Sept. 11, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:20:35
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| I truly don't know if I could have come up with a more perfect guest for the first episode of the show. | ||
| Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, author, and founder of Project Reason. | ||
| And according to some people, he's also a genocidal maniac bent on nuking much of the Middle East. | ||
| Sam, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be here. | ||
| Which half of that would you say describes you better? | ||
| We'll talk about both halves, I imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll take the first, though. | ||
| Well, I'm truly thrilled that you're here and that, you know, you came in for my first show. | ||
| You said you were going to come in in October when your book comes out, but I twisted your arm sufficiently, and here you are. | ||
| Yeah, well, congratulations on the show, too. | ||
| Thanks, I appreciate it. | ||
| All right, so let's start. | ||
| I want to start basically where sort of I really found out about you and where I think | ||
| this whole discussion that everyone's been having for the last eight months or so started. | ||
| You were on Real Time with Bill Maher and you were on to talk about your book. | ||
| Bill was talking about liberalism and Islam and Ben Affleck was on and I know everyone's | ||
| seen this clip already, but let's take a look. | ||
| When you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers | ||
| and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us. | ||
| And the crucial point of confusion... Thank God you're here! | ||
| Well, I mean, the crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is intellectually ridiculous. | ||
|
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Hold on, are you the person who understands the officially codified doctrine of Islam? | |
| I'm actually well educated on this topic. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're saying that Islamophobia is not a real thing. | |
| That if you're critical of something... Well, it's not a real thing when we do it. | ||
| I'm not denying that certain people are bigoted against Muslims as people, and that's a problem. | ||
| Why are you so hostile about this, Ben? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's gross, it's racist. | |
| It's not, but it's so not. | ||
| It's like saying those stateless, shifty Jews. | ||
| You're not listening to what we are saying. | ||
|
unidentified
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You guys are saying, if you want to be liberals, believe in liberal principles, like freedom of speech, like, you know, we are endowed by our forefathers with an inalienable right, all men are created equal. | |
| No, Ben, we have to be able to criticize bad ideas. | ||
| So, first off, I think It's Gross It's Racist should be your Twitter bio. | ||
| Have you considered putting it there? | ||
| Yeah, people have been just throwing that at me on Twitter ever since. | ||
| It's a bit of a meme. | ||
| Yeah, so what I want to start with is, because I think there's obviously a ton we can talk about the fallout of this, and we'll get to that, but I want to talk about actually the specifics of what happened there. | ||
| Did you expect, because usually when they bring on the guest that sits on Bill's side of the table, usually it's for a one-on-one with Bill and sort of a casual conversation. | ||
| The panel doesn't really jump in. | ||
| Did you expect that whole thing to explode the way that it did? | ||
| No, no, not at all. | ||
| I was selling a book on meditation at that moment. | ||
| I was talking, and the first, that's about 60 seconds into the exchange, and so initially it starts with, you know, how can an atheist be spiritual, and there was talking along those lines, and I said something Slightly derogatory about the new age. | ||
| And Ben jumped into that space and was at my throat about... Islam hadn't even come up, so he clearly was poised to do that. | ||
| And yeah, that's considered a protected interview. | ||
| Everyone on the panel knows you're not supposed to jump in. | ||
| What do you think was going on with Ben? | ||
| Well, apart from him possibly being on steroids for his Batman role, I don't know. | ||
| I just think he clearly had... I think he had no idea who I was, really, but someone had given him a paragraph, a bio of me, and had more or less told him that, you know, I'm a A bigot who's intolerant of Muslims, and he really should take a whack at me on that topic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Honestly, I think I was a little slow to appreciate how hostile he was, because I wasn't just looking at him, I was actually looking at Nick Kristof, who I have actually collided with on this topic and who my remarks were more pitched to, I think more appropriately pitched to, because Nick really deals with With especially women's rights issues in the developing world to a unique degree. | ||
| So I had a bit of a bone to pick with Nick and Michael Steele was on the panel and so my attention was split and so I wasn't just kind of at the corner of my consciousness was I was understanding that there was a level of hostility here that I didn't really Yeah, so talking about knowing how to interpret it, like, it's a little different if Nick Kristof or some author or a philosopher had immediately jumped out at you like that. | ||
| I think you perhaps would have dealt with it in one way, but when a big, I mean, this is an A-list Hollywood star, this is Batman, jumps at you that way, did that throw you off in a way? | ||
| I mean, look, you were cool and collected there, but just having to deal with someone at that level, it's like a different ballgame, you know? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's hard to interrupt a movie star who doesn't want to be interrupted. | ||
| So at a certain point, if Bill's not going to cut him off, I can't cut him off. | ||
| So trying to get a word in edgewise is a challenge there. | ||
| But the irony is, the sentence he was reacting to, the sentence where I say everyone conflates criticism of Islam, a set of ideas, with bigotry against Muslims as people, He no sooner were those words uttered than he demonstrated my thesis with every subsequent statement. | ||
| And it was just impossible to get that mirror bent, you know, close enough toward his face so that he could recognize what he was doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he literally, for the remainder of the 12 minutes, I mean, he continually and repeatedly proved your theory. | ||
| And then I continued for an hour in the green room afterwards and it was by no means resolved. | ||
| Yeah, and clearly hasn't been resolved since. | ||
| All right, so I don't want to focus too much on that specifically, but I just want to talk about when someone throws, you know, he throws this, it's gross, it's racist. | ||
| Suddenly I noticed that the next day the onus was on you and Bill Maher, and a little more to Bill, I think, To prove that you weren't racist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I have never, I've been a big fan of Bill's for a long time, I've never heard anyone call him racist ever before. | ||
| But suddenly the next day on all the websites it was Ben Affleck calls Sam Harris and Bill Maher racist. | ||
| Is Bill Maher racist? | ||
| Is Sam Harris racist? | ||
| How does that feel in that moment of the discussion when someone throws that gauntlet down? | ||
| Because you're used to debating people with ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not just words. | ||
| Well it's very dispiriting because It's almost guaranteed to convince half the audience. | ||
| This is the first thing I said to Ben afterwards in the green room. | ||
| I said, do you realize just calling us racist convinced half the people listening and watching that we're racist. | ||
| Just using that word is enough for people. | ||
| People just assume where there's smoke there's fire. | ||
| They can't figure out what anyone is actually saying. | ||
| Their attention span is so truncated that using words like that Uh, again, just convinces fully half the audience. | ||
| And the most depressing thing in the aftermath of this was to see the outpouring, the celebration of, you know, disproportionately in the Muslim community, um, on social media. | ||
| From people who thought that he had just mopped the floor with us, that he had exposed our racism for all to see, and he had argued brilliantly, and he's just this white knight for the Muslim world. | ||
| And it was so embarrassing because, of course, he did none of that. | ||
| He wasn't making any sense. | ||
| He wasn't listening to what we were actually saying. | ||
| And he was simply, you know, Calling us names. | ||
| Very loaded names. | ||
| And it works for people who want to perceive the conversation along those lines. | ||
| Was this meme, or this idea of you as a racist, was that even out there? | ||
| Because now I see it in the dialogue all the time, but I had never heard of it. | ||
| And to be 100% honest with you, I had sort of ancillarily knew your work. | ||
| I'm not even sure if I was following you on Twitter at the time. | ||
| So I know a lot of people, when they're done with this, they're going to say, ah, Ruben's just a Sam Harris fanboy, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But I really, I didn't, I was watching that and I thought well here's someone making some sense and now Ben Affleck's just using the worst kind of language with him. | ||
| But was that idea about you out there before? | ||
| Well not, well yeah, I think Glenn Greenwald and a few other people had put it out there. | ||
| So it was, I mean it's a trope of Politically correct liberal apology around criticism of Islam. | ||
| So this notion of Islamophobia, the idea that to single out Islam for any special attention as a set of doctrines or as a political reality in today's world is tantamount to, synonymous with, or covertly motivated by racist bigotry toward Arabs or brown-skinned people. | ||
| And there are many people like Glenn Greenwald who quite irresponsibly make that point again and again. | ||
| And so yeah, so Ben's... | ||
| Sir, that was not the first time criticism of Islam has been conflated with racism. | ||
| But it's, I mean, it's such a crazy claim because, I mean, this has been pointed out again and again, and Bill's done this, but Islam is not a race. | ||
| You know, it's a set of ideas. | ||
| You can't convert away from a race. | ||
| You can't convert to a race. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| One person can do that. | ||
| Everything I say about Islam applies to white converts to the faith every bit as much as it does to Arabs or anyone born into it. | ||
| In fact, even more so because if you're 30 years old And not had this drummed into you on mother's knee, and with a full adult, you know, clear viewing of your life and all the opportunities available to you, you decide to convert to the most doctrinaire and repressive form of Islam. | ||
| Well then, then I have the most to say about you. | ||
| You know, someone like, you know, Adam Gaddan, who's, you know, I think he's now dead, but this guy from Orange County who joined Al-Qaeda. | ||
| You know, these are, so, and everything I say about Islam as a religion that, you know, it's true, | ||
| I've said some disparaging things about it as a set of ideas, and I've compared it unfavorably | ||
| to Buddhism and Hinduism, which, you know, their adherents are, for the most part, not quite like me. | ||
| So the idea that racism has, that notions of race has anything to do with this is just completely crazy. | ||
| I took the top five things that I think people attack you on, in my opinion, misquote you on, | ||
| and I thought maybe we could take five minutes for each one. | ||
| Five or six minutes for each one. | ||
| And that way, each time someone says, well, Sam Harris wants to nuke the Middle East, or Sam Harris wants to racially profile Muslims, or whatever it is, you or I or anyone that's clear-minded can just send a link and say, here it is in five minutes. | ||
| You don't have to read a book. | ||
| You don't have to watch a three-hour interview. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| I think the number one thing that people say about you is that when you say Islam, you mean all Muslims. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, take it away. | ||
| Yeah, so the claim is that I generalize about Muslims, and this is incredibly ironic because | ||
| half the time in that Bill Marklip was spent where I was talking about statistics and poll | ||
| results and percentages, and a certain percentage is jihadist, and then there's a wider circle | ||
| of Islamists, and then there's a wider circle of conservatives. | ||
| And so I never generalize about the Muslim world. | ||
| And insofar as we have good data on the numbers of people who subscribe to various beliefs, then I'm always looking at those data. | ||
| And so, everything I say about the problem of of Islam and Islamism | ||
| It takes as its area of concern, first and foremost, the people living in the Muslim world who are living under the shadow of, if not the boot, of theocracy. | ||
| So, you know, women and gays and freethinkers and public intellectuals and atheists, people who email me saying they're afraid their mother and father will kill them if they knew they were an atheist, for instance. | ||
| And there's nobody who I celebrate more than Muslim apostates and true reformist Muslims like my co-author on this new book, Majid Nawaz, who have taken just heroic risks to say critical things about the faith in a context where it's much more dangerous to do so than the context in where you and I live. | ||
| And so, you know, if I were a Muslim in Pakistan saying half of what I'm saying on this show, I would have a life expectancy of about five hours, you know? | ||
| And that is a political and human rights reality that every liberal who's using this term Islamophobia is disregarding, not at their peril, at the peril of all the people who are not being helped by by Westerners who could help, you know, and non-Muslims who | ||
| could help. | ||
| And what non-Muslims can do is help in whatever way possible to make criticism | ||
| of theocracy in the Muslim world safe to do. | ||
| So yeah, no, I don't generalize. | ||
| And I think, of course, there are millions and millions of Muslims | ||
| who do not take the barbaric passages in the Quran and the Hadith seriously | ||
| and who are not wanting to kill apostates and don't want to throw gays from rooftops. | ||
| And those are not the people I'm talking about. | ||
| I mean, or if I'm ever talking about them in my criticism of religion, I'm talking about them in the same spirit that I talk about, you know, reform Jews or non-doctrinaire Christians who are not a real threat | ||
| to anybody, but who may be bending public policy around in ways we don't like. | ||
| The problem with many of those Muslims is they don't want their religion criticized at all and they | ||
| don't want any link between its core tenants, tenants around jihad and paradise and martyrdom | ||
| spelled out in terms of the way it's generating the kinds of violence and intolerance we're seeing | ||
| So, insofar, if you're going to defend your religion by saying Islam is a religion of peace and the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. | ||
| You're being intellectually dishonest and that kind of denial of obvious realities now is, I think, Yeah, just to close the door to notions of racism and bigotry against Muslims as people. | ||
| I think the apostates, the intellectuals, the women, the gays of the Muslim world are the most... | ||
| They're the most important people in the world right now. | ||
| If we could give green cards to every real secularist in the Muslim world, I think they should just get to the front of the line. | ||
| These are the people who need to be empowered. | ||
| The irony is that if they could leave the Muslim world, the Muslim world needs them. | ||
| The best thing to do would be to empower them in the Muslim world. | ||
| Life for these people is... | ||
| In countries like Pakistan, we have Bangladeshi bloggers being murdered in public by machete wielding maniacs and nothing happens, right? | ||
| Everything I say about Islam is a confession of solidarity with these people. | ||
| How you get racism out of that or bigotry against Muslims as people, you're a better geometer than I. | ||
| This is a big one, and I've seen this one really take a life of its own, that you want to do a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that true, Sam? | ||
| No, alas, it's not true. | ||
| It was made true, apparently, or at least to the satisfaction of many people by Chris Hedges, who went around every stop on his book tour, radio, television, print, telling people that this was, in fact, my position. | ||
| And many people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and your old colleague Cenk Uygur have reiterated this claim. | ||
| There are a couple of passages in my first book, The End of Faith, where I talk about how A certainty about paradise, and about martyrdom as the best way to get there, just destroys the logic of nuclear deterrence, of mutually assured destruction that we had, that kept us more or less poised on the brink of mutual annihilation with the Soviet Union for so many years. | ||
| And I just pointed out what I think is an obvious fact, and still is an obvious fact, should be an obvious fact, and a very troubling one, that if you have a regime That is the psychological equivalent of the 19 hijackers, the people who woke up in the morning wanting to fly a plane into a building. | ||
| That is a regime who you can't, they're not rational actors, you can't, or if they're rational, they're rational within the context of believing that they're going to paradise this way, right? | ||
| What's the rational part of that? | ||
| If you believe that, it's rational to blow up the world. | ||
| It's rational to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour. | ||
| This is not, so I pointed out the obvious fact that we have to avoid this circumstance at all costs, and there's no one who should be more cognizant of this problem than so-called moderate Muslims, or secular Muslims, or non-jihadist Muslims. | ||
| We have to collectively find some path to a future in which you don't have a true jihadist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. | ||
| Long-range is crucial. | ||
| So you have Pakistan. | ||
| Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. | ||
| Do I think we should execute a nuclear first strike on Pakistan? | ||
| No. | ||
| Pakistan is not, first of all, a jihadist regime. | ||
| And though, you know, they're one coup away from being taken over by one, but they're also, they don't have the warheads that can deliver these nukes to the capitals of Europe or to the U.S. | ||
| It's a very different circumstance. | ||
| And so, yes, no, there's nothing that I say in that book that suggests that we should be nuking Iran. | ||
| You know, and so it's just this is all I was talking about is how The kind of game theoretic logic of nuclear deterrence that we lived however precariously under with the Soviet Union falls apart once you admit to yourself that it's possible that truly suicidal religious maniacs can get their hands on these weapons. | ||
| And so all I was calling for is Our awareness, that really is a game changer, and we have to avoid that at all costs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you said this was just a few passages in your book. | ||
| It was literally about a page, right? | ||
| It's like a paragraph or two. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when people have blown this up into something that somehow this is like this massive idea that you have, Actually, a good friend of mine who I agree with on a lot of things and disagree on some other things, what he says to me in relation to this is that you're laying the philosophical groundwork for a nuclear first strike. | ||
| People respond to this passage as though I invented nuclear weapons, or that I think they're a good thing. | ||
| I'm just talking about the reality of our world. | ||
| We have a nuclear policy. | ||
| We have a first strike policy. | ||
| Someone somewhere in a war room has We've beaten out every choice point in terms of what are the circumstances where we would use nuclear weapons first? | ||
| What are the circumstances where we would imagine that they're going to be used against us first and then have to preempt that? | ||
| And this has all been thought out in a Cold War context. | ||
| We haven't had to worry about anyone else doing this to us. | ||
| And when you're talking about other regimes like China or North Korea, there are There's a plausible assumption that they're not suicidal, that everyone isn't eager to die, right? | ||
| And now we are talking about a set of ideas, you know, jihadist eschatology, this idea that martyrdom is a real metaphysical principle and it's not only okay to die in the right circumstances, it's the best possible thing that can happen to you. | ||
| There's no such thing as innocent collateral damage because all the good people are going to go to paradise with you and they're just going to thank you for it, right? | ||
| Nothing can go wrong and this world is just fit to be destroyed. | ||
| That is the ideology that you see in Happily, a small minority of Muslims at this moment, but it is not an accident that these people feel this way, because it's a very plausible, literal reading of the text. | ||
| During real time, you said that Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas. | ||
| Now I've seen, since, I've seen you tweet at someone, you tweeted a couple weeks ago at somebody, that Judaism is a motherlode. | ||
| That was the one moment in that exchange with Affleck where it seems to me I misspoke. | ||
| I mean it was just in saying the as opposed to a you know because I obviously I've written I've written more about Christianity than Islam right so I criticize religion in general I think faith-based religion is The Motherload of Bad Ideas. | ||
| Faith-based thinking, this idea that somehow you're wanting something to be true is a good surrogate for evidence that it is true, right? | ||
| And a way in which you can embrace self-deception and deception of others as a legitimate principle. | ||
| That, I think, is the Motherload of Bad Ideas. | ||
| Religion has kind of a corner on that market at the moment, but Islam is an especially dangerous variant of it within our current political reality, or I should say Islamism as opposed to Islam in general. | ||
| So when you say that, you're talking about because of the geopolitics, because of the maturation of the religion itself, right? | ||
| We know that Judaism's far older, Christianity's older, they've gone through different reformations, so partly this just has to do with timing, right? | ||
| Yeah, but unfortunately it's not only timing. | ||
| But timing is enough to differentiate them because obviously Christianity, 500 years ago, Christians were burning people alive on street corners. | ||
| And by the way, you've written a ton about that. | ||
| This isn't just something you're saying to me right now. | ||
| No, no, I've written more about that. | ||
| I wrote a whole book just on Christianity. | ||
| I haven't done that with Islam except this newest book that I wrote with Maajid Nawaz. | ||
| You know, there are historical differences between Islam and Christianity and other religions, and there are unfortunately theological differences that make Islam a harder doctrine to modify. | ||
| But it's just, as a sheer matter of history, Islam has not had A reformation, an enlightenment. | ||
| It hasn't been modulated by modernity in the same way. | ||
| And you're talking about, for the most part, people who have been intellectually isolated to a degree that should be unheard of, but is still quite common in the 21st century. | ||
| And unhappily, they're isolated from the ideas and ways of thinking That give us science and give us a commitment to human rights and give us a commitment to pluralism and democracy, but they're not isolated from the destructive enabling technology that we've produced. | ||
| So you have people who are legitimate engineers, right, and legitimate, you know, computer scientists even, who are jihadists, right, who want to, who will use the tools of modernity against any kind of set of modern values that, you know, we would be wise to defend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So I think what you said is it is not the motherlode, but it is a motherlode within the context of timing, geopolitics, and a whole bunch of others. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I certainly should have said a motherlode about it. | ||
| So the next one, you want to racially profile Muslims. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was a painful blog post. | ||
| Ironically, I read your piece on it. | ||
| If that's the case, you're either Muslim or you want to racially profile yourself. | ||
| I'm of the race that should be profiled. | ||
| Can you explain that a little bit more? | ||
| We've all had this experience of going through security and seeing people who, at a glance, you can rule out as non-jihadists. | ||
| All I've argued for in the few things I've said about profiling is that we should be honest about what we're looking for. | ||
| We're looking for suicidal jihadists. | ||
| Now, there are other suicidal people who may bring down planes, but as a general matter, we're looking for People who are the functional equivalent of the 19 hijackers, right? | ||
| So we're not looking for 80-year-old women from Okinawa. | ||
| We're not looking for little girls from Norway. | ||
| If Jerry Seinfeld is going to the airport, if he gets the same search that someone who looks like Osama bin Laden does, that's a crazy misuse of resources. | ||
| Now, there are little wrinkles here that we can correct for, it's possible to put a bomb in | ||
| someone else's bags, all bags should be searched. | ||
| I mean, yes, you can think this through, but there are people who you absolutely know at a | ||
| glance are not terrorists, right? | ||
| And any moment spent scrutinizing them in this security theater we've all witnessed at TSA is a | ||
| moment not actually intelligently looking for a more plausible threat. | ||
| So, I mean, my view is you have ten dollars worth of attention, if you spend a dollar over here you've got | ||
| nine to spend elsewhere, right? | ||
| So it's just a zero sum game. | ||
| And so my sense is because, I mean, again, we need well trained, smart people at TSA to do this. | ||
| That's a whole other issue. | ||
| So it's not like we're well-poised to do this, but when you look at what the Israelis do, if you ever get on El Al and you look at how they run security, yes, they look at everybody. | ||
| But there's absolutely no pretense of being fair in this process, and there shouldn't be. | ||
| And when I go through security, 50% of the people to me look like, and I'm not saying that I'm an expert here, but I pay attention to this sort of stuff a lot. | ||
| I would be willing to bet my life that certain people are just, and in this blog post I showed a picture of one, one old woman who you just know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's just absolutely no way she's joined Al-Qaeda. | ||
| So you look at her and you say, okay, the scrutiny on her is a waste of time, and it's a dangerous waste of time. | ||
| And in the interest of appearing fair, we are actually ramping up our risk. | ||
| But I -- | ||
| And the keyword being "appearing," right? | ||
| Because it's just appearing. | ||
| It's not actually -- | ||
| Yeah, but you and I fit the profile. | ||
| I mean, we're, you know, youngish to middle-aged men who could be -- we could be jihadists, | ||
| There are jihadists who, like, as I said, you know, Adam Gaddan or any of these other Western recruits to al-Qaeda or ISIS, who functionally look like us. | ||
| They're not, they don't look like Arabs. | ||
| They're not, you know, they're not holding Pakistani passports. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm not letting myself off the hook here. | ||
| It's not like I want me and the other white guys to just sail through. | ||
| It's just there are still people who are obviously not jihadists. | ||
| And until these people start blowing themselves up on planes, I think we'd be wise to just admit we know what we're looking for. | ||
| We have some sense of what we're looking for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just to be crystal clear, in that post, you literally said, I'm just reiterating what you just said, that you should be picked out, right? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| That you actually should be picked out. | ||
| And I describe it as anti-profiling. | ||
| It's not that I want certain people profiled, I just want us to admit that certain people require less scrutiny. | ||
| And, you know, Jerry Seinfeld is one. | ||
| When you see a famous celebrity go through security, treat it as though he just may have become a jihadist, you know, when no one was watching. | ||
| It's crazy-making. | ||
| It is security theater. | ||
| And there are many people who, though not famous, are every bit as unlikely to be members of Al-Qaeda as... | ||
| Uh, you know, prominent people who we know, you know, Betty White. | ||
| You know, Betty, Betty White is, is, uh... I would not be happy about that. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That would be a surprise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| ISIS will have won if they, if they win. | ||
| If Betty White gets, uh, profiled. | ||
| All right, so the final one of these sort of five pillars of Sam Harris thinking, uh, the big one is you're a neocon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uh, so I think we should define neocon first. | ||
| You want, you want to handle that or you want me to? | ||
| Well, I think it means many things to many people, but it's, it's the, uh, It's the attitude toward foreign policy that I think most was canonized by people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz in the run up to the first | ||
| or the, or, or, our invasion of Iraq after, um, 9/11, uh, this idea that we can go in in a very muscular way | ||
| and just create nations along democratic lines and, um, that our foreign policy should be very | ||
| aggressive and, and, um, we'll fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here. | ||
| And, um, I think we've all, I mean, I was, you know, I was never for the Iraq war. | ||
| I think we've all, I mean I was, you know, I was never for the Iraq war, I was never | ||
| I was never vocally against it either. | ||
| vocally against it either, I just was, at every moment through that process I was just | ||
| I just was, at every moment through that process, I was just painfully aware that I had no idea | ||
| painfully aware that I had no idea what to think about it apart from it looked very risky | ||
| what to think about it apart from it looked very risky and it looked like a frank distraction from the war | ||
| and it looked like a frank distraction from the war in Afghanistan which did seem to me | ||
| to be necessary and seemed like something we were probably going to botch. | ||
| One thing you can say against neoconservatism which is that it is idealistic to a degree | ||
| that now seems not at all sustainable. | ||
| We should have learned a lesson at this point which is we don't do this very well, we don't | ||
| nation build very well, we have a political environment where we just can't stay committed | ||
| to these things even if we were doing it well. | ||
| You know, we view everything through a four-year presidential lens. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And an election cycle. | ||
| And these are multi-decade commitments if we're going to do this well. | ||
| But Iraq looks like a disaster, and it's looked like a disaster for most of the time, apart from, you know, 15 minutes there after the surge. | ||
| And I certainly don't consider myself a neocon. | ||
| I just think we have to be honest about, in ethical terms, what is really going on in the world. | ||
| If you're going to say that we never should have gone into Iraq, Which I think is a reasonable thing to say, and it was a reasonable thing to say then. | ||
| It's only decent to admit how depressing a claim this really is. | ||
| So we're saying that Iraq is a place that requires a psychopathic thug to run it. | ||
| Given the level of religious sectarianism, given the fact that when you remove a butcher like Saddam Hussein, Everyone starts killing their neighbor, right, which is in fact what happened, and which is in fact the political and religious reality we underestimated when we walked in there thinking they were just going to put flowers in the barrels of our guns and welcome us as liberators. | ||
| So it's a very depressing thing to admit about the state of a place like Iraq. | ||
| I view Iraq, initially when Saddam was there, as a kind of hostage crisis. | ||
| You have a totally illegitimate regime. | ||
| Run by barbarians, keeping tens of millions of people hostage. | ||
| And so the people who criticize the war based on saying it was a sovereign government and we should never have gone in there, that's just a failure to engage with the moral reality, which is this was a terrible place to live and if we could have done something to help these people, We should have. | ||
| And there are many countries that fit that description. | ||
| I mean, North Korea is one of them. | ||
| If there would be some way to depose that regime and liberate the North Koreans, we should do it. | ||
| Now, we know that it would just be a bloody mess if we tried, and we're learning that more and more in these other societies. | ||
| And so neoconservatism, I don't know what its current state is now, but I can't imagine anyone is You know, even Wolfowitz or Perl is, I can't imagine any of them are as sanguine about the possibility of building a nation anywhere from scratch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's actually a great point. | ||
| Like, are these guys still believing that idea? | ||
| Do they think if we went back into Iraq right now, would it, would it be any better? | ||
| I somehow doubt it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And it's, but the idea that, that we created ISIS by going into Iraq, that's also just, Delusional. | ||
| I mean, the set of ideas that gives us ISIS, that is the set of ideas and the level of sectarianism that gave us the civil war that we could barely contain, that drove us out of Iraq. | ||
| And that set of ideas, in one or another degree, has been animating a subset of the Muslim world for a very long time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is where I think some of your critics would say, well, you're blaming things more on religion than the geopolitics, because had we never gone to Iraq, Saddam would still be there and at least ISIS would be controlled. | ||
| But basically you're saying this, this thing sort of would have bubbled up one way or another? | ||
| Is that? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| So, but no, but if ISIS, if those religious sectarian commitments were controlled by a dictator, That seems to me an intrinsically unstable situation. | ||
| At some point, they're going to bubble up. | ||
| But let's just admit how depressing that remedy is. | ||
| And we're talking about someone who's got torture chambers running full-time, and he's got sons who show up at people's weddings and rape the bride. | ||
| It's just a playground for sociopaths. | ||
| If that's what it takes to modulate the Sunni-Shia Internecine animosity you know that's it's a okay that that does not exonerate religion right and it does not exonerate at that level of commitment to divisive theology and so it's and there you know I think it's a | ||
| Yeah, I think it is totally appropriate to be humble about how hard it is to help people in these circumstances. | ||
| But if you look at a place like Rwanda... | ||
| Right, where, you know, Clinton's one regret was that we didn't do more to help, or to prevent that genocide. | ||
| And if you look at a total failure to intervene, and the resulting massacre of nearly a million people, and you say, okay, that was something we should not play that We should do something differently. | ||
| We should have intervened. | ||
| Well then, what do you think we should do to what's happening to the Yazidis under the Islamic State? | ||
| We've got people being crucified by the side of the road. | ||
| We've got thousands of sex slaves. | ||
| We've got gays being thrown from rooftops. | ||
| So, do we intervene or not? | ||
| I think it's not obvious That there's anything we can do in each one of these circumstances to help people, but the idea that you are a moral monster to even think that we should intervene is deeply suspect. | ||
| Alright, so one of my intentions with this show is that I really want to talk about ideas and not people, and I think that's what we've done so far for the half hour or so, but I do think sometimes you have to address certain people within the context of these conversations. | ||
| So I have to talk about one of your favorite people to start, Reza Ahsan, who, in my view, has repeatedly mischaracterized and misrepresented your views. | ||
| He's done this in a varied forum. | ||
| I've seen him, you know, say to my former boss, Cenk Uygur, that you and Bill, you know, that this is about all Muslims. | ||
| Then the day later, I'll see him on Huffington Post Live saying that Bill is his friend. | ||
| I mean, just a myriad of things that don't sort of add up. | ||
| Uh, it also, it sounds like maybe he half made up his bio. | ||
| Again, I don't want to make this about people, but sometimes I do think this has to be addressed. | ||
| So you want to just take that and put it somewhere? | ||
| Because I also sense that you're sort of tired, we're talking about, right? | ||
| Didn't you once say on Twitter that you just weren't going to do it anymore? | ||
| And then, and then it feels like the mafia, like you get sucked back in, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, so yeah, I declared a unilateral ceasefire at one point on my podcast saying that I would never mention these people again unless absolutely necessary. | ||
| But yeah, I kind of painted myself into a corner there because they don't stop. | ||
| People like Glenn Greenwald and Reza have the larger platforms, but there are many people who fit this description where they They seem to imagine that it's fair and intellectually legitimate to misrepresent the views of their opponents as a way of sliming them because they know it's effective. | ||
| It's like if you can just get something to stick, that's good because the person you're | ||
| arguing against is so unethical in his or her commitments that it's, this is, the end | ||
| justifies the means, right? | ||
| And I'm noticing more and more, this is obviously not a problem just with Reza or Glenn, but this is a larger problem in our conversation with one another, but it seems to be a pathology that's expressing itself on the left politically in a way that I'm not seeing it quite so much on the right. | ||
| I get attacked by people on the right, They actually, for the most part, do me the courtesy of understanding what my views are. | ||
| And they tell me, you know, a Bible-thumper like, I don't know, Rick Warren or anyone else like that who I've debated, you know, he will He understands what my position is, and then he disagrees with it based on his own commitments, and then we can have an honest debate. | ||
| And it can be barbed on stage, but it can be totally pleasant in the green room, because we both know what game we're playing. | ||
| But with these guys, it's not at all pleasant in the green room. | ||
| It's just impossible to engage at this point. | ||
| It's just so poisonous. | ||
| The crucial piece is, and this is something I honestly can say I'm innocent of, if I've ever done this, I've never done it intentionally, and the moment I've noticed I've done it, I've apologized for it. | ||
| The crucial sin here, intellectually and ethically, is misrepresenting the other person's views as a strategy for defaming them or marginalizing them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this has been done repeatedly. | ||
| So in the example of Reza and Glenn, They've retweeted memes saying that you want to nuke the whole middle. | ||
| All this stuff that we've been talking about. | ||
| So what I'm particularly interested here is that I see this on the left too. | ||
| I'm on the left. | ||
| So I care more about the left. | ||
| To me the right went over the deep end already. | ||
| But I want to bring the left back into some sort of sane middle ground. | ||
| So what do you think is actually going on here? | ||
| I had Dr. Gad sat on a couple weeks ago. | ||
| And he said that basically this is just the age-old thing where you go for the intellectuals first. | ||
| So someone like Reza, I think probably can't really, I know you have debated him, but can't really defeat you, so to speak, in a debate. | ||
| So then he has to go to this because, as you said at the beginning of all this, 40% of this stuff just sticks, right? | ||
| You say racist, well now 40% automatically believe you're a racist. | ||
| To bend over backwards to be charitable to these guys, I can say that we're all guilty of... | ||
| Kind of a bandwidth problem and an impatience with views that we're not sympathetic with. | ||
| And frankly we all are, it's possible for any one of us, no matter how scrupulous we attempt to be, to not take enough time to understand the position we're criticizing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so you, because you feel like, you know, if it's somebody like I don't know. | ||
| Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or somebody on the right with whom I'm basically unsympathetic. | ||
| I feel like I have the gist of what their opinions are or are likely to be. | ||
| And then they say something, I have a shorter fuse with them maybe. | ||
| I have less of a reason to really look into what their position actually is. | ||
| And that is That's a time bandwidth problem, but it's understandable, but it creates huge problems in our conversation, left and right, on any given topic. | ||
| But the crucial problem is, which I am now, to a moral certainty, sure I've encountered in these guys, is they know they're misrepresenting the view, and it's a strategy. | ||
| And I think it comes out of Just a feeling that it's a very cynical relationship to the truth. | ||
| It's a very cynical relationship to the significance of ideas. | ||
| We started this segment talking about the distinction between ideas and people. | ||
| Now these are people who Really don't think ideas matter very much. | ||
| I mean, certainly I don't think religious ideas matter very much, and the differences between religious ideas. | ||
| And so, you know, Reza is always talking about how, you know, religions are just, you know, networks of symbols and metaphors, and there's this kind of postmodernist nonsense that comes out of his mouth when he's talking about The truth claims of religion, and the punchline is nobody ever really does anything based on religion. | ||
| It's always some other reason, right? | ||
| It's psychology, it's politics, it's economics. | ||
| Right, I've heard him say that you actually believe in this stuff the most, because that's why you quote it. | ||
| And he obviously knows that's not true. | ||
| No, but he says things, you know, what he'll say, every time I come up he'll say, you know, I get my view about religion from Fox News, right? | ||
| Is there any chance he believes that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no chance. | ||
| I think if you've proven anything here today, that's probably... I mean, you look in the bibliography of my first book, right? | ||
| There's like a thousand references there, right? | ||
| There's absolutely no chance he believes that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's absolutely no chance he thinks I've called for a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, and yet he retweets a tweet that calls me a genocidal fascist maniac. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's, and Glenn Greenwald is in this category, and Cenk is as well, and Chris Hedges, all of them. | ||
| And the problem with this is that it works. | ||
| It actually, because then for the rest of my life I'm going to be seeing people who are absolutely sure On every comment thread I'm ever going to see, I will see people who are absolutely sure I've called for a genocidal nuclear holocaust. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And many other things. | ||
| And so it's very depressing, but it works. | ||
| And there really is no way to respond adequately to it. | ||
| And so I've had on my blog for years now a a post entitled "Response to Controversy" where I deal with | ||
| each one of these things as they come up and then a year later I'll revisit it and | ||
| fine tune it. | ||
| And I think it's the number one, if you search "Response to Controversy" on Google, I think | ||
| it's the number one result. | ||
| I mean, so it's, it's, it's kind of depressing to be associated with that phrase, but, uh, it's the, um, but it's still, it's not an adequate, it's like a, it's like a 10,000 word letter to the editor essentially, but it, it, it's not an adequate way of addressing this. | ||
| It's not adequate because a lot of people just don't care what the truth is. | ||
| They just like the fact that you can destroy your opponent's reputation by calling him a racist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's where I have to bring up the other person here that we've sort of danced around. | ||
| And that's the personal part to me. | ||
| So Cenk, obviously, Cenk Uygur is the founder of the Young Turks, the CEO of the network. | ||
| I worked for him for two years. | ||
| I still play basketball with him every Sunday. | ||
| You sat with him for three hours, for three hours, unedited, on his channel. | ||
| They put about five commercials in it. | ||
| It has over a million views. | ||
| I'm sure they made a lot of money on it. | ||
| You calmly explained to him at the beginning that basically he was repeatedly slandering | ||
| I don't know how to use the word slander, but that he was repeatedly misrepresenting your views and that you were there to clean up the mess. | ||
| And then you sat there for three hours, clearly laid out what you think about these things. | ||
| I was still working there at the time. | ||
| And then... | ||
| After that, he only doubled down on the lies about you. | ||
| Not only doubled down, but I see this all the time now on Twitter, people will take little video clips, 10 second video clips of him saying one thing to you, and then what he said when you're not around, even after, and things that he said to Reza, knowing that that's not what you said, and all of this stuff. | ||
| So the personal part to me, I just have to say it because people have been asking me forever, so it obviously had a Good amount to do with why I left. | ||
| So I just want to put that out there sort of more for my audience. | ||
| But in terms of the three-hour sit-down, I mean, that's a long time to sit with somebody. | ||
| We're not going to go three hours. | ||
| You did three hours with one glass of water. | ||
| Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think that it was going to get worse after that? | ||
| Because in my opinion, at least, it did. | ||
| Yeah, no, I could see He was not following me entirely. | ||
| So I could see that he was just, there was a kind of a fundamental disinclination to have his opinion about me changed by anything I was going to say, right? | ||
| So you encounter that in someone, you see that it's not, it's not functioning by the usual rules of conversation. | ||
| I mean, this is, this is the thing that's so poisonous. | ||
| It's the, and again, unfortunately I encounter this more on the left than, than elsewhere. | ||
| There's a, Everyone on the left at the moment seems to be a mind reader, right? | ||
| They're trying to detect in you evidence of a view which you claim you don't hold, but the moment they can string together anything you've said that seems to line up with something they want to find in you, they will hold you accountable to that misunderstanding, and no matter how much you try to take their foot out of your mouth, They, they, the mere effort itself is going to be counted against you. | ||
| You're someone who's in denial, or you don't really understand how racist you are, or, um, and it's a, uh, uh, I mean, so for instance, so, it's a classic example on Twitter. | ||
| I, I often see that, um, Whenever I say something critical about Islam, I will get back, you know, why don't you ever criticize Christianity or Judaism, which obviously I do. | ||
| My book. | ||
| But now, I recently said something very disparaging about Orthodox Judaism, and I saw on Twitter people claiming that I was just covering for my racism with respect to Islam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that made sense. | ||
| And this was just a token way of just, this is just a misdirection, right? | ||
| I don't really feel this about Orthodox Judaism. | ||
| There is no way to dig out from this. | ||
| I mean, really think how perverse that is. | ||
| And they're all mind readers. | ||
| They're all psychics who are plumbing the depths of your conscience. | ||
| They're detecting things in you that you don't even know about yourself. | ||
| Do you wish your mind was that deep? | ||
| Well, I mean, yeah, I wish. | ||
| What's amazing to me is, I mean, this is such a confused moral position because They're claiming I'm saying all these horrendous things, right? | ||
| I say we should racially profile. | ||
| I say we should nuke the Muslim world. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| They're going to selectively edit that. | ||
| I say we should torture people. | ||
| These are my claims. | ||
| And then when I say, no, this is not actually what I said, they—I mean, I say incredibly | ||
| If you actually honestly engage with what I'm saying, these are very... I take controversial positions. | ||
| I'm never hiding what I actually believe, right? | ||
| I'm walking right up to the line, like I'm going to say, though it is politically impossible, I want to talk about the ethics of torture publicly now. | ||
| I mean, this is a thankless job if there ever was one, right? | ||
| And yet they're claiming to detect in me commitments that I'm disavowing, and there's just no way you can disavow them once they insist they're there. | ||
| Right, so you want to have the battle of ideas, which is exactly what liberalism should be for, and they don't seem to want to do that. | ||
| So I just want to wrap this up with one final question, this portion of it. | ||
| So just putting it flat out there, I have tweeted at Cenk publicly and respectfully several times since I've left the network to engage him on this, and I've sort of laid out some things and showed out showed some evidence of this or that and he's just ignored | ||
| me so I just think I just have to say that and you know everyone can think what | ||
| they want. | ||
| But my final question on this is what do you think we should do about these | ||
| people? Do you think that your engagement at this point where you when you've seen | ||
| someone lie repeatedly misrepresent your views? | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| When you've seen this happen repeatedly, repeatedly, and then I started seeing it bleed into other things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you keep engaging? | ||
| Or at some point, do you just put your hands up? | ||
| And I'm guessing you struggle with this yourself, because you were sort of ready to put your hands up, and then you got sucked back in. | ||
| But where do you stand on that now? | ||
| I wish I had an algorithm for how to deal with this because it's very haphazard. | ||
| On my side it's just sometimes I'll just see a tweet that I just can't let go and then I'll go for weeks or months or in some cases even years not dealing with this directly. | ||
| I think insofar as someone has a big platform, you have to deal with it somewhat, some of the time, because I see the consequences of their successfully misleading people. | ||
| And so the people who I will never mention and never deal with because they're kind of smaller fish in this murky pond, but someone like Rez Aslan, you know, he is kind of a public figure now, and he's a darling of a certain... | ||
| Segment of the media and so what he says actually matters because it is you know, he's promulgating genuine falsehoods about the the connection between religious ideas and a very dangerous behavior and he's does it with a Apparently clear conscience and I think he knows enough to know that he's actually lying. | ||
| So he's a he's a I view him as a truly bad actor And yeah, but it's incredibly boring to keep poking fun at him or to keep pushing back against what he says. | ||
| And then ultimately you're just getting them clicks and in some cases actual money too. | ||
| So it's sort of, I guess there is no answer yet, but maybe. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean I'll just do it, you know, I do it when I can't do otherwise, but then I move on to other things. | ||
| I want to get back into some of the religious stuff. | ||
| So, I think partly what a lot of your detractors would say is that you have this focus on Islam that you don't have. | ||
| Now, you've already illustrated and you've written a book about Christianity, the whole first half of End of Faith, you're talking about the Crusades, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| As you said just a moment ago, you've said all kinds of things about the Orthodox Jews. | ||
| I think we get a sense that it's not just that. | ||
| But they're not all the same. | ||
| I think that a lot of these, a lot of the progressives, a lot of these people on the left, they want, they believe in this idea that everything is equal, that there's just this sort of base equality. | ||
| Except the fact is, by definition, these things are different. | ||
| If I was to right now draw the Jewish God of Yahweh or Moses or something, and then draw Jesus, Yeah. | ||
| in a weird sex act and then draw Mohammed, and I'm talking stick figures, I'm not a good artist, | ||
| only one of those would cause a threat to my life. So these things are not equal, right? | ||
| I know they like that proposition, but it's a faulty proposition, right? | ||
| Yeah, oh no. This is probably brought out in the most elegant way by that onion cartoon. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that. | ||
| The title was No One Was Murdered over this cartoon. | ||
| And it's just, you know, Buddha sticking his arm up the ass of Ganesh. | ||
| You know, blowing Jesus. | ||
| I mean, it's like everyone but Muhammad is in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the point is made perfectly. | ||
| You can do that, and yet you cannot draw a stick figure of Mohammed without having your life deranged thereafter by conversations with the FBI about how to keep you and your family safe. | ||
| That's the reality of the world we're living in, in the West. | ||
| Forget about what it's like to live in Pakistan or Bangladesh. | ||
| any of these countries where you are literally going to be cut down by your neighbors | ||
| on the mere rumor that you have mistreated a Quran or that you don't | ||
| believe that it's the perfect word of the creator of the universe. | ||
| So, yeah, so this... | ||
| I mean, the crucial piece is that beliefs matter. | ||
| Specific beliefs matter. | ||
| The differences between beliefs matter. | ||
| The doctrines, religious doctrines, are not all the same. | ||
| And therefore the behavioral and political and moral commitments born of those doctrines are not all the same. | ||
| So has media really failed us here, the mainstream media? | ||
| Because I did a video a couple months ago, you know, there was this exhibition, I think it was somewhere in the middle of the country, where they had the Pope made out of condoms. | ||
| Now I can see that being offensive to some Christians. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could turn on Family Guy on any given night or South Park and see Jesus doing all sorts of crazy things. | ||
| I posted a clip of Jesus bathing naked in front of Stewie, a baby, a male baby, and they're playing porn music in the background. | ||
| There's no threat of anything. | ||
| So is this where sort of the media has sort of helped the narrative because they have no problem publishing the picture of The Pope in condoms, but at the same time the New York Times didn't, for example, post the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. | ||
| And is this also where secular people, we've sort of, maybe we've underestimated or not been kind enough to the mainstream Christians because they get crap all the time, as I'm illustrating right here. | ||
| Nobody's being shot for these things. | ||
| Yeah, well I think we just have to acknowledge publicly and loudly and incessantly that free speech has to win. | ||
| So, anyone who In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, wondered, wait a minute, were those cartoons at all racist? | ||
| Because that was going to make me feel differently about it. | ||
| Opening that door is just a kind of moral blindness that we should have immediately inoculated ourselves against. | ||
| And people like Reza and Glenn Greenwald, that's the door they opened. | ||
| These were not Kosher cartoons, these were racist. | ||
| Of course they weren't, in fact, if you understood anything about French politics. | ||
| They were incredible satire. | ||
| Yeah, and these people were on the right side of all these liberal questions in France, if you understood French culture. | ||
| And by the way, not focusing on Islam more than any other religion. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| Way more were about Christianity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they did plenty of stuff on TV. | ||
| But even the cartoons that on their face seemed racist, and they were kind of a racial caricature, they in fact, if you understood the context, weren't racist. | ||
| But never mind that. | ||
| The sense that there's a tension between freedom of religion and freedom of speech is a total moral and political illusion. | ||
| So there's absolutely nothing you and I could say in this conversation that infringes upon somebody else's freedom of religion. | ||
| We can disparage religion all we want. | ||
| That doesn't affect someone else's political rights to practice it. | ||
| They can raise their kids however they want. | ||
| We simply need to admit that religion should be subjected to the same kind of criticism and scrutiny and satire as any other set of ideas. | ||
| As you point out, we do this for something like Mormonism. | ||
| So you can have a play like the Book of Mormon and no one gets killed. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's unthinkable to have an analogous play about Islam and we have just acquiesced to that difference. | ||
| We've just said, you know, it's just, yeah, it's too dangerous and The problem is not that it's too dangerous, the problem is that anyone like me would want to do it, right? | ||
| Someone like Trey Parker or Matt Stone, those assholes, they shouldn't go after Islam, right? | ||
| That's where the moral sensibilities of liberals seem to be right now, whereas we should be acknowledging how excruciating it is that there is this difference, even in our own societies, between Islam and something like Mormonism, whereas at one point In one of my blog posts I pointed out that the Mormon response to the Book of Mormon was adorable. | ||
| They took out ads for Mormonism in Playbill, right? | ||
| That's exactly as it should be. | ||
| And I say just incredibly withering things about Mormonism, but no Mormon is going to kill me for it. | ||
| And that is a difference that, you know, People like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are maintaining the status quo actively, energetically, and we have to break them down. | ||
| So the supposed moderates, and you talk about this in End of Faith, that actually the supposed moderates In this case, right. | ||
| And they're liberal apologists, and they're secular liberal apologists who are not even religious. | ||
| Glenn is a gay Jew. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it wouldn't go that well for him if he started walking down the streets of Saudi Arabia. | ||
| So I think Gadd, your previous guest, once tweeted in response to something Glenn Greenwald tweeted about me, you know, defending Islam, he said, I think this was Gadd, he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but he said, do me a favor Glenn, Get a shirt made saying I'm gay and I don't believe in God and travel around the Middle East and report back on your adventures. | ||
| There's one place he could do that and we'll get to that place in a second because we're going to go controversial if you don't think we've gone there so far. | ||
| I thought what we could do here for a second is because I know that people are going to say you guys are focusing on Islam, you're focusing on Islam, can you just give me a bunch of bad shit about Christianity and Judaism? | ||
| I mean, just rip it apart. | ||
| I know you can do it because I've read the books, but just tell me some really terrible stuff. | ||
| Well, at the level of the text, at the level of what's just in the Old Testament, that is the worst book. | ||
| It is worse than the Koran. | ||
| It is the most barbaric and theocratic recipe for human unhappiness. | ||
| Now you're talking about some Old Testament, so that's Judaism. | ||
| This is Judaism and to some degree Christianity. | ||
| And if you as a Jew wanted to live out of Leviticus and Deuteronomy | ||
| you are just right of Mullah Omar in terms of your theocratic commitments. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, it just so happens there are reasons why even ultra-Orthodox Jews aren't committed to the letter of the law there, but they're not good reasons. | ||
| They're just, they're just kind of accidental historical reasons. | ||
| This is actually a encounter, I briefly relate in my new book with Majid Nawaz, when we're talking, I was talking to him about how I'm always worried when I see sort of carefully worded, seemingly moderate claims from religious people because you sense that they're doing some kind of theological correction in their brains where it's covering for other commitments that they're not being so forthcoming about. | ||
| And I once discovered this with a Orthodox Jew at a wedding, he was a friend of the groom, and we were introduced, and the groom walked away, and I said, so I just kind of launched into my spiel, and I said, listen, just tell me, what about all the barbarous things in Leviticus and Deuteronomy? | ||
| How do you reconcile those things? | ||
| And he said, well, you know, it's very interesting. | ||
| All of that was just in the context of the time. | ||
| It doesn't apply now. | ||
| There is no Sanhedrin, you know, there's no body of elders who would make all of that effective. And I said, and I could see, I could | ||
| hear what he was doing there. And I said, "Okay, yeah, but when the Messiah comes back, as you think | ||
| he will, and you reconvene the Sanhedrin, and the temple is rebuilt, then what? You know, then are | ||
| you stoning people to death for adultery and witchcraft and homosexuality?" And he said, "Well, you | ||
| know, that's fair." | ||
| It's a very hard question. | ||
| And then he said, you know, you don't, I don't think you can appreciate how, what a sacrilege those behaviors would be in the presence of the Messiah and a properly concentrated, consecrated Sanhedrin. | ||
| And I said, yeah, you're right. | ||
| I can't, you know, so like a where, what part of your body should I vomit on now? | ||
| I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, so that was the, If you just push long enough, you can find the theocrat in those people. | ||
| But, as a matter of fact, they have theological reasons why they don't have to be stoning people to death for homosexuality and adultery right now, or working on the Sabbath, right? | ||
| Though those rules are mandated in the Old Testament. | ||
| But there are, yes, there are possible circumstances where A religion like Christianity or Judaism is more dangerous than Islam. | ||
| It's just we don't happen to be, as a global matter, we don't happen to be in those circumstances. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But if you take something like stem cell research, I mean, again, it just comes down to the specific consequences of specific beliefs. | ||
| So, Islam is totally off the hook with embryonic stem cell research. | ||
| They don't think the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception. | ||
| They think it enters at, I think it's day 80 or day 120, depending on what you believe, which hadith you believe. | ||
| So, you know, when I go on and on about the religious impediment to life-saving medical research in embryonic stem cell research, I'm never thinking about Islam, right? | ||
| It's compatible with Islam, right? | ||
| ISIS could be doing embryonic stem cell research if they wanted to. | ||
| So you just have to be honest about who is culpable, what ideas and what advocates of those ideas are culpable for specific problems. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm pretty sure you're saying we just proved you're an anti-Semite? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, I got that. | ||
| I've been blamed. | ||
| There's a passage in the End of Faith that, if you read it uncharitably, seems to blame the Holocaust on the Jews, right? | ||
| I wrote that as a Jew. | ||
| No, but it's an honest fact that you have You have a 2,000-year history of anti-Semitism, which to some degree Jews have collaborated in by being an incredibly insular culture, religious culture, that dogmatically defined themselves in opposition to the rest of the world, the non-Jewish culture. | ||
| It's two sides of a coin. | ||
| It doesn't excuse the Holocaust. | ||
| It doesn't blame Jews for the Holocaust, obviously. | ||
| The conception of Jews as Jews, as a race, is shared by Jews. | ||
| It hasn't been foisted on them by the outside world. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| We have to get out of this game of defining ourselves tribally based on imaginary You know, fictitious ideas. | ||
| And we have to realize that the way forward is recognizing our common humanity. | ||
| We're a single species on a single planet trying to build a single viable global civilization. | ||
| And there are a thousand different ways we can screw this up and not so many ways where we can build paradise on earth, which should be our common project. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think our definition of paradise and some of the people that we're talking about may not be exactly the same thing. | ||
| Well, that's the problem. | ||
| You have, I mean, hence the power, the crucial matter of criticizing bad ideas. | ||
| The thing is, most people think there's a lot of bad people running around in the world. | ||
| There aren't a lot of bad people. | ||
| There are a lot of bad ideas, and bad ideas are worse than bad people because bad ideas are contagious. | ||
| Bad ideas get good people to do horrible things. | ||
| You wrote what I think, or I think it was on your podcast actually, but I read the transcript, what I think is the most tepid defense of Israel that has ever been said ever. | ||
| But because of it, people think you're a Zionist, you're secretly, as you said earlier, you're manipulating things and blah blah blah, even though you've talked about dragging settlers by their beards out of the West Bank and all of this stuff. | ||
| Sorry, we only have about 10 minutes. | ||
| So in about 5 minutes, can you just sort of sum up that, what you were talking about, and I didn't even really view it as a defense in a weird way, but I didn't agree with all of it by any stretch. | ||
| I defend Israel, it's the one tiny little democracy in that part of the world which you saw. | ||
| So can you just sort of sum that up and then also why then even the most tepid defense means you're automatically some Zionist Nazi whatever? | ||
| I mean it was the worst titled blog post podcast ever because people read it as, I mean the title was Why Don't I Criticize Israel? | ||
| And immediately I reminded my readers and listeners that I do criticize Israel, right? | ||
| But it was read as, you know, I am committed to not criticizing Israel because of X, Y, and Z. So I do criticize Israel. | ||
| I say in that piece that I don't think it should exist as a Jewish state. | ||
| I think the idea of a state organized around a religion is just intrinsically obnoxious and divisive and unsustainable. | ||
| Well, with the one caveat that the only thing that justifies the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is the fact that the rest of the world has rather reliably demonstrated its willingness to murder the Jews outright for being Jewish. | ||
| So, I mean, there are no other people who are coming out of this legacy of having been hunted and hounded for generations until antiquity by The rest of the world. | ||
| So it's understandable that many, many Jews think we need a Jewish state. | ||
| And I don't deny that. | ||
| It's also, it's not a state that's, you know, there's an ethnicity that is Judaism. | ||
| It's not just a religion. | ||
| So it's not a Jewish state in quite the same way that Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not religious in any way, but I like bagels and I watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I guess I'm a Jew. | ||
| Yes, I'm precisely that sort of Jew. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um, and I like Israel. | ||
| I have been to Israel and it's, you know, it's a, um, uh, I've loved my time there. | ||
| Uh, but if all the Jews woke up tomorrow and said, you know, this isn't worth it. | ||
| Let's just assimilate. | ||
| Let's just, let's just blend into the rest of the world. | ||
| This is just, this God forsaken piece of land is, let's give it to the Muslims. | ||
| Um, In my view, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. | ||
| If the Jews were the first religious congregation on earth to admit that religion as a variable, as a divisive variable, was just defunct, and we are just going to be human beings, that would be, as a closing chapter to Judaism, I think I would be honored to be among those Jews. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the polls are sort of showing that, right? | ||
| I mean, most Jews are secular, aren't religious in any way. | ||
| That's the other thing about Judaism now is that it's very hard to find Jews who believe anything superstitious in the service of their Judaism. | ||
| I debate conservative rabbis who don't even believe in God apparently. | ||
| Or the God they believe in is just like quantum mechanics or just pure energy. | ||
| It's not a God who can hear prayers. | ||
| I believe in the force. | ||
| >>>JOSEPH M. SORENSEN: Yes, I've met that rabbi. | ||
| So it's a, but so my bias toward Israel, whenever you're talking about the conflict between | ||
| Israel and her neighbors, my bias towards Israel is really a bias against suicide bombing and the | ||
| use of human shields and an explicitly genocidal aspiration which Hamas has in its charter and many | ||
| many of the things that we do. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| of Israel's antagonists have just in the way they talk about the fate of the Jews. | ||
| I mean, it is prophesied that, you know, the end times will come when the very earth cries out against the Jews, where the trees and the rocks say, there's a Jew behind me, come kill him. | ||
| I mean, that is like center of the fairway Islamic prophecy, right? | ||
| And it's in the charter of Hamas, right? | ||
| So how can Israel expect to deal with these people? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think you illustrated in that piece that if the weapons were reversed, if the Israelis had the weapons that Hamas has and Hamas had the weapons the Israelis had, well, this thing would be over tomorrow because there would be a genocide tomorrow, which to me sort of sums up the Yes, that is the moral disparity that all of Israel's critics have to admit to be intellectually honest here. | ||
| Israel is showing what they would do if they could kill all their enemies tomorrow, because they could kill all their enemies tomorrow. | ||
| They could go into Gaza and kill everyone. | ||
| Now, they're not doing that. | ||
| You might cynically think, well, they're just not doing that because the rest of the world would be so horrified and treat them even more like a pariah state. | ||
| So they're not being restrained by any commitment to human rights or anything else noble. | ||
| They're just as pure self-serving calculation. | ||
| But still they're not Committing genocide. | ||
| And yet you have people on the left claiming that what they did in Gaza was a genocide, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their population goes up every year. | ||
| I mean, I tweet that at people all the time when they're saying that. | ||
| Someone tweeted at you saying about, well, why don't you call it genocide? | ||
| And you wrote, well, it's not genocide. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, they're in a horrible and increasingly untenable situation, but they're dealing with people, some significant subset of whom support the targeting of innocents through suicidal | ||
| terrorism in defense of religion. | ||
| Not in, not, I mean, this is, this has flown the perch of mere politics and mere | ||
| claims upon, you know, scarce resources. | ||
| We're talking about religious attachments to holy sites. | ||
| If, if, if the Dome of the Rock, if the, if the Al-Aqsa Mosque was destroyed as | ||
| some crazy Christians and crazy Jews want to figure out how to accomplish, I mean, | ||
| there are, there are people who want to bomb that building, right, to usher in the second coming of | ||
| Christ or, if that building were destroyed, you would see just an all out attempt at genocide | ||
| from, from the Muslim world. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| Again, based entirely on the religious symbolism of just a pile of rocks. | ||
| That's the situation we're in. | ||
| So I put a lot of thought into it. | ||
| How do I want to end this? | ||
| And I read your other book, Waking Up, which is a guide to spirituality without religion. | ||
| And as I've sat across from you for an hour and a half now, you seem to be extremely at peace. | ||
| I said to you in your interview with Cenk, There was a lot of ranting and raving on his side and papers flying everywhere and you sat there pretty much like you're sitting here right now and you calmly approach all these things I think in a very admirable way. | ||
| So I've read the book but what are some of the tactics that you use To tap into that spirituality side, to get all this, because we've talked about a lot of noise, and you know, once we post these videos, I know what Twitter is going to look like, and I know what the comments are going to look like. | ||
| How do you find some peace within all this, and then within everything else that is going on in your personal life and everything else? | ||
| How do you sort of get to that space? | ||
| I practice meditation, which is just paying close attention to your experience in the present moment. | ||
| So, if you do pay close attention to your experience, you'll notice that Uh, you have this condition of consciousness, which is, subjectively speaking, whatever we'll learn about it at the level of the brain at a certain point, subjectively speaking, it's intrinsically mysterious. | ||
| I mean, you don't know what this is or how this is arising subjectively. | ||
| In fact you don't even know you have a brain subjectively. | ||
| So you have this space of light and shadow and color and energy and in that space thoughts and emotions keep arising and changing and passing away and the difference between being at peace and being starkly miserable is always a difference between Being free of identification with thought and being totally captured by your thought. | ||
| The next thought just comes up and you don't, you didn't notice it as a thought and it's just all of a sudden it seems to become you, you know? | ||
| So if I'm, if I have a thought that arises and you know that fucking Reza Aslan, right? | ||
| If that, that trims down consciousness to That's the entirety of my being in that moment. | ||
| The toxicity of our lives is really mediated by thought. | ||
| The moment you recognize it, really, your mind, at the level of experience, at the level of your functioning in the world, your mind is all you have. | ||
| Every relationship you have, every experience you have, is going to be as good or bad as your mind is in that context. | ||
| And we all have these experiences where we get kind of slammed into the present moment in a very satisfying way based on some heightened experience, whether you're bungee jumping or We're having sex or we've taken a drug or there's some peak experience that overrides all of our habitual mediocrity and gets us to recognize that life can be beautiful and profound. | ||
| But you can actually take charge of that process and just train your mind to find that profundity in each moment. | ||
| And meditation is just that technique. | ||
| And so the book Waking Up is my effort to describe that process and that possibility very much in the context of science and without any religious mumbo-jumbo. | ||
| I sense you'd rather spend more time talking about that than some of this other stuff, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the irony is that Ben Affleck collision completely hijacked my book tour. | ||
| I was on a book tour talking about meditation and spirituality, and just from that instant thereafter, it was just all, you know, racism, bigotry, Islam, all the time. | ||
| But yeah, no, I do, I mean, I just feel like, I view, I really view most of my career, certainly most of my, everything I've said about religion as a massive opportunity cost. | ||
| I mean, I shouldn't have to say any of these things. | ||
| None of us should have to say or hear or contemplate any of these things. | ||
| I mean, we just, we're talking about the legacy of These ancient books that people think were not written by human beings but were dictated by the creator of the universe and hence they want to throw gays off of rooftops and force women to live in bags or prevent gay marriage in our context or prevent embryonic stem cell research or whatever it is and so we're fighting these ancient battles which we should have outgrown centuries ago and | ||
| I see it as a personal opportunity cost, because yeah, there are more interesting things to talk about, but I just see it, civilizationally, we have this one opportunity to make this life beautiful, you know, and we have, it's a short life, you know, I have a friend who just died, I just learned today, right, he's my age, you know, and You know, his life was whatever he made of it, you know, and then he had a final hour. | ||
| And we were all in that same circumstance, personally, and we're in that circumstance as a species. | ||
| And when you look at how we, you know, I mean, there are real challenges that make that a hard project. | ||
| I mean, there's disease and there's, you know, scientific things we don't understand | ||
| that really would help us to understand. | ||
| And we have environmental problems and we don't understand economies well enough | ||
| to really figure out how to prevent, you know, bad recessions and depressions. | ||
| But we have this other area of our lives where we're just so obviously creating needless human | ||
| misery. | ||
| And when you look at something like ISIS or the extreme forms that religion takes, it's just like we're just lighting fire to the wealth of the world for no good reason. | ||
| No, I appreciate the opportunity to talk for a few minutes about something else, but it's just a fact that I do view us in the midst of a kind of political and moral emergency, and so I do find myself talking about bad ideas more than I talk about good ones. | ||
| Yeah, well, I feel the same way, and I don't know how many opportunities people get in life to talk to somebody that they truly admire, and that's what I got here today, so I beyond thank you for coming in and being the first guest on the show. | ||
| And I hope that at the end of this, that maybe something good happened. | ||
| And if not, maybe we'll do it again. | ||
| It was fun to do. | ||
| Maybe next time. | ||
| Do you have a room that you do the meditation in? | ||
| I don't at the moment. | ||
| And can guests go there? | ||
| No, but I could find an appropriate spot. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, of course, you guys, you're probably following Sam already. | ||
| It's at Sam Harris Org on Twitter. | ||
| It's SamHarris.org. | ||
| You got another place we want to send him? | ||
| No, my website is a good hub, yeah, samharris.org. | ||
| The website's the hub, and his new book is coming out next month, so check that out. | ||
| And Sam, I thank you once again, and I thank you guys for watching our first episode, and we're gonna do it again next week. |
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