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April 24, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:20:16
Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel | EP 541
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So this question of, you know, is there really progress?
We used to move faster.
We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years.
We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age.
There is a dimension of science and technology.
It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.
Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities.
You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity.
But I think there's something deeper there.
It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology.
Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit.
So I had the opportunity
to sit down with Peter Thiel today and...
Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time.
And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side.
We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation, because his thought tends in that direction.
He's a philosophically inclined person.
And our discussion really walks through one of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively
since maybe the 1960s and that there are deep reasons for that.
Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor.
Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside.
Some of it is a
And so, he outlined his...theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status games,
which I think is a very wise target of skepticism.
We walk through his thoughts on social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60. Also began to flesh out metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise.
And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain, well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic.
So, join us for that.
So, the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC, and you said a number of things there that were provocative, and one in particular that I wanted to follow up on.
It surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it.
You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now.
You feel, you seem to feel, I don't want to put words in your mouth that.
The most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so.
And so, I'm curious about, we've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated.
There's tremendous advancements in robotics.
And so, how do you conceptualize quantifying progress, scientific and technological, and why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate?
Yeah, there are variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point.
And, of course, there are all sorts of very complicated measurement problems.
So how do we compare progress in AI with, let's say, lack of progress in dementia research, curing Alzheimer's, and so all these different complicated ways of how you weight all these different things.
The West, the Western world, was in this fast era of scientific, technological progress where it was advancing on many, many different fronts.
And in some ways, it started picking up in the Renaissance, early Enlightenment, 17th, 18th centuries, and then probably in important ways accelerated in the 19th, first half of the 20th.
And then in some ways...
I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years.
Maybe 1970 or so is an inflection point one could cite.
It doesn't mean it's stopped altogether.
One way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits.
Computers, software, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, now AI.
But there's been much less progress in the world of atoms.
And if you think about a university setting, most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded.
And I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, class of 89. And it wasn't quite obvious at the time, but in retrospect, almost anything.
That was in the world of atoms would have been a bad field to go into physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, certainly aero-astro engineering, nuclear engineering, people already knew was kind of outlawed and over by the 1980s.
You could still maybe do electrical engineering, which was sort of the atoms that were used for, you know, semiconductors, but basically the only STEM field.
that was a really, gonna be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science, which was kind of this marginal, almost fake field.
Because I always have this riff where when people
I'm in favor of science, but I'm skeptical when people use the word science.
So social science, political science, climate science are called science by people who have an inferiority complex.
Deep down, no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields.
And something like this was true of computer science in the original day.
It was people who were too dumb at math to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering.
And they sort of flunked out into computer science.
And weirdly, this was a field that worked and it had a decent amount of impact.
I don't think it was...
And then it worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies.
There were certainly some important cultural...
And social transformations that we had as we moved from sort of the industrial age to the information age.
I don't know if it's worked that well on, let's say, a broad economic level of well-being.
So even if you measure it in terms of material well-being for people, the millennial generation, the U.S., is probably in a lot of ways not even doing as well as their baby boomer parents.
It's the first time we've had this sort of economic stagnation or even outright decline.
And again, the naive view would be that all this progress somehow translates into
a more successful economy.
It's not the only way to measure things, but it's sort of a straightforward way to measure things.
And then when it doesn't translate, my conclusion is maybe it hasn't added up to as much.
One of the reasons it's very hard, by the way, to have this debate and even figure out what's going on
It is because one of the features of late modernity, unlike early modernity, is hyper-specialization.
And we have an ever narrower group of experts who are experts in their field.
So the cancer specialists tell us they will cure cancer in five years.
They've been telling us that for the last 50. And then the string theorists tell us they're the smartest people in the world.
And it's very hard to evaluate these fields on their own terms.
It's like Adam Smith had this concept of the pin factory, where you had 100 different people working in a pin factory.
And you can think of late modernity as the pin factory on steroids.
We're so hyper-specialized, it's extremely hard to have a picture of the whole.
And so this question of, you know, is there really progress?
Is there not?
It's kind of a hard one to get at.
But I think if you measure it in economic terms, there's a slowed sense.
If you measure it in this sort of intuitive thing where, okay, we'll just look at a bunch of different fields like cancer, supersonic aviation, you know, just all these different ways.
You used to move faster.
You move faster every decade from, you know, 1500 on.
It was faster sailing boats and faster railroads, faster cars, faster planes.
We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years.
So, you know, that's one dimension.
And so there's sort of a common sense way that we have stagnation.
There is an economic way to measure it.
And then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too, which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo, that you're not allowed to discuss, my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct.
And so the example I always give is Professor Bob Laughlin, who's a Stanford physics professor.
I think around 1998, he gets a Nobel Prize in physics.
He suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize, he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about.
There are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences.
I mean, question Darwinism or question stem cell research or question, you know, climate change.
These are very dangerous areas.
But he picked one that's even more dangerous than any of those three.
He believed that most of the scientists, so-called scientists...
We're basically stealing money from the government, engaging in borderline fraudulent science, or it was incrementalist, not worth much.
His area of focus was high-temperature superconductivity.
He told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written in that area, and maybe 25 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all.
And I don't even need to tell you how the...
He started by...
Yeah, it was not just the abstract replication crisis.
He started by talking about naming people.
This person has stole money, and this person is a fraud.
And, I mean, I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended.
He promptly got defunded.
His students couldn't get PhDs anymore.
And so, and then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science, which immediately gets you deplatformed.
That's an idea we should take very seriously.
So that's the political intuition I have on this.
I have a few of these different ideas that we've been a lot more stuck.
It doesn't mean that there's been zero progress.
It doesn't mean that the progress we've had has been uniformly good.
It doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are unjustified either.
Maybe all these things are actually...
Part of the explanation for why the stagnation has happened.
Now, there's a much harder question.
And then there's sort of our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated.
How causal they were is always hard to say.
But if we sort of think of the Apollo space program as this last great technological, scientific...
There's some sense where July of 1969, where we landed on the moon, and Woodstock started three weeks later.
And, you know, with benefit of hindsight, in some sense, that's when progress, scientific technological progress stopped, and the hippies took over the country.
And you can describe it in many ways, but in some ways you can describe it as a shift.
From outer space, from exploring the world outside of us, to inner space.
And there were sort of all these different transformations.
There was a...
I would describe yoga, meditation.
I would describe psychedelic drugs.
I would describe, I don't know, incels playing video games in basements.
You know, there was all this incredible, maybe continued atomization, the navel-gazing, you know, of identity politics, in a way.
You know, you could say that, you know, people often lump, for example, they often lump Marxism and cultural Marxism together.
In my telling, these are opposites, because Marxism at least was primarily concerned about the...
Outside, objective, material, economic realities.
And then cultural Marxism was like the shift from Apollo to Woodstock, where you just went into the sort of interior world.
You no longer were thinking about this outside world.
And in some ways, you stopped asking these questions about economic growth and basic economic prosperity.
And then that coincided with, also with this lack of progress in these things.
So I think there were all these kinds of cultural transformations that coincided with this shift.
You know, I think the, people often ask why this stagnation happened.
My standard, you know, if you agree with us, and of course people can disagree, you know, how much it happened, but if you agree with me that there's been...
You know, a slowing down of progress that, you know, in some sense, the singularity was maybe more in the past than in the future.
And you always have these questions, why did it happen?
And my cop-out answer is always that why questions are over-determined.
And it could be, you know, it could be sort of a...
Our society became risk-averse or too feminized.
Or you could say that...
You could say that...
There was too much regulation and bureaucracy, which is sort of a libertarian intuition I have.
But I've come to think that one of the bigger factors was the sense that a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous.
It had a, at least in a military context, had a dual-use character.
I mean, there was already some relentless acceleration of this stuff in the late 18th, 19th centuries.
Napoleonic Wars, Colonel Colt with the revolver, Alfred Nobel inventing dynamite, World War I was sort of a break point where the sort of naive progressive narrative really got undercut.
And then somehow you can say that the sort of Baconian science project in some sense ended, were ended in the Hegelian sense as both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos with the building of nuclear weapons.
And then, again, it doesn't work perfectly, but my telling would be that it took maybe a quarter century for nuclear weapons to really get internalized by society.
And then by the 1970s, You know, the energy was, you know, we don't want to be doing this outside world where we're going to build ever more thermonuclear bombs.
We want to be, you know, piecing out at Burning Man with psychedelic drugs.
We want to, you know, or you escape back to nature through environmentalism.
You know, we are, you know, we want to be in a world.
Not of change, but of stasis.
Because the world of change has this apocalyptic dimension.
Change is change for the worse.
That's the sense that gets, you know, encapsulated in the 1970s.
And so there's a way that the sort of progressive version of science, you know, we try to put the pause button on it.
The places where it's still allowed, you can say, are the most inert.
So in a way, the world of bits.
We're seen as incredibly inert because, you know, you're not building bombs, you're not building weapons with it.
And then, of course, even there, there's, you know, some sort of way in which the ideas on the Internet, maybe they do translate into reality every now and then.
You know, what happens on Twitter or X doesn't always stay there.
Most of the time it stays there, so it feels like it's this extremely angry, intense conversation.
But every now and then it still translates to the real world.
So the internet, you could say, was allowed because it was sort of a safe space.
It was a place where the sort of violence could be contained.
And then even there, probably not totally, and even there people felt it was like maybe too much.
But yes, the sort of apocalyptic background of late modernity where, you know, every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon is in the background.
And again, I don't like the stagnation and the risk aversion and all these responses.
But there's a part of it that I think is understandable.
Yeah.
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In fact, you can get four extra So it sounds to me,
now that you've clarified that, it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're grappling with is more of an attempt to Yes.
war period or maybe even the enlightenment to the post-war period.
Like, things have shifted radically.
And it sounds to me like what you're outlining is a, what, it's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift, perhaps even more than an attempt to deny the idea that there's any progress.
You said yourself when you were laying out your argument that...
It's very difficult to measure progress, but it's also undeniable that many, many things have shifted and we're not where we were, let's say, well, 10 years ago, probably, and certainly not 30 years ago.
Well, I would say we are broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago.
We are still progressing in some dimensions.
They're maybe still too fast and too scary for people, but the big thing that has shifted vis-a-vis, let's say, the world of 1913, pre-World War I, is...
That we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age.
That there is a dimension of science and technology that, you know, it has a dark dimension and it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.
And, you know, I don't like Greta and I don't like the full precautionary principle, but her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong.
So you see this shift in part as a shift from the ethos of progress, the prior assumption of progress.
Yeah, but I don't want to abstract it too much.
It is actually, it's the specific nature of the progress that happened.
It is, we got thermonuclear weapons.
Yeah, right.
We are powerful enough to affect the environment.
I'm not sure whether, you know, carbon dioxide is the most important dimension, but there are probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be.
Impacted in very radical ways.
We can probably build very dangerous bioweapons.
Maybe that's even what was going on in the Wuhan lab.
There are dimensions of AI that are potentially violent and very dangerous.
And you don't have to necessarily believe all these sort of weird pictures where it's this superintelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet.
But there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology that feel unsettling.
A simple example is that we have this drone technology.
That's a new form of technology that's come to the fore in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.
And you have a human in the loop.
But the human can get jammed.
And so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems.
And that's...
Seems inevitable.
That seems like the natural, logical thing to do.
And then even I, as a pro-tech person, have to say I find that somewhat unsettling.
Okay, so let me lay these ideas out again and summarize.
So, one of the threads that you were developing was, we'll do two at the same time.
One was that the scientific process, in terms of physical reality, maybe, in your view, peaked in the 1960s.
And then you could imagine that there...
You kind of outlined two maybe reasons for that.
One was fear of the apocalyptic consequences of that technology and an escape into various forms of abstraction.
So some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions, inner journeys, but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction.
And then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open.
And so maybe we could understand this.
And then in the digital realm, and then in some ways, even these escapes weren't full escapes.
So AI, yeah, it seems to be just about bits, not atoms.
But then if you combine it with a drone, the AI comes back to the physical world.
Yeah, well, we'll get back to that, back to the overlap.
So you could imagine that, okay, so the scientific approach.
The method produced an explosion of technological consequences.
Many of them were dramatic in the physical world.
There was kickbacks against that.
One of the kickbacks was the apocalyptic element.
The other was the turn away from spirituality, you might say.
But then there was also the counterposition that always develops after any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways.
Like, the scientific...
I was just in Uzbekistan, you know, and they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years.
And part of the reason that they could do that was because there was nothing in the way, right?
Because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default.
Now, you could imagine that for a good time, the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing.
Revolutions non-stop.
And the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it.
And so, they caught up, quite remarkably, by the 1970s.
And that left the digital space still open.
And it is kind of a free-for-all space.
Yeah, but the way you're telling the story, it has too much of this timeless and eternal character.
This is just what always happens.
Yeah, right.
Well, that is what I'm wondering.
Whereas the story I want to tell has more of a...
One time and world historical character to it, where it is, you know, there were lots of inventions where, you know, people figure out, you know, cures for diseases.
That didn't say, okay, now we have to take a step back and cure fewer diseases.
That actually encourages you to double down on that and do even more.
Or, you know, we have, you know, we have all these machines that replace humans in factories.
And, yeah, there's some downsides to it, and there are labor problems with the Industrial Revolution.
There's a lot of pollution, but on the whole, the good way outweighs the bad.
And there was no big regulatory counter-movement in Victoria.
Let me make a counter-example.
But then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons, and that specifically has a very different character.
It has a really different character.
And probably, I don't know, by the 1950s and 1960s, you know, baby boomers get, you know...
You're a kid, you get brought up on Dr. Seuss and not on adventure stories.
And it probably changes childhood education.
It changes the way we form and develop human beings.
And it leads to a society where science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence.
There's always sort of an interesting...
Big picture history question of how much science and technology, you know, were they, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West?
And were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a complement?
Where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation, and this is sort of a way that it's, you know, it's a...
It's a fulfillment of this, or was it meant to be a substitute, where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God?
Radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project.
Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life.
And then, you know, and, and, and, and,
And so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence.
And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, I think someone like Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist.
We need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress.
And then I've had this Bacon discussion with a number of people lately, and they all think, no, no, that can't be right.
Bacon was just this somewhat heterodox Christian.
And because in late modernity, where we find ourselves, again, it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally, but in late modernity, it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point.
And so if you think about Hollywood...
Richard Dawkins' despair.
Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity.
He is like a fossil from before 1789.
He's the last of the Enlightenment.
He's a fossil from before 1789.
And Greta is more representative.
If you think about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary.
And so to the extent...
The way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that, yeah, it's God's fault, but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place.
And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth.
And so, in the 17th and 18th century, you know, the Christian God was blamed for slowing down the scientific technological project in the...
The 20th and 21st century, the Christian God gets blamed for starting it, speeding up, keeping it going.
So, the invariant is the Christian God always gets blamed.
But, you know, the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something very interesting about how this is transformed.
Now, that's interesting, because you're making the point that two opposite arguments are making that are both...
Directed towards furthering Nietzsche's death of God, let's say.
So then that begs the question, what's the actual motivation?
The only point I'll make is that we're, again, we're in a very different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th, 18th century.
17th, 18th century, I don't think people would have said, yeah, we're going to make all this progress and there's going to be a lot of pushback and it'll get regulated.
I know the thought was we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better and it's going to have this sort of unraveling, accelerating effect.
And then in the 20th, 21st century, we make the opposite argument as there are some things in this project that have gone somewhat haywire.
Okay, so let's pick up on...
On the religious thread for a moment, I've been trying to understand the relationship between Christian Europe, let's say, and the dawn of the scientific age for a long time.
And so, let me outline something for you, and then I'll turn back to exactly what you said.
So, it seems to me...
Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities.
And so, there's certainly a trail from Christianity through the monasteries to the universities.
And so, you can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity.
But I think there's something deeper there.
And so, I've tried to make this case with Dawkins, for example.
Not least after he called himself a cultural Christian.
So, it seems to me that for science to get going as a motivational project, there are some assumptions you have to make that aren't scientific.
So, there are axioms before the game gets going.
And I think there are faith-based axioms.
One is that the cosmos is intelligible, that it's intelligible to the human mind, and that diligent investigation of that intelligibility...
both practical, both conceptual and practical, and that that increment in knowledge is good.
But then there's maybe a deeper presumption, which is that increment in knowledge can be good if the point of the knowledge pursuit remains encapsulated in something like the underlying Christian ethos.
And then I would say that fractures in a way, perhaps Bacon's a turning point, where the
The reliance of the scientific endeavor on these metaphysical presuppositions is questioned.
Like when I presented Dawkins with that argument, he just waved his hands over it.
He said he doesn't have any metaphysical assumptions underlying his brand of science.
And I think that that is what the more radical Enlightenment French Revolution types thought, is that no.
We've escaped from the underlying religious ethos, okay?
The problem with that is, it seems to me, and I think this might have to do with this apocalyptic kickback, is that once you unmoor yourself from the underlying ethos, which is even the ethos that defines what constitutes knowledge and progress itself, then the Luciferian element of the scientific endeavor can begin to loom extremely large.
Well, again, let's start with the early modern history.
I'm always a sort of hardcore Girardian, this great thinker, intellectual, sort of, in some ways, Christian polymath that I studied under Stanford in the late 80s,
90s and influenced me tremendously.
And, you know, these things are, again, very complicated intellectual history questions.
But certainly one intuition that's odd about your telling would be that you would say that, you know, we had sort of a law-centered, monotheistic tradition also in Islam,
also in Judaism.
And if we say there was something about Christianity where this really came, it was not in the Islamic world that you got the scientific revolution, for example.
It suggests that maybe it wasn't just the metaphysics, not just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology.
Girard was fond of always saying that when people focus too much in the Bible on what it tells us about God, there must also be something it tells us about man.
Yeah, okay.
And certainly the Girardian intuition is that one of the...
You know, one of the things is always that, you know, there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating, that in some ways, in some sense Judaism and then Christianity, it's the same story.
It's the same story of, you know, sacrifice, but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community.
It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim.
And there's a certain way where...
It sets in process this gradual, this dynamic revelation that has, that leads to sort of gradual unraveling.
And there are, and as you stop believing in scapegoats, you're forced to come up with other explanations.
And that includes science.
So, for example, you can ask, why did the witchcraft trials come to an end?
And the atheist scientific explanation is, We got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible.
And I don't think that's even been proven in 2025 because we don't know everything.
Maybe it's a lost art that's been lost.
Maybe you can go to a bookstore in Berkeley and buy a book on how to be a witch.
There's not a lot of difference between placebo effect and magic.
But then the Girardian alternate story of why the witchcraft trials ended.
Were that at some point people realized that this sort of collective scapegoating in some ways was like a version of the death of Christ.
The witches were not absolutely innocent like Christ, but they were relatively innocent.
It was a community that went crazy.
And then once you know that the witches are innocent or are relatively innocent...
Then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations.
You know, if you don't think that it was, you know, I don't know, the Jews that poisoned the wells in the Middle Ages.
Or some devils.
Eventually, or, you know, this was during the Salem witch trials, there were these, you know, you had these competing sermons on Sundays.
And, you know, the initial ones were sort of that, yeah, these women had made a pact with the devil.
But then the way it got reconstructed, because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended, and people sort of realized pretty fast they kind of collectively lost their minds.
And the alternate one was, you know, the devil had entered the whole community and had possessed all of Salem.
And those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath of the witchcraft trials.
And then in that sort of a context, you know, maybe science was also a way to find...
You know, you can steel yourself to find natural explanations.
When you're in an archaic, you know, thing, scapegoating is always an explanation.
It's a, you know, this person did this, that person did this, it's that person's fault.
And when you say those explanations won't do, maybe you're forced to do scientific explanations.
So there are all these different threats one can stress.
I think you have to always ask this question.
What was specific about the Christian message that really enabled this?
I think there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned.
And people, I don't know, if you compare the Talmudic abilities already in the Middle Ages to understand the Bible, to read it, it was as good or better than any,
Anything that the Christian scholastics were doing.
But somehow it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way.
But again, it's obviously a complicated history.
Well, so one of the things you pointed out there that's very interesting is that Christianity, the rise of Christianity destroyed the pagan world.
And that's a great mystery.
One epistemological consequences of that was the notion that deities weren't widespread.
That idea had to disappear.
You know, the Romans had gods for their archways, right?
So, there was an idea that there were invisible spirits, so to speak, that were operating behind the scenes that could easily be interpreted as causal mechanisms.
But you can imagine then, I'm also trying to integrate this with what I learned from Jung, you can imagine that as the world's desacralized, At the pagan level, and the kinds of interpretations that you just described are no longer tenable, right?
There are these invisible agencies, some of them personalities that are operating.
That isn't working anymore.
That gets all aggregated into a monotheistic deity, and the magic gets pulled out of the world.
See, Jung also pointed out that as the Christian revolution transpired, the alchemical mythology...
...started to become widespread and that there was an idea that developed that there were mysteries lurking in the material world that had redemptive capacity.
And so you could imagine that as the spirits are taken out of the world, the suspicion, you already said this, the suspicion that there are other causal forces at work starts to make itself manifest in at least the imaginations of people who are on the cutting edge.
And so I wonder if that's a...
Is that an inevitable consequence of the victory of Christianity over the pagan world?
Because it gets desacralized.
Merely because everything that's divine gets united into a single figure.
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I think it was somewhere in Karl Marx where he says that, you know, all social criticism starts with criticism of religion.
And then the Christian addendum, I would always say, was that Marx...
Jesus Christ was the first person to actually do that, really, and started that whole process where, you know, you can think so much of it was, you know, calling into question the social institutions, the religious institutions, you know, in a way deconstructing them,
you know, and there's something about this that is, you know, I think is true.
I think there is something about it that has an unraveling character.
And I don't think you can go back.
We can't go back to these pagan institutions once they have been deconstructed.
And maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena.
Or unconscious manifestations.
But that doesn't sound like the way you really bring Zeus back into the world.
The way it would have been, you know, understood by, you know, the average person in ancient Greece or something like that.
But, yeah, I think, you know, there's a, one of the other, you know, dimensions that, I mean, Girard, it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology, but also, there was always a psychological dimension to Girard.
The psychological intuition in Girard is that there's something about human beings being imitative that's very deep, very important, very underexplored.
And it is that, you know, you have something like, it's something like, I believe it's in Aristotle, man differs.
for imitation.
Yeah, it's a huge difference between us and other animals.
And then you could say this is, like, you know, of course, Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes.
And the apes, they ape, they imitate.
And so we differ from the apes and being more ape-like than the apes.
If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the Darwinian one, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way.
And then the problem is,
The good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted.
This is how you learn language.
Without imitation, nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work.
And then the thing that's dangerous is it's not just on a representational level.
It's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate.
It's also on the level of desires, of things they want.
And when everybody wants the same thing.
You know, this becomes this, you know, incredibly, you know, incredibly violent thing.
And then, in Gibbard's understanding, the point of, you know, or a major point of a lot of the laws, divine laws in these archaic societies was to, you know, in some sense, stop imitation.
Okay, okay.
To prevent imitation, to, you know, you will, the job you do will be the same job that your father did.
If your father's a baker, you will be a baker.
And this creates a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and it all goes, everybody's at everybody else's throats.
And then somehow, you know, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did before we had any Anything cultural at all.
Before we had invented, you know, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or, you know, these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence.
And so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is, you know, it's what makes our society dynamic.
But there are no natural barriers.
And that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, this...
And again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it has this super open-ended dimension where it can go in all these different ways.
You know, there's probably, again, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here.
There probably is, you know, something about the loss of the transcendent.
Where, you know, if you have a transcendent, some transcendent reference, you're not in mimetic competition.
Yeah, okay.
I want to return to that.
And so, one of the intuitions Gerard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list.
The first commandment, you know, you should only worship one God.
There's one God above you.
That's who you worship.
The Tenth Commandment is one about...
You know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being to your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things.
And it's basically when you, you know, when you stop looking up, you start looking around.
And when you look around too much, it's not a wisdom of crowds.
It's a madness of crowds.
And it's...
Great. That's the envy issue.
And then that is sort of where, again, you know, it's...
We're not even talking about what to do about this, but this is just sort of a...
Well, kind of.
Looking up is partly what to do about it.
As a description, I would say there is something about late modernity, a society that's not dominated by a supernatural being, that's sort of, you know, it's atheist, the liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal.
It's a lot of...
Very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it.
And that would be sort of a Girardian description of this world where mimesis is far more out of control than ever before.
Don't think we can go back.
But there are all these ways.
It's frustrating, unsatisfactory.
It may be apocalyptic.
But that's a way to...
Again, understand this history, and it's in some ways, you know, downstream of Christianity.
It's downstream of these things being revealed.
In some ways, it's the opposite to it.
You know, because one of the questions, you know, Gerard, if you ask Gerard, you know, you have this theory about mimesis, and there are all these bad forms of mimesis.
We have the wrong role models, and then isn't it just, okay, you should be less mimetic?
Yeah, no.
And then, of course, this is just the nature.
You can maybe choose your role model, you can choose Christ, but you can't choose not to be a medic.
By the way, that's the Ayn Rand answer, where in Atlas Shrugged, the bad people are all the people who imitate.
They're the second-handers.
They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else.
And then the really great people.
No, but the Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be, people like that don't exist.
We all grow up deeply in a social context.
There's a developmental part to human biology.
Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children, because children are incredibly imitative.
Both good and bad, but this is just the way we are.
But so yes, Gerard's answer was never that you could get rid of mimesis or anything like this.
Yeah, no, that's not going to happen.
Or even that some kind of psychological approach would be, you know, that you talk about your mimetic stuff with your therapist.
That might make it worse, right?
Because you'd focus on it even more, and then you'd conclude...
As in so much therapy, it gets marketed as self-transformation and it crashes out as self-acceptance.
And then you probably just conclude, I'm just a really mimetic person.
It degenerates into self-worship.
Into self-acceptance, let's say.
Yeah. I wish it stopped there, but it doesn't.
And then I think Gerard's answer would still be something like, you should just go to church.
Okay. So, let me pull apart.
I'd like to talk to you about sacrifice.
And then again, about imitation.
I'm going to start with imitation.
So, the psychologist that I know best who is most conversant with the ideas that you put forward is Jean Piaget.
And Piaget prioritized imitation as much as Girard.
But Piaget's view didn't concentrate so much on...
The violent aspect of it.
He didn't concentrate so much on how imitation can go wrong.
The way I believe it was sort of this somewhat optimistic, you know, just positive societies progressing through imitation.
Yeah, well, he wasn't concerned precisely, I would say, with notions of progress from an economic perspective.
Like, Piaget's notion was that...
It's very much like Girard's, you know, is that the way that we organize ourselves socially and psychologically is through imitation.
And so, Piaget concentrated, for example, on games.
And so, his counter to Girard, but without invalidating Girard's point, by the way, is that...
But he was before Girard, right?
Yes, he was.
Yes, definitely.
And so, Piaget's point was that we actually...
Yes. Abstract and
model the domestic environment.
But then there's a higher order principle that regulates that, which is that in order for it to be play, both of them have to be voluntarily in accordance with the aim, and they have to be learning dynamically.
Okay, so now your point, I think, was that...
So now imagine a world where there's an indefinite number of these imitate...
Imitation-predicated games, because there is an indefinite number of them.
Now, what I think happened in the religious framework, particularly in the Christian framework, that that multitude of games, each of which is potentially a little Tower of Babel, is organized underneath a higher-order principle.
Now, you said that Gerard's answer was you implied aim up, but you also implied go back to church.
Now, see, let me just finish one thought.
Imagine that there are metagames under which imitative games could be organized.
One metagame would be power.
Another metagame might be hedonistic self-gratification.
The Christian metagame is voluntary self-sacrifice.
That's a radical reshifting of the metagame territory.
And I think it is irreplaceable.
And I think it has to be embodied And not propositionalized.
So, the pagan world, the Roman world, the Greek world, they were essentially predicated on power and hedonism.
If I could, then I had a right to.
And if I could impose force on you, then I was the better man.
And that was inverted in Christianity.
But it was inverted in a way, I think, that matches maturation.
I mean, your point seemed to be that the imitative capacity can go dreadfully wrong.
If the games degenerate into envious status competitions.
And the other point, I think, was that they will degenerate into envious status competitions unless they're oriented towards something transcendent.
So then the question would be, what would that transcendent orientation be?
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Well, let me see.
There's many different threads here, but I would say Gerard would reference people like Piaget and said that, you know...
They underestimated imitation massively.
They whitewash it.
If you ignore this all-important runaway violence dimension and things like this...
Yeah, well, Piaget was not a psychopathologist, right?
He was a study of normative development.
Yeah, yeah.
And then I think Girard's intuition was much more that, in some sense, the so-called normal case is the less important one.
It's the extreme case.
It's where, you know, it's the madness of crowds.
You know, that's an extremely important case.
Hey, fair enough.
See, because Piaget also wasn't an abnormal psychologist.
Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell, in the wisdom of crowds.
The crowds are wise because they imitate each other, and this is how a lot of stuff works.
Right, but he did bind it by the necessity of voluntary play, right?
That's an important distinction.
All these ways were still within some structure.
But you could always say this is a basic difference between enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is, you know, in the Bible, the crowd is always wrong.
The crowd is always crazy.
It is mad.
It's, you know, the Tower of Babel.
It's in part, it's the unanimity.
The Israelites in the desert.
It's and enlightenment.
Enlightenment rationality, it's always, you know, democracy is good.
The more people vote for something, the more rational it is.
Although, you know, at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea.
And so, you know, it's a very important question.
When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds?
Yeah, that's a very important question.
The Girardian, and I would say Christian intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than you think.
And this is, yeah.
So that's sort of one dimension.
I don't know if I would anchor it as much on sacrifice, though, as the key feature.
And again, this is one of the places where Girard argued that it's...
Christianity was, in Gerard's telling, is anti-sacrificial.
It is a move away from sacrifice.
You know, all these theories about the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death.
But even if we go with a sort of traditional theological...
Is it a movement away from the sacrifice of others?
Well, it is Christ's death is supposed to be the last one.
Christ made the sacrifice, so we do not have to make it.
And then, yeah, you can say it is a sacrifice of others versus the sacrifice of self.
You could say that, but you could say, the way Gerard would put the stress would be that you refused, it's not there was some virtue in Christ sacrificing himself.
It's not like some, I don't know, some sort of silly...
Hero saying, you know, please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that.
You know, giving some sort of dramatic announcement.
It said, Christ at Gethsemane.
You know, it's still praying, please let this cup be taken away from me.
It is, so it is, it's not, you know, this is, you know, a wonderful, necessary thing to do at all.
It's quite the opposite.
But you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others.
That characterizes Christ.
Well, definitely that.
And we're not willing to resort to violence.
We'll use power.
You aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion.
And so it's a refusal to sacrifice others.
And then, yeah, maybe in some context you have to lay down your life, your friends.
There are things like that that happen, but I think it's...
It's much more, you know, the anti-sacrificial intuition.
And you have this already in, you know, a number of the Old Testament prophets.
I think it's Hosea, where it's, you know, God desires mercy and not sacrifice.
You know, so it's, you know, and then these are sort of, in a way, you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws.
It's centered on the temple, and we have this sort of elaborate set of sacrifices.
You know, in some sense, Christ replaces it with, you know, love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And then pay attention to the moment.
And then we could say, we could say it's, and then, you know, he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law.
Yeah. But if you do those two things, you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore.
Okay, so let's delve into that.
You can even eat bacon and pork.
Right, right, right.
Which was a really, really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law.
Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit.
I want to make this psychological and sociological as well as theological.
So, it strikes me that one of the radical characteristics of human beings, we talked about imitation, that's certainly one.
Another radical characteristic is the Willingness and ability to make sacrifices.
So let me define that for a minute, and then we can see how it goes astray as well.
So, the more immature you are, the more your attention and behavior is under the dominion of biological systems that have narrow short-term gratification as their focus.
That could be rage, it could be hunger, it could be temperature regulation.
A two-year-old is a collection of...
Unruly, competing, short-term motivations.
It takes 18 years for the cortex to develop.
And you could think of the cortex as an inhibitory structure.
So that's kind of a Freudian model.
Or you could think about it as an integrative structure.
And that's a better model.
Part of Piaget's model is useful in that regard because we integrate within the confines of imitative games.
But there's more to it than that.
So as you become more mature, this kind of a definition of maturity, you...
Focus more on tomorrow and next month and next year.
So your temporal span of apprehension increases and you regulate your behavior in the present in relationship to the future.
That's a sacrificial move because you're sacrificing immediate gratification for the stability of the future.
And then there's another...
Let me push back on just that description.
Is it a sacrificial move or is it a rational move?
Because there's some way in which...
I think it's both.
It's both.
It's rational once you can see the future.
But it's sort of very...
To the extent it's rational, it may not be that sacrificial.
You save money in order to buy a house.
But I don't think you believe that people can regulate that with mere rationality.
It has to be deeper.
I would say part of that regulation of short-term impulse that's so...
Mere rationality won't do the trick.
And the rationality itself would have to be encapsulated within a concept of what actually constitutes rationality.
So, like I could ask you, what's worth sacrificing your short-term pleasure for?
Now, the pleasure speaks for itself, right?
There has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work, for example, that you regard as worthwhile.
And it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move.
Now, there's one more sacrificial element.
It's like, as you mature, it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub-components of you want now, and more about how you find harmony and competition and cooperation in social groups.
So, for example, one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social is to take turns.
And that's also a sacrifice, because the default is...
It's always my turn.
That's what it is like for non-social animals, for example.
Man, this is where I want to push back a little bit.
Push away, man.
I don't think you tell a two- or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice.
No, you probably acted out for them.
It's if you don't take turns.
You won't have friends.
Or the other kids tell the kids that.
There's some very pretty fast immediate consequences to it.
And again, you don't say it's rational, but it's sort of you learn pretty fast to do these things.
And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is That the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make.
I'm going to give lots of examples, but there's always a question about what should be done about academia.
All the conservative academics.
Are being expelled.
It's so hard to do this.
And there's sort of a, there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of right-of-center people over the last 20 years, where it's, well, we just, you know, we need to just train more people with PhDs,
and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system, have to somehow break in.
Yeah, right.
There's sort of a lot of reasons to think it's hard to do or might not work.
But the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice.
And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made.
It's a very foolish choice.
That perhaps this language of sacrifice confused things.
And then the non-sacrificial move is roughly like what you yourself did with the University of Toronto, wherever you were, where it's at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia.
I'm not sacrificing my mind, or I'm not playing by all their silly rules.
And I think that was the correct thing to do.
I would describe it as the anti-sacrificial move.
The sacrificial move would be, you know, you have a tender position there and you might be unhappy about it, but, you know, for the greater good, you have to stay there.
Okay, so there were things I wasn't willing to sacrifice to stay there.
There's no doubt about that.
But I would also say that...
And I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed.
I think you made totally the right decision.
But I would also say...
I would describe it as...
The way I would describe it, and maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing, but I would describe it as you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly, irrational, crazy...
In relation to what?
See, that's the issue, because I think that's true, but...
In relation to things that, again, maybe can't be fully rationally defined, but in relation to some of the alternatives.
You could do in relation to maybe even something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable.
Did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor?
Or did you find it boring?
And it wasn't fun.
The boredom wasn't fun.
And it's not the only reason to leave.
Maybe it's not a sufficient reason.
From my perspective, it's a good partial reason.
And there were probably a lot of things like this that added up.
I was unwilling to sacrifice my tongue.
And so what I sacrificed was my job and my clinical career so I could keep my tongue.
But there's a Christian element to that, too, because the Christian insistence is that the truth-oriented word establishes the order that's good.
And so...
But I don't think we can escape the sacrificial language because I had to give up my job, both of them.
I had three because I had a private business.
But again, I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you, but I think what you're doing is far better, far more important now.
I'm certainly not unhappy about it.
So if you had sacrificed your job and you were completely unemployable...
And had no economic prospects.
You know, you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself, but if nobody's listening to you, that might be a pretty irrational thing to do.
Again, and so it was, I think it was a, yeah, it's rational for you to focus on reaching a much larger audience, for you to do all these things.
And I think those were good decisions.
You didn't let...
You didn't let, let's say, the moralizing left-wing people in academia get to you.
You didn't let their value system control you.
Their value system is that, you know, there's nothing more important than academia.
This is the world that really matters.
This is where you have to fight the battles.
You said, no, you didn't let that morality control you.
So I would describe it as...
Well, I think it also,
to some degree, it likely stems from your saturation in the Girardian view, because You can correct me again if I'm wrong.
You're likely, and especially given what you said about Christ's sacrifice making further sacrifices in some ways unnecessary, your view is going to be to concentrate, it seems to me, on the more pathological end of the sacrificial process.
I think the terminology can be confusing because I would say...
What I gained was far greater than what I lost.
Now, that doesn't mean that what I lost was nothing, because it wasn't nothing, and it took a fair bit of reconstruction to make things work.
And so you could say, well, if you gain more than you lose, is that truly a sacrifice?
Now, the biblical stories are replete with paradoxes like that, because the most intense one, obviously, is what happens with Abraham and Isaac.
Because God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham is willing to do so, but the consequence of that is that he gets his son back, right?
And so, that points to the ambiguity of what constitutes a sacrifice.
I want to push back on all of these things.
Yes, I will confess to being an unreconstructed Girardian, and there were probably ways Girard modified his views more than I have.
And so he probably, towards the end of his life, was more open to sacrifice.
And I stick with the Gerard of the 70s and 80s, who is more categorically skeptical of it.
You know, I think, let me do an alternate cut on one story.
And there's one of these Bible stories.
And I always think one needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament.
This is sort of the...
This is sort of, again, a Christian bias I have, that it doesn't fully make sense on its own.
You need to interpret it in the light of the New.
And so there's a passage in the New Testament, I don't have the verse memorized, but it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child.
And then there's, again, you can think it's like an abstract thing, but maybe it's, again, We should always think more concretely.
The concrete question I would have is, is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as especially noteworthy and worthy of emulation?
And I think there is, in fact, one child whose faith gets described in the Old Testament, and we never seem to talk about it, and it's Isaac.
Because as they're going up the mountain, you know, Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story that maybe God will provide something else and, you know, that's what might happen.
And then Isaac just believes that.
Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice.
That's the delusional faith of an adult who's read too much Kierkegaard or something.
And Isaac's...
Is the true Christian faith.
That God will figure out a way where the sacrifice does need to happen.
God is not a violent God.
The violence doesn't come from God.
He's a loving God.
And there's a way to do this without sacrifice.
And I'm always...
What I find so odd about the Abraham-Isaac story is that...
We've written endless amounts has been written on the faith of Abraham, or Abraham is seen as the iconic person with faith.
And it's, again, linked to a certain conception of sacrifice.
And yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child.
Maybe you can come up with a better example.
I think the concrete one is Isaac.
And it is interesting that it's not written from his perspective, the analysis.
We get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story, but it's all the reviews, all the, when we talk about, you know, whose faith should we emulate?
Yeah, the theologians, the philosophers, they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of Abraham.
The way I understand Christ, I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac, which I think is...
Is very different, and maybe also very different on this question of sacrifice.
There always are questions how it interprets the Christian account.
I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, both as an event that happened historically, but also as a promise.
And in some sense, following Christ, there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you, but it's a rational trade.
For saving your soul and for having eternal life.
And so, if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life, you know, we can call that a sacrifice, but it has a very different character.
Right, that's why he says his yoke is light, which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation to the cross.
But you have to, you know, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in...
A literal, you know, eternal life.
That's one sort of thing.
If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as a really high value.
But that's why I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial.
And, you know, maybe, I don't like the word rational, but just, you're making a good choice, a wise choice.
Okay, okay, got it, got it.
Okay, so I'm going to stop us here, and so this is what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side.
All you watching and listening know we do an extra half an hour.
I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child, but I also want to ask you why you think...
If you think it's true that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side, and I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been.
Because that's something we actually share in common.
You know, unlike Piaget, I'm a psychopathologist, right?
He was a developmental psychologist, and I've always been interested in the extreme case.
And so I'd like to talk to you about this faith issue that you just described.
I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity, and I'd like to talk to you about...
What it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that, on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things.
So, alright, so everybody who's watching and listening, well, this part of the conversation has come to a halt.
And thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible and The Daily Wire.
We're going to continue for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side with the topics that I just described.
Thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk.
We obviously just barely got going.
Just got started.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's a good start.
And we've got another half an hour and maybe some time in the future.
So thank you very much.
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Much appreciated.
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