And as you say, the bridges will fall down.
Well, they will, but something worse will happen also.
You have a competition between those who can figure out how not to succumb to this nonsense and those who can't.
And those who can figure out how not to have their engineering school deranged by these ideas will have a superior engineering school.
Their bridges will be much less likely to fall down.
What I am concerned about as an evolutionist is that what we are producing is a recipe where those people who find no reason to engage the question of oppression come out on top because those who are obsessed with oppression will self-hobble.
And so I don't want to live in the world on the other end of that, where the people who may suffer from a total compassion deficit come out on top because they figured out a way to shut this stuff down, maybe for the wrong reasons even.
I don't want to... what I'm about to say also could be misinterpreted, but look, I mean there's a chance that Even if the intersectionalists and the identity politics people got what they wanted, the likelihood... I mean, I think that they can't ever get what they wanted for reasons I demonstrated.
It all runs against each other.
It's a horrible, great, big, bloody mess that they just keep making.
You know, my favorite Orwell quote when he went and spoke to a communist in the 40s, and Orwell says to this communist, you know, well, you know, What have you got to show for this wretched stuff?
And the communist says, well, you know, he admits the show trials, he admits the famine and so on.
And Orwell says, you know, what's the point of all that?
And the communist says, you know, well, You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
And Orwell says, well, where's your omelette?
And you know, there is a sort of, even if the intersectionists got what they wanted, it would be horrible.
But if they did, if they ever actually managed to create the exact perfect system, which allowed everyone to work out their place in the hierarchy all the time, and the working place in corporate America was exactly along the lines of what they wanted, they'd do it just in time for China.
Right.
It won't hold truck there, and so suddenly they will be opening the door to a competition from... they will be opening the door to a superior competitor that just simply won't be playing this game.
Yeah, yeah, and I've very little doubt that that's what happens.
And by the way, there's also... there's a sort of more mundane but more painful day-to-day thing that I notice, which is... I mean, we hear a lot of talk about, you know, disenfranchisement and much more, and
But let me give you one example of that is that it seems to me that emerging is that slightly more privileged, if you wanted to play that game, slightly more privileged, say, young white men are able to work out the game and are able to adapt, play around it, do the stupid stuff everyone's got to do to perform it, but actually get what they want.
And the problem is that less advantaged, including less intellectually advantaged, less economically advantaged people, are going to get stuck in the game.
And I see this all the time with what I, you know, the cuttlefish analogy I give.
I know exactly the type of rich Western man who has worked out how to feminize themselves sufficiently around women to get to shag the women.
And I know exactly the type of man who is failing at that, because they just haven't worked out the game.
And I think there's just, it's a horrible, horrible thing.
I don't think that can be secret knowledge.
Yeah, secret knowledge, right?
And again, it goes to your point about whether gay men know something that both straight men and straight women are fascinated by and need to know something about.
I should tell you, that cuttlefish analogy, you know, is a fascinating one.
It is not the only version of this.
It's actually a strategy that evolves many times across the animal kingdom, right?
It's called a she-male strategy.
Maybe it's not called that anymore, because... It's very offensive to Bangkok ladyboys.
Right.
But anyway, the evolutionary dynamics around it are fascinating, but you're right.
What we've effectively created is a niche for people who can figure out how to game the system in a particular way.
And anytime you set up a system that can be gamed and won by those who do it, that's what you're going to see.
And so we are creating...
A very dangerous environment in which even those who are well-intentioned in setting this up do not understand that, okay, you may advance the interests of black people, for example, but which black people are going to end up at advantage in the end of this game?
It's going to be the bad actors in that group, not the people who are most deserving.
So, anyway, we are in a terrible pickle in this regard.
And the question, I guess, I feel like we are in an arms race, right?
There is an attempt to take over society and restructure the rules around these very naive syllogisms and the like.
And then those of us who are fighting back and blowing up landmines are trying to spread the instinct towards applying nuance and extrapolating carefully and these things.
And the question is, which of these two instincts will win?
One thing that is maybe going to act in our favor is that the point you make about even if the intersectionalists could have what they wanted, it would be horrible.
I don't even think it's horrible.
It's unstable that this conclusion about, you know, the left eating itself.
I do think there's a way that doesn't have to be true, but it is often true.
Did you see just this morning the Guardian in the UK reports that apparently Greta Thunberg has now got it in the neck for being white.
the oh it was a terrible choice on her part can she get nothing right Yeah, Greta Thunberg has been criticized by the, I think it's Extreme Reaction, what's it called?
Anyhow, one of the other sort of Got to shut down all the cities now, people.
And they're all going for her because they're saying she's only got the attention because she's white and people aren't highlighting enough black women who are also in the belief that we're all going to burn to death in the next 48 hours.
And I just, you know, I just, yeah, it's always eating itself like that.
Always.
So it's always eating itself because of a basic game theoretic instability, right?
These coalitions function when they're pointed in the same direction and at the point that they have spoils to divide, they turn on each other.
And so one of the things that struck me, I've been saying that for a long time, but in reading your book, it struck me that the question of trans women, that is people born male who transition to female competing in women's sports, is the first wave of the turning on
Because at this point, trans is now backing women against the wall in a way that will destroy the hard-won access to sports that women have enjoyed for the last several decades.
Yeah, as you know, I think that I think the trans one is important because it reveals some of what is actually going on and because it runs fundamentally against the other groups that it's alleged to have so much in common with.
So it obviously runs against women, runs against men as well, but people are less bothered about that.
But it runs against women in a very fundamental way, which I try to show.
And it also runs against gay, which is one which, I mean, almost nobody has bothered to point out.
And it's been presumed that trans is just the next stage in gay, but actually it runs totally counter to it.
So the female tomboy in her teens actually might be told, now actually you are a boy and we'll make you one.
And so, yeah, I'm very concerned about that.
I just, by the way, you started to say something there, which led me to remember that of course, when we talk about how to get out of this, I'm very struck that there are several ways.
What I tried to do in this book, obviously, is to undo the intersectional thing to the extent that it can be done, to show how it's woven, to unweave it, and then to redirect people onto, I think, and I don't, I'm not, as you know, I'm not dogmatic about what it is I think they should do, but redirect people onto better paths.
And of the various options open to us, those of us who think that people are wasting their time, it does seem to me that a very important thing must be addressed, which is, okay, let's say we can get lots of people out of this horrible, retributive, zero-sum game.
What ought they to be doing?
And I think that we can't get out of this unless that is also in the frame.
And I'm very concerned about this, and I give some hints in the book of what I think.
Might be an answer.
I'm concerned about the opportunity cost in this generation of doing this stuff, of this intense naval gazing, with the idea that if we gaze at it enough, we will sort out the naval.
But in a way, I think one of the faster ways out of this is to say, why don't people from many disciplines Start to talk about what we should be doing instead.
You know, because rather like setting up a prize, you know, it's always a good way if you say, you know, ten million dollars if you solve this problem.
You know, it's quite a good way to solve a problem.
Why don't some people just start to work out what actually we would like to be doing?
And now it might be, I'm not a great, I don't think the purpose of life will simply be longevity, and that if we all live to 150 we've won, because you've still got all the same problems we've always had.
But there should be attempts, I think, and it's not like, I'm not saying we need to fabricate them, I just think we need to identify them accurately, or as accurately as we can manage, across many disciplines and say, Wouldn't it be wonderful?
You know, because the thing that just amazes me at the moment, I've said this before, but everywhere I go in the world, I travel all the time.
I'm in a different country every week.
And I speak to so many people from so many different backgrounds and disciplines and all that sort of thing.
And one of the greatest things, one of the things that just excites me most and has made me most optimistic in recent years has been the fact that a young person anywhere in the world who's smart and who has access to the internet is now right at the cusp of the conversations of their time in a way which never before in human history is one of the things that just excites me most and has You know, one of my great heroes in the 19th century, Alexander Hudson, those people had to leave Russia and go to Paris and Berlin to pick up the latest critical ideas.
And it just took such a long time.
And it was such a small class of person that was able to do it.
Now we're not in that world.
As I say, we're in this extraordinary situation where anyone in any country with access to the internet and enough So why would we not be trying to work out what we can do?
It's not harnessing, but unleashing that potential.
So I completely agree with you, and I think the irony of attacking not only the Enlightenment, but the idea of Enlightenment as if it was a con, the irony is Just gargantuan.
And you're right, we are on the verge, almost accidentally, of being able to democratize access to all of the highest quality thinking, and we are fumbling the ball.
But you... Do you know what course I was teaching at the point that Evergreen blew up?
Go off, go on.
No, there's no reason you should, I just... You've got a feeling that'll break my heart, go on.
Oh, it's going to break your heart, I think.
I was teaching something called Hacking Human Nature.
So this was a full-time, 16-credit course.
So I had these students full-time.
It was my only job, their only job.
And we were studying, basically the premise of the course was, it's very hard to get the power to change civilization.
Nobody knows how to solve that problem.
So, let's skip it.
If we had the power to change civilization, given what we understand about what works and what doesn't work, what would the rules of a good civilization look like?
And the core tool was really the trade-offs between competing values.
So, A, I should tell you, my students were entirely loyal.
The students that you saw were ones I had never met.
My students and I were exploring this question, and we were deeply into that exploration at the point that Evergreen boiled over, such that at the very end I had to hold my evaluation conferences off campus in my backyard, in fact.
So I met with every student after the fiasco had disrupted our ability to meet on campus.
And a number of them asked me if I had somehow created the entire catastrophe to illustrate the principles in the program.
And, you know, it wasn't like they thought that it happened, but they couldn't shake the idea because it fit so perfectly with what we had been studying.
Very good of you to lay that on, yeah.
Yeah, well, right.
It was, you know, the ultimate teachable moment, I guess.
But anyway, I agree with you completely.
What we should be doing is agreeing on the values, as this conversation started there.
You and I seem to agree on at least a great many of the values, maybe all of them.
And then the question is, well, if you were serious about those values, You're not going to achieve perfection on any of them, but what would an optimal balance look like and what rules would stabilize it, would achieve it and stabilize it?
It's a fair question and we really, we ought to be having a broad explanation for it, much as you'd like.
And then what ought we to be doing?
The most enormous gap in our society is the fact that the adults have become distracted Or lacking in confidence and have decided, as I say, hand over the keys.
I mean, never before have we seen phenomena where, or at least not for a very long time, where the adults are willing to tell the children what to believe and then say we must listen to the children because only the children know.
Whatever the reasons are, I'm just struck that there is this vacuum, and I wrote about this in my last book a bit more, but it obviously touches on it in this one, but that this vacuum of purpose and meaning, and I know that that is, it's what everybody hopes for in their adolescence in particular, that at some point somebody's going to stand across their lives and say, let me tell you what we're doing.
Mm-hmm.
And what you should be doing, and what would be a life that would be worth living.
And not everyone ever got it.
But to have a society in which no one gets it, and no one is expected to get it, and we all just, I don't know, save up for the next holiday, is not fit for the enormous luck of the situation we find ourselves in.
I think, unfortunately, the reason that we are in this predicament is that very few people actually reach meaningful adulthood.
That the adults are incompetent, and part of why they are turning the reins over to the kids is...
Not only do they not know what to do, they wouldn't have the first clue how to figure it out.
And maybe it dovetails with what you were saying about anybody anywhere with the access to the internet can be at the forefront of the most important conversations.
The small number of people who have some idea what to do next are emerging in the strangest quadrants and participating in these conversations.
That as much as this is a very perilous moment for various reasons, it is also, it's a horse race.
It's a hopeful moment in the sense that some curious force is causing people to stand up who otherwise might never be heard from and to participate in really bold discussions about, well, what is true of our situation?
And what would be a reasonable objective?
How do we get there?
And maybe I hope.
I don't think we can paint a well-rendered picture of a good future, but I think we can essentially figure out the path toward a good future.
And if those of us who are inclined towards that mission, who have some of the tools necessary to do it, can participate together and not be Driven off the map, or caricatured into oblivion, or whatever it is that might happen, maybe this perilous moment could end well.
Just hoping.
Yeah, well, that didn't sound very convincing, Douglas.
Alright, this has been a marvelous conversation.
I've really enjoyed it.
Is there anything that you would like to say in closing?
I'm sitting in front of one of my bookshelves, as you can probably see, and just as you were talking, there was something that, when we were talking earlier, there was something I was reminded of, and let me just go and tell you.
It's from Arcadia, and it's later on in the play than I remember.
Hannah and Valentine are talking, and he's talking about relativity and quantum, and He has a great description.
It was on my mind.
He says at one point, About the drip of a tap.
He says, we're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Because the problem turns out to be different.
We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular.
Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart and the weather is unpredictable the same way will always be unpredictable.
When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen.
The future is disorder.
A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs.
It's the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
Oh, that's delightful.
And it goes to a point I forgot to make at the beginning of the conversation.
There is, I think, a single switch that is flipped differently in people who are participating well in this conversation and people who are doing something perhaps more destructive.
And it is whether or not there is delight in discovering that you had something wrong, or is there horror?
If you delight in discovering that you had something wrong, then the room for growth is tremendous.
If you recoil, then you don't grow, and it's a very sad predicament to be in.
So, I feel that you are one of these people who It smiles when you discover you had something a bit off, even if it's embarrassing, and I join you in that, and I hope others will join us as well.
Absolutely.
It's been an enormous pleasure, Brett.
Thank you.
All right.
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