Dec. 18, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I'd like to believe that critical thinking is woven into pretty much everything we do here on The Rubin Report, but today's show is going to have an even keener focus on this all-encompassing topic. | ||
| At the end of the day, whether we're talking about politics, religion, or current events, it all boils down to critical thinking, the definition of which is, quote, the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment, end quote. | ||
| Can we really look at the world the way it truly is, not the way we want it to be? | ||
| Can we set aside our faith-based hopes to analyze real-world problems? | ||
| Or is faith actually a part of the problem as opposed to being the solution? | ||
| Each week I try to have conversations that exist in this space without resorting to ad hominem attacks and strawman arguments. | ||
| That guiding principle is fully based in critical thinking and moral reasoning. | ||
| Joining me this week is Peter Boghossian, philosophy instructor, critical thinker, and author of a manual for creating atheists. | ||
| Peter's book is a really incisive, clear take on why critical thinking is important, how faith-based thinking can be dangerous, and also relates what you can do to spread ideas based on fact and reason Yes, I did say help there. | ||
| Help is exactly what I believe is needed in this situation. | ||
| and relatable style on topics that many are afraid to touch on, even with the people closest | ||
| to them. | ||
| He gives the reader the very tools to help people trapped by faith-based thinking. | ||
| Yes, I did say "help" there. | ||
| Help is exactly what I believe is needed in this situation. | ||
| When your beliefs aren't based in reason and critical thinking, it creates a space | ||
| where extremism can creep in. | ||
| This of course isn't beholden to one religion or ideology. | ||
| Anytime you throw reason and fact out the window to trade it with ideas that aren't provable, you create the very breeding ground that extremism needs to spread. | ||
| It's not a coincidence that in places where gays, women, and minorities are treated poorly are also the places where religion has often been a substitute for clear moral thinking. | ||
| By the way, we here in the West could do a much better job of this ourselves. | ||
| I know we're more focused on Islamic extremism on this show, but there are all kinds of extremism in the world. | ||
| You can't deal with any of these ideologies with half-truths and by shooting the messengers. | ||
| You must deal with them by looking at them head-on and tackling the ideologies with better ideas and moral clarity. | ||
| We live in a time when religious extremism is on the rise. | ||
| I'm going to guess that we probably don't have many religious extremists watching this show, so I don't know how much of an effect I can have on those people. | ||
| The people that I can have an effect on, however, is you guys. | ||
| People out there from every walk of life, from all over the globe, who want to do the work of finding out what brings us together, not what tears us apart. | ||
| I firmly believe that critical thinking is the solution. | ||
| Critical thinking doesn't care about your race, your sexuality, or your nationality. | ||
| It is a roadmap to solving serious issues and combating superstitious thinking that has led to many real-world problems. | ||
| Much of the right in America is led by Christian religious ideology. | ||
| Much of the left, while not guided by religion, has become as dogmatic in its beliefs. | ||
| Between the two is where most clear-minded, free-thinking people live. | ||
| It's what my guest on next week's show, Ali Rizvi, refers to as the New Center. | ||
| I think by letting go of our superstitions and focusing on real solutions, we can change the world for the better. | ||
| Either that, or we can leave it up to the zealots. | ||
| After all, the world is what you make of it. | ||
| Peter Boghossian is a philosophy instructor, critical thinker, and author of a manual for creating atheists. | ||
| He's also an anti-regressive warrior and can back it up with some jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Peter, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Really looking forward to our chat. | ||
| I am looking forward to it as well. | ||
| You know, every week I feel like I'm connecting with people that I know in the digital space, mostly through 140 characters, and I put you in that group. | ||
| You just did three hours with Rogan. | ||
| I did. | ||
| We had an interesting conversation. | ||
| How are you feeling mentally? | ||
| You came up, too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good. | |
| I feel great. | ||
| I feel great. | ||
| Did you say good things about me? | ||
| We said nothing. | ||
| Well, you know, that's the thing. | ||
| We don't... I think part of it is when people are together and they're sincere, I think they'll... | ||
| They'll either agree to disagree or there'll be a convergence around those ideas. | ||
| And I started off when we were talking thinking that I feel like I know you. | ||
| Like I feel that the stuff that you think about and the values that you have are in congruence with my own values. | ||
| And I think part of that comes from a type of honesty with oneself. | ||
| Yeah, well we're obviously going to talk a lot about those values, and I think it really is cool that this group of people have come together. | ||
| You were sort of in this a little bit before me and connected with Sam and some of those other guys, but now Rogan and Christina Hoff Summers, all these people who don't necessarily agree on everything, don't come from the same walks of life or the same socioeconomic stuff or whatever, that we've all sort of come together because we have these base principles that we want to put out there. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right, and I think that it's—so here's one way to think about it. | ||
| We often think about the right and the left on some kind of a line. | ||
| So there's the far right, which is obviously on the far right of the line, the far left in the middle. | ||
| There's this—in philosophy, there's a—a French philosopher has this idea of a horseshoe theory. | ||
| You take the ends of the line and you bend them together. | ||
| The far left and the far right are closer to each other than they are to the center. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think that that's a helpful heuristic, a helpful way to look at some of these issues. | ||
| And for me it was, you know, rather than give a genealogical account about how this came to be, for me what's always interesting is When I look at the mean-spiritedness, the anger, the tactics of the regressives, they're just so fundamentally contrary to what my values are and for the sort of person that I want to become. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I do see that horseshoe, that far left and that far right. | ||
| In the left, the regressives seem extraordinarily angry and eager to smear those people with racist, sexist, homophobe, etc., if you don't buy into certain—even if you ask questions, as opposed to buying into something. | ||
| They've made any kind of discourse almost impossible. | ||
| Yeah, well we've talked a little bit about that, and Sam said something, Sam Harris said something about how it's almost like scorched earth, loosely quoting what he said, because the tactics have been so bad. | ||
| But before we get into all that, let's talk about you a little bit so people can understand where you come from and all this, and the book that you've written, which I just read this week, The Manual for Creating Atheists, it was wonderful, it was what I try to do here actually. | ||
| Which I guess goes to what you said at the top, because it was understandable. | ||
| You were trying to give people the tools to go about talking about, you know, reasoning and morality without taking the leap of faith. | ||
| Yeah, and asking people starts off in, so thank you for the book. | ||
| You enjoyed the book. | ||
| I fully did. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And if you didn't, you'd tell me. | ||
| I absolutely would. | ||
| Okay, so that's a type of sincerity and I'd appreciate that. | ||
| So the book, talks about in the forthcoming app, Atheos, which talks | ||
| about how to have more civil, productive conversations with people to help them break | ||
| through dogmatism, to help them break through these deep-seated beliefs that they hold, and | ||
| that they think that they're better people because they hold these beliefs. | ||
| So how to really have productive conversations and engage people. | ||
| Yeah, so I think the best way to jump off on this is let's just define some terms. | ||
| And I've done this in one incarnation or another a few times on the show when we've talked about religion and atheism and agnosticism and all that, but why don't you just give me some basic definitions, which is sort of how you start the book. | ||
| So just what is an atheist? | ||
| So the way I define atheist, and I think it's right, these are placeholder terms, I'm willing to revise those. | ||
| I don't have, an atheist is a person who doesn't have sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God, but if they were given that evidence, then they would believe. | ||
| So inherent in the term atheist, or the way that I use it, is a sort of open-mindedness. | ||
| Right, which is funny to me, and that's the way you describe it in the book, because there seems to be a certain subset of people that think that atheists are actually the most close-minded people. | ||
| But that's not the way you're defining it, and maybe that's just sort of the personalities that have been publicly attached to atheism or something. | ||
| We can understand why someone would think that, because the word theist is contained with the word atheist. | ||
| And just as theists tend to have these dogmas where they latch on to religious propositions, faith, faith, propositions to faith, so too one would think that atheist does. | ||
| But again, I think that the faithful have constructed these narratives to make it As if there's some kind of a parallelism, a symmetry of belief. | ||
| Look, we believe these things, you guys believe these things. | ||
| We have beliefs that are predicated on no evidence, just like you do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think that's a type of insincerity. | ||
| I don't think that people who are honest with themselves and have a minimal level, you know, basically enough intelligence to tie a shoe, I don't think that it's possible to come to that conclusion. | ||
| Yeah, so before we go too deep on that, what are the other terms we should just define right at the beginning? | ||
| So agnosticism, for example. | ||
| Which you're not big on. | ||
| No, I don't like that. | ||
| I don't like the term. | ||
| I think it's a useless term and we need to do away with it. | ||
| You don't believe in Santa Claus. | ||
| No. | ||
| So you are a Santa Claus atheist. | ||
| You're not a Santa Claus agnostic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the word agnostic gives wiggle room where no wiggle room should exist. | ||
| The default to any belief shouldn't be maybe. | ||
| The default should probably be no unless they have sufficient evidence to believe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But again, that's part of the hijacking of the narrative. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So that's interesting. | ||
| So a lot of people I've heard lately, they describe themselves as agnostic atheists. | ||
| That seems to be like the new meme out there. | ||
| Have you heard about that one? | ||
| Where it's giving them, I guess, a little more wiggle room, but you're saying that in a way that's sort of cheating the The idea here, right? | ||
| Yeah, and maybe people self-describe that way because they feel they want to reap some social benefits from it. | ||
| Maybe they feel that they don't want to offend people or insult people or make people feel bad so that they use these wiggle terms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in the book, well, first off, is there anything else we should define? | ||
| Just real quick, right off the top. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| If we've defined something, and you're right, it's important to define words, and those can be placeholders for later on, because if someone says, I'm an agnostic atheist, I'll say, well, what do you mean by that? | ||
| And I can challenge or what have you, but if not, it's like two ships passing each other. | ||
| Like, we don't know what the conversation is about. | ||
| And there was a lot of that in the book where you're talking about, you know, people with faith and people without faith, or non-believer versus believer, however you want to define it. | ||
| They're talking about two different things, and that sometimes makes the conversation really kind of crazy. | ||
| It does, and that's the problem with faith, is that it has a broad semantic range, and people try to use the term to do some work that it doesn't do. | ||
| Like, they try to use the term to protect, like, well, I believe that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, or I | ||
| believe Jesus walked on water, or fasting, or the Dalai Lama incarnates through bodies, whatever. | ||
| But you have faith your wife loves you, or you have faith in a plant. | ||
| So they use that term as an umbrella term to almost cover their beliefs from any, make | ||
| it impervious to reason. | ||
| And I just don't think that's a very sincere way to approach any inquiry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think a lot of people, just from this first five or six minutes, are going to say, wow, this guy is a pretty open-minded atheist. | ||
| That's going to be part of it. | ||
| And I think one of the things you said right at the beginning of the book is you don't really define yourself as an atheist. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't. | |
| And I thought your reasoning was actually really clever. | ||
| Can you go into that a little bit? | ||
| But you tell me what you got, and then I'll... Well, basically you were saying I don't define myself as someone that doesn't believe in leprechauns. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But yet there seems to be, with atheists, there seems to be so much onus on them to constantly have to talk about it, or whatever it is. | ||
| I've only been in this... I never even publicly said that I was an atheist. | ||
| Yeah, I heard you say that. | ||
| Literally, it was about two months ago, I think, when Milo Yiannopoulos was on the show. | ||
| I always considered myself sort of a friend of the atheist community. | ||
| I always liked atheists. | ||
| I like free thinkers. | ||
| I like critical thinkers. | ||
| It wasn't something that really hit me one way or another. | ||
| I didn't feel like I needed to say, all right, I have to make this announcement or this announcement. | ||
| But somehow in that conversation with him, I had finally sort of got to my breaking point or something. | ||
| Well, that was good then. | ||
| It was a good conversation. | ||
| Yeah, it was all good. | ||
| It was all good. | ||
| It was a kind of public honesty then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A public honesty. | ||
| And so, I think that the word atheist still has some negative connotations, and a lot of negativity is attached to it. | ||
| But I think that atheism is a conclusion, and ultimately it's much less important than epistemological hygiene, if you will. | ||
| Like, thinking about How you come to knowledge and making sure that those ways to come to knowledge are reliable. | ||
| Because that's the other thing that was a big realization for me a long time ago, is that faith claims are knowledge claims. | ||
| So when someone makes a faith claim, they're making a claim about the world. | ||
| Like, I have faith because of X. So people use faith as a process to get to a claim about the world. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing is just so... | ||
| Bizarre and twisted, but unfortunately where we live, it's surrounding us. | ||
| It's weird to me. | ||
| I'll go to an atheist conference and people will be singing about being atheists. | ||
| It's just unfathomable to me. | ||
| Right, well that's why your description of it felt decent to me. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It certainly, as I said, I didn't talk about it until three months ago, it's never, I don't think it will ever be something that defines me. | ||
| What defines me are my thoughts and my, the breadth of all the things that I am, but that's just, to define yourself by something you don't believe in actually doesn't make that much sense, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I'm trying to think about defining yourself in terms of your thoughts. | ||
| I don't even know if I do that. | ||
| I think it's important to ask yourself, what kind of person do you want to be? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you know, I want to be a kind person. | ||
| I want to be a compassionate person. | ||
| I am very confident that those values are derivable through reason and that we can articulate ways to get through those very clearly. | ||
| But I'm not sure. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe I want to be the type of person who's willing to revise my beliefs. | ||
| Maybe I want to be the type of person who's inquisitive and trustful of reason and who treats people well. | ||
| Maybe that's the kind of person I want to become. | ||
| Maybe those things are, I self-identify with those. | ||
| But I don't, it's just an odd thing to me to latch that on to an identity. | ||
| Yeah, well, I certainly agree with that. | ||
| So a lot of what you're doing in the book is really, and I think you actually used this word, is to deprogram people from faith. | ||
| And I thought using that word was particularly interesting, because you're viewing it as sort of, you know, | ||
| we all enter this life sort of as a clean slate, and then we're programmed with this stuff. | ||
| And you're trying to give everyone the tools to deprogram. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| We've been indoctrinated by ideas, culture. | ||
| Everybody has a kind of cultural myopia. | ||
| That's reinforced by religion and beliefs. | ||
| So how do we help people to become more reflective about their beliefs? | ||
| How do we help people to become less dogmatic about their thoughts? | ||
| And, you know, maybe that's why, like, for me, even the sexuality isn't part of an identity, | ||
| but maybe that's because it's a dominant, heteronormative opinion, you know? | ||
| So, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| What I do know is that people think that having certain beliefs makes them a better person. | ||
| Dan Dennett talks about this in terms of belief and belief. | ||
| And part of the problem is once you start thinking that your holding beliefs makes you a better person, you're much less likely to revise those because it moves from the realm of epistemology, that is knowledge, to the realm of morals. | ||
| And you don't want to be that guy. | ||
| You don't want to be... Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm with you. | ||
| The difference between knowledge and morals, which people seem to conflate constantly, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it's interesting in terms of the regressive left and the idea of race, when people talk about race. | ||
| That is just so charged and so politicized that they have made it almost impossible for a sincere inquirer to ask a question without being smeared or labeled in some way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we've lost the ability, we've lost the ability In an academic context, to ask sincere questions, the only way to solve any problem, the first step is to be honest about it. | ||
| If you're not honest about it, you're not going to solve it. | ||
| And you've written about this, and Douglas Murray was on Sam's podcast, other people have spoken about this, I've tweeted about this, I wrote about this, if you do not allow questions, then extremists are eager to come in with answers. | ||
| And so that's one of the consequences that we see. | ||
| And we see this in a religious landscape, especially with Islam now. | ||
| We see this as a terrible problem. | ||
| So we're jumping ahead a little bit. | ||
| I'm going to follow you on this jump. | ||
| Um... | ||
| So, when it relates to the left, now I assume you're basically someone that comes from the left, right? | ||
| I mean, from everything I know about you... I am a classical liberal. | ||
| You're a classical liberal. | ||
| In virtually every sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I assume then also that you feel the same way I do, that it's your job to police them more than the right, right? | ||
| Like, for me, people always say to me, well, why aren't you attacking the right as much? | ||
| And it's like, I am not part of the right. | ||
| I do attack them. | ||
| I don't think I've ever voted for a Republican in my life. | ||
| I have not. | ||
| I'm not a fan of the Democrats. | ||
| I'm not a Democrat, I'm an independent, but for me to police the people that I'm not part of, it just seems silly. | ||
| I want to police my guys. | ||
| Do you feel that? | ||
| Is that part of what you do? | ||
| I feel to me it's more germane in the sense that The left, the regressives, have taken over academia. | ||
| They have literally hijacked the institutions, and now they're institutionalizing these policies which are really rather extreme. | ||
| Any classical liberal would be horrified with their speech codes, microaggressions, trigger warnings. | ||
| It's horrifying. | ||
| And they're basically robbing a generation of people of the possibility of being able to think clearly and critically, and they're ever increasing the threshold—people's threshold for what they consider to be offensive or the types of conversations they'll have is continuously dropping. | ||
| So, for me, it's personal only in that I have to deal with this every single day, and I—right? | ||
| I mean, it's— It's the most personal thing, actually. | ||
| Yeah, it's endemic. | ||
| Now, why don't you criticize the right as much? | ||
| Well, I mean, look, I have criticized the right. | ||
| You've criticized the right. | ||
| Think about the type of criticism you have to label against a guy who is a bona fide—can I swear on your show? | ||
| Swear away, yeah. | ||
| Everyone always asks me before they swear. | ||
| I probably should have asked before. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's fine, that's fine. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, think about Huckabee, who's a bonafide fucking lunatic, right? | ||
| I mean, think about guys like Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, these guys are so outside—actually, the sad thing is they're not outside the mainstream. | ||
| At least of that place, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And labeling a sort of criticism against that type of crazy is very different from people For whom I feel sympathies for these impulses they have. | ||
| They have very decent impulses at base and we need to be careful that because they're so insincere and dishonest that we don't disregard their whole message. | ||
| The onus falls upon us to think Clearly about that, and to really, okay, privilege, I got it, you know, this gender thing, you know, but to really take a step back and separate the message from the messenger so that we don't discount the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm very, very aware of that, all the time, you know, because I know that I'm attacking | ||
| the trigger warnings and the safe space and all that stuff, and I don't wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater, | ||
| and I know that there are legitimate racial issues and there are legitimate socioeconomic issues | ||
| and all of that stuff, but because of the way these guys have behaved and framed the debate, | ||
| they've made it extremely difficult to separate legitimate issues-- | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| From pure craziness, so I think what's interesting related to someone like you that comes from a place | ||
| where you're writing and talking about moral clarity and critical thinking, this has to be, | ||
| it's almost like doubly worse for you, in a way, to be part of this, 'cause there's the thinking part, | ||
| there's the spiritual part, like it's just a lot mixed into one crazy thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, everybody who had, I think, Nick Cohen on here, and other people have given genealogical accounts of how we got into this situation, but I think the thing that people really aren't thinking about or talking about that much are, what are the implications for these things? | ||
| I mean, what are the philosophical—what does this—excuse me, what does this—I notice we're both speaking quickly. | ||
| We have so much to say. | ||
|
unidentified
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We have so much to get on. | |
| What does this mean when we've created academic environments in which people—in which professors are terrified to give a dissenting opinion? | ||
| And when I say dissenting, I mean something from the regressive party line. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Just for a second, let's define dissenting, because it's barely dissenting. | ||
| It's literally just saying anything other. | ||
| Dissenting, it's not like you're saying something that's really against what the mainstream belief is. | ||
| It's pretty much anything like, you know, be okay with someone else wearing a Halloween costume that you may not like. | ||
| That's the sort of dissenting we're talking about. | ||
| And that's the kind of craziness that you get when—I mean, so it's—again, the issue of how we got there is extremely interesting and valuable. | ||
| I'm interested in—recently, my work has been focusing on what does that mean for one's intellectual life? | ||
| Like, what does that mean for one's ability to reflect on issues? | ||
| What does that mean for one's ability to make decisions about things that really matter? | ||
| Not Halloween costumes. | ||
| I understand that some people think that matters, but that's just evidence of an inability to show moral triage. | ||
| You know, to indexically prioritize, some kind of a hierarchy to identify one need as another need and show why that's important, and the way that you do that It's through reason and rationality. | ||
| That's how you get there. | ||
| And the way that you—so, when you attack safe spaces and when you attract true warnings, you're actually—this is the key thing—you're actually doing them a favor, because you're giving them an opportunity—you're giving people an opportunity, if their values are true, like if their values are morally correct, And I do believe that there's such a thing as being morally correct, and obviously they do as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Or they couldn't be espousing—and that's just parenthetically. | ||
| That's the interesting difference between—that's the contradiction in their beliefs between being—ugh, I lost my train of thought. | ||
| Well that I think you're going, that they think that they're so right. | ||
| So these people, they have the legacy of relativism, but yet the values that they put forth are radical egalitarianism. | ||
| You cannot be a relativist and an egalitarian at the same time. | ||
| You cannot say everything is relative and then all systems are equal. | ||
| So one of the things that you're doing They'll look at it as to them, but I will look at it as to advance their cause. | ||
| One of the things you're doing is you're giving people an opportunity to reflect on how they know what they know. | ||
| And the only way you can do that is through an unsafe space. | ||
| The only way you can do that is to really take a look at these ideas and examine these ideas. | ||
| There just is no other way. | ||
| So, if they have, their values are arbitrary and subject to cultural capriciousness unless they can be rationally derived. | ||
| And they've taken out the engine of rationality once they've created spaces in which you can ask these questions. | ||
| Yeah, so that's why I, a few times, I'll say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That I believe that these guys, actually Joe Rogan fought me on this when I said this, I said I believe these guys like with the Affleck thing on Real Time with Sam Harris and all that, I said well his intentions were good. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He was intending to try to protect the other. | ||
| Joe basically was like, nah, he's a Hollywood guy, and then he's just protecting his own internal... He's an actor. | ||
| He's an actor, and that's it. | ||
| He's out for number one, fine. | ||
| But I guess that's probably what really is perverse about what's going on on the left, because by taking kids, by taking college kids whose thoughts aren't fully formulated yet, and then putting this thing on them, they think they're doing everything for good intentions, but then they're going to walk out into the world realizing the world doesn't really react that way. | ||
| And if they're listening to this and they're just dumping on you and hating you and hating me, I think it's perhaps a nice, helpful heuristic to think about it in terms of standing for the flag. | ||
| An example on the right. | ||
| The people on the right are big on respect for the flag. | ||
| They've made their own things sacred. | ||
| But I don't think that's important. | ||
| I think what's important is to teach people why they should stand for the flag, what our values mean. | ||
| And that's why they're standing. | ||
| It's not an icon, but I think that the same property holds on the left. | ||
| They have to start being honest and realizing that if their values really are true, then they have to subject those values to scrutiny. | ||
| And then we have to create spaces, we have to create environments where The marketplace of ideas, we can have a discourse and a dialectic about these things. | ||
| It's not just a little different, we have to just do the opposite. | ||
| That's why they should be thanking you. | ||
| I'm not being facetious, I'm being really sincere. | ||
| That's why they should be thanking you. | ||
| Because if not, then that means their values are arbitrary. | ||
| So when I talked about this with Milo and the college thing, you know, he said that what this really is about, this isn't about left and right, he was saying that this really is about authoritarians versus... That's the horseshoe. | ||
| And that's what you're really talking about. | ||
| That's the horseshoe. | ||
| Yeah, so somehow though I think this is related to religion too, right? | ||
| We can relate this very much to the thinking of religion, so can you go down that path for me a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, so they use many of the same mechanisms. | ||
| They have things that are sacred. | ||
| In this case, it's the rise of the victim, the victimhood culture. | ||
| They have certain questions, certain ideas can't be questions, can't be challenged. | ||
| The churches are safe space. | ||
| University campuses are safe space. | ||
| And so here's what's super interesting. | ||
| When I did a talk a few years ago, I don't know, five years ago, I don't even know, it's on YouTube, Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and other delusions just say no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that or not, it doesn't matter. | ||
| But the people who protested that were not Christians. | ||
| I had some Christians come in the audience. | ||
| I speak all around the world. | ||
| People are, in general, with very few exceptions, Christians and Muslims, they're very civil. | ||
| The Christians, I go out for a beer often afterwards. | ||
| But it's the regressive leftists who I mean, really think about this. | ||
| This is like the feminists—this is what I said to Joe today—it's like the feminists in bed with the Islamists. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, you just could not conceive of a relationship that was more antithetical to one of those parties' interests. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And I'm pretty sure that the Islamists know that they're never going to treat these women any better, right? | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I'm sorry to cut you off, but what is that? | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| So they just view—so these feminists for whatever, they just view the other as more oppressed than they are, so they just have to give them their cred? | ||
| I mean, is that—is it really that simple? | ||
| That is a comp—I have thought about that a long time. | ||
| I think it deals with the color of people's skin, oppression. | ||
| I think it deals with— You know, this whole third wave feminism that I still don't understand. | ||
| I don't know, I cannot explain to you, and I've thought about it extensively, how this cohabitation, not a marriage, but how this bizarre Relationship came to be. | ||
| I still cannot understand it. | ||
| And the most recent event at Goldsmiths that Dawkins was tweeting on and such, I mean, that is—that should be a case study for people. | ||
| That is even boggling my mind to even think about trying to understand that. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And then, so that, and all of this, and all the stuff that we're talking about in this discussion, it shows again why, that if you don't help the reformers, the actual reformers who are trying to change, make things better for women and gays and minorities. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| If you don't help these people and you keep framing these people as the problem, well what do you do? | ||
| You get the rise of Trump. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just going to say that extreme—I think my tweet was something like, if you have—create environments in which you can't ask questions, extremists step in with solutions. | ||
| And I think that that's exactly right. | ||
| Could this—so really, could you think that this atmosphere that Trump is taking advantage of— I sense a palpable fear right now in America that I haven't felt before. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I sense that people are feeling like everything is screwed up. | ||
| We have this terrorism stuff. | ||
| We don't know what the answers are. | ||
| There's this refugee thing. | ||
| We're all children of refugees or descendants of refugees here, unless you came over as a slave or an American Indian, right? | ||
| If you were actually indigenous to this land. | ||
| And I just have this sense that people don't know what's going on. | ||
| And then when you shut down the people on the left, then of course Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I really wish that every single person listening to that would put the rewind button and listen to that again. | ||
| So if you're one of these people who thinks that you're doing the world a favor by triggering Protecting people who are—you know, you want to protect the sensitivities of others. | ||
| Again, not a bad impulse at all. | ||
| But the consequence of that is that people become less capable of making discerning, rational judgments, particularly in the moral sphere. | ||
| So the consequence of those things is that Donald Trump is right there with the answer. | ||
| And I just read a piece about the number of people who support Trump who won't admit it is far higher. | ||
| Which is terrifying. | ||
| And we know that the way—we don't want to create adversarial relationships. | ||
| I mean, if—so, I think that part of this problem—I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, necessarily, but part of this problem is we have to engage Trump's arguments on his own terms. | ||
| And part of that is, if the idea is that this is going to make America safer, I think that's what we should—we shouldn't appeal to patriotism. | ||
| We should take a look at that. | ||
| I don't think that claim is true. | ||
| I don't think that's borne out by the evidence. | ||
| I don't think there's any reason to think that, first off, it's not even constitutional, any of the keeping people out based on religion, or any of that stuff. | ||
| But we can just, we can accept, we can just bracket that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we can just look at, okay, what is the consequence of this? | ||
| And what is the concept? | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| What is the concept? | ||
| You think that Muslim, Islamic, again, so we need to ... | ||
| You're getting caught in words. | ||
| Isn't that the crazy thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They've made us all so crazy about words that whatever you were about to say there, you | ||
| had to think about it 18 different ways, even though you're sitting across from somebody | ||
| that you know is okay with the idea of what you're going to talk about. | ||
| Yeah, I was caught because I said, OK, well, we should have defined the terms. | ||
| You know, Islam is the religion, the belief, the ideas. | ||
| And you separate from the people. | ||
| And for some reason that seems to be an unbelievably, way too complicated for people to understand. | ||
| I don't understand why it is... So what do you think that is? | ||
| And it also seems like they can only do that with Islam. | ||
| Like the issue only seems to be with Islam. | ||
| Because if we were to say anything about Christianity here... People would be saying, great job, thank you, you guys are awesome. | ||
| All day long. | ||
| Or if you say anything about radical Islam, they'll say, well, the Crusades. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So you did it. | ||
| So that's right. | ||
| Remember I said the values they hold are egalitarianism and relativism? | ||
| For them, in their minds, egalitarianism—look, every age has had a dominating value. | ||
| Aristotle talks about the Aristotelian gentleman. | ||
| In Homer, it was strength. | ||
| Volterra was humor. | ||
| And now it's—in one side, it's egalitarianism and relativism. | ||
| For them, everything has to be relative. | ||
| It's like the—excuse me, the default is relativistic and egalitarian. | ||
| So, well, they have their bad guys, but you have your bad guys. | ||
| Actually, no. | ||
| Actually, those things are not morally equivalent. | ||
| And so you asked the question, which is, I think part of it is that we've extended the umbrella of rights wider and wider. | ||
| And I want to be crystal clear that I'm being descriptive and not evaluative. | ||
| I'm describing the state. | ||
| I'm not saying it's good or bad. | ||
| You know, I was just at a restaurant with my buddy there before we came here, and, you know, I don't eat, I try to eat only cruelty-free meat, so I won't eat anything that's cruel. | ||
| So we've now extended the umbrella of rights to animals, right? | ||
| So that is constantly extending. | ||
| So the next step for some people is to extend that to ideas. | ||
| We've extended that. | ||
| And I think... Ah, that's really interesting. | ||
| Wait, you've got to... Yeah, sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, no, I want to sort of get in that for a second. | ||
| We've extended the ideas of rights, which used to be for people, now to animals, because we want to treat animals better. | ||
| Minorities? | ||
| And you're saying the next version of that will be with ideas, so we're going to sort of take, we're going to put on even softer gloves when it comes to ideas, because even that should be held in some sort of special way. | ||
| Yeah, because people, as I said in my TAM talk, ideas don't deserve dignity, people do. | ||
| And it's kind of become a meme, but it's true. | ||
| It's that It's just the next kind of radical taking that idea and extending it further on. | ||
| And the problem with that is that you do a disservice to those people holding beliefs, because you don't respect their beliefs to engage them enough. | ||
| That's the other thing that's really not talked about. | ||
| This whole enterprise is really one of disrespect. | ||
| They're trying to engender these values of respect, but not listening to people, not engaging people, people's ideas, Even, you know, you've talked about in your show the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| I think it was Bush's phrase. | ||
| I kept crediting Bill Maher, which at least sounded nice. | ||
| Now I'm quoting George W. Bush. | ||
| I don't know how I feel about that. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| So then you'll be a neocon, right? | ||
| Now everybody's going to gang up on us because they're going to say, look at you guys, you really love Bush deep in your heart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that's actually not true. | ||
| That's just a fabrication. | ||
| That's the kind of mental gymnastics people need to do to keep their ideological biases in place. | ||
| Yeah, well that was one of the things, you know, when we launched the show on Ora, Sam was the first guest, and he said that they're always looking, that these people are always looking for something in you. | ||
| Not that you've said this opinion, or that you've shared this idea, but if they can somehow link together something that gets them to where they want you to be, you're out. | ||
| Yeah, and just think about this kind of person. | ||
| Think about Discharging that impulse that you have. | ||
| Think about the kind of person that you are. | ||
| You know, it's difficult for me to say without being overly harsh, and it's an example of a time when someone ought to be overly harsh, but that makes me feel really sad for somebody. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's very much how I feel out of all of this, because, look, I can barely speak when I'm saying it, because this situation has cost me friends and relationships already, and I've only been talking about this stuff for a couple months, and I see the way people have turned on me, and I've gotten into debates with friends and said, Can you point me to where I've said what you're accusing me of? | ||
| And they never do, because they can't. | ||
| So if I may ask you, what is the point of contention? | ||
| Was it an issue? | ||
| Was it a suite of issues? | ||
| Someone who exists in the world that we exist in, that's a public person, who I no longer talk to anymore, who's been a good friend of mine for the last couple of years, said that my whole show now is about bigotry to Muslims. | ||
| And I said, it's actually the complete reverse. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm trying to separate people from the ideology. | ||
| I'm trying to show that not everyone believes this. | ||
| I've brought on people repeatedly to talk about tolerance. | ||
| You know, the way they'll frame, they'll say, Sam and Majid, that these are the bigots. | ||
| Their book was about Islam and the future of tolerance, not Islam and the future of nuclear war, you know? | ||
| So it's these mental gymnastics, as you just said. | ||
| So what would that person like you to do? | ||
| Not talk about it, I suppose. | ||
| Not talk about these important issues. | ||
| But I'm not going to do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then again, that goes back to what we started the conversation with. | ||
| Then that's why you get Trumps. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I would ask them, so that's kind of the defeasibility test that I talk about in the book, and the app has the defeasibility test. | ||
| It's under what conditions do you think that that belief would be false? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't have to be religion. | ||
| You can use the defeasibility test. | ||
| This is not my idea. | ||
| It's Matt McCormick's. | ||
| You can use the defeasibility test with anything. | ||
| So, under what conditions could I demonstrate to you that I am not biased against Muslims? | ||
| If they say to you, well, there are no conditions, well, that's a type of belief closure. | ||
| Then there almost is no conversation. | ||
| Then you have to take a step back, and I hate to say this, but to the metal level and have a conversation about that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think that I don't know. | ||
| Now I'm kind of ideating. | ||
| I think I'm, like, concerned about your friendship with this person. | ||
| I mean, I've given up, basically, because after being called a bigot repeatedly and saying, actually, no, and can you point me to any—I know I'm not a bigot. | ||
| You know, Douglas Murray said something really interesting on Sam's podcast. | ||
| He said, I have no time anymore for people whose intentions are not good. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So I know I'm not a racist, so if you want to call me a racist or call me a bigot, it actually, since I'm not, it actually, I don't like being called a racist or a bigot, but it doesn't really have any meaning because it's just a word. | ||
| If I was secretly a racist and you were calling me a racist, I suppose I would struggle with it a little bit more, but I'm not. | ||
| So that's the hard thing about, that really is difficult about dealing with people who are insincere. | ||
| And I think a lot of those attacks on Sam like I in philosophy this thing called a hermeneutic of charity you want to give everybody a charitable interpretation and you want to say okay these guys actually believe this stuff you know but over time you just have to grow up yeah I mean I I hate to say this I mean I don't hate to say this because it's I should have woken up to this conclusion long ago. | ||
| I don't think these people are sincere. | ||
| No, I don't think so at all. | ||
| But that's hard to grasp, too. | ||
| It is hard to grasp, because if they thought they had the truth, why wouldn't they be sincere? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, excuse me, that's the thing that kind of... | ||
| Keeps me from going on a full-throttle attack. | ||
| I mean, maybe their cognitive software has somehow been hijacked by this moral—this idea that they think that they're defending the downtrodden and, you know, this—you know, we need to do this as an example. | ||
| It's OK to do this because we're serving some—you know, there's some utilitarian calculus, like, oh, it's going to be in the greater good. | ||
| I don't know what goes through their minds. | ||
| But that's the problem with dealing with someone who's insincere. | ||
| Yeah, so I do think that. | ||
| I think that they think, and maybe I'm probably giving them the leash that they wouldn't afford me, right? | ||
| But I do think they think, as Majid said, they think that they're in a war. | ||
| So they're going to use whatever tactics they have. | ||
| What I find particularly odd about it is that now that we live in a digital age where everything is recorded and you can be quoted, you know, talking to this person about this or this person about that, Even when they're confronted with new evidence, or confronted or exposed as frauds, they just double down even more, which is incredible. | ||
| Yeah, so I share your frustration and I'm sympathetic with it. | ||
| I don't know, I would, I mean, hey look, I'd call your friend again and say, hey look, I've been thinking about this. | ||
| Let's have a talk. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't let that friendship go, because that's not like— I tried to get them to sit down. | ||
| We did this over text. | ||
| They wouldn't even sit down with me. | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
| I mean— They wouldn't even sit down. | ||
| They wouldn't even say, let's get coffee. | ||
| But that's, again, part of the regressive left, right? | ||
| They don't want to have conversations. | ||
| They want to end those conversations. | ||
| And ironically, they turn that against us and say, well, look, you guys are the ones who don't want to have conversations. | ||
| And look, the whole problem—this is the schism in liberalism, right? | ||
| And it was made naked on the Bill Maher Show with Ben Affleck and Sam. | ||
| And this is something, again, to solve these problems, we need to be on it, we need to be forthright, we need to be honest, we need to create environments where we can talk about the problems. | ||
| And almost, if you were to, again, create a list of how not to solve your problems, these people have it. | ||
| I mean, they've done a perfect job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, what's amazing to me also is that I never mean to go this deep into it. | ||
| I really wanted to focus more on atheism. | ||
| And I'm happy, we're going to go there now, and I'm happy to do this, but what I think is particularly fascinating about this is that everything else that we talk about, and that we're going to talk about, is so related to this. | ||
| That's why this whole situation has been so bananas, because this schism has exposed something that I think people didn't really realize. | ||
| But let's just leave that portion there, unless you want to give me a closing statement on that, and then we'll come to atheism. | ||
| No, it is fine. | ||
| I just think that we—this is not a very hopeful time right now, you know? | ||
| I mean, we're dealing with very serious ecological issues, and we have people who are apologists for big oil companies and denialists, you know, denying anthropogenic global warming. | ||
| And again, I actually do think those people should be given a seat at the adult table. | ||
| Anybody who has a view different from my own, as long as they provide evidence, is welcome to have a conversation. | ||
| I think that there's something that's morally damaging about what the regressives are doing, and I think people have had enough. | ||
| I have had way more than enough. | ||
| And I think now, like, your show has really caused this catalyst, almost this cascade, of people who also feel the same way, and their like minds are gravitating. | ||
| And they've really robbed us of any idea of hope that we have, because we look at the | ||
| presidential campaign and it's just holy moly. | ||
| I mean I look at the Republicans and I think, wow. | ||
| Like, any one of those people would be an unmitigated disaster. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is—I mean, all right, we're just going to keep going with this. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| No, no, no, but I do—we'll just keep going, because you're hitting on it, that this thing is so— It's so powerful because I watch the Republican debates and I think, I could never in good conscience vote for all of you people. | ||
| But now part of it, there is a piece of me that when I see this regressive group, when they all like Bernie, now there's a piece of me that's like, do I like the same guy they like? | ||
| That's crazy because I do like him. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But that's how perverse this whole thing is. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why we have to make sure that we separate the message from the messenger. | ||
| And that's why it's so difficult to do that when you're constantly smeared. | ||
| If you use the wrong pronoun by accident. | ||
| Look, I'm 49. | ||
| I've been growing up calling he, he, I. Look, it's not, it's not malintent. | ||
| I don't have some deep moral malignancy in me that I'm kind of, you know, it's like I made a fucking mistake. | ||
| You know, and so we have, I think they're so morally right all the time too, you know what I mean? | ||
| They're always policing everyone else's words as if they never made it. | ||
| That's part of the genius about this. | ||
| Anyway, we'll do the atheism thing. | ||
| It's crazy though because I do want to keep going with this because I feel each week I feel like I can get away from this a little bit, and then something else happens that brings me back into it. | ||
| And we've talked about it in a little more of a lofty way, which is nice also. | ||
| Not so much the nitty-gritty of it, but in sort of a bigger sense. | ||
| Alright, so let's get to some of these. | ||
| And this is all going to relate back to it, so I want to talk about new atheists. | ||
| There's an attack on new atheists. | ||
| As I understand it, new atheists pretty much are just atheists who are finally speaking up about atheism. | ||
| It may be a little more. | ||
| You define it, I think, a little more specifically, right? | ||
| In the book, there's a little more about that they're actually trying to shoot down some ideas where an old atheist maybe just removed themselves from the discussion. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, different people define it different ways. | ||
| Austin Dacey, some people think there's no difference between new and the old. | ||
| I think, I do think there is a difference. | ||
| I think they're a little more kind of forthright in their speech, and people interpret being forthright as being disrespectful or overly aggressive. | ||
| I think that's a mischaracterization. | ||
| I think that they've But they don't take too kindly to that, the believer. | ||
| this set of beliefs or this suite of beliefs is rational to these beliefs are delusional. | ||
| And I think in my work delusion has been a component of how I think it's helpful to | ||
| think about the problem. | ||
| And – But they don't take too kindly to that, the believer. | ||
| To delusion? | ||
| You go up to the believer, the average believer, and you say, "You're delusional." | ||
| They're usually not that responsive. | ||
| Yeah, if you do that, you haven't read the book. | ||
| Because you don't want to invoke a defensive posture in someone. | ||
| You want to enter into a conversation in which people change their beliefs from a point of view of safety. | ||
| Yeah, so this is literally what you do in the book. | ||
| I mean, you lay out the exact tools on how you should talk to somebody. | ||
| Line by line, word for word. | ||
| There's a template that you can use, and people have gone around—Anthony Magnabosco has gone around videos on YouTube who implements the—uses the scientific method. | ||
| What is your confidence in this belief? | ||
| Gives an intervention based upon the book. | ||
| Now, what is your—and then a post-test. | ||
| Pre-test, intervention, post-test. | ||
| And it's amazing the down moves that people make in only five to ten minutes. | ||
| So we know that this works. | ||
| We know that this is effective. | ||
| We know that these sorts of very civil, very engaging... And that's the other thing. | ||
| You never have to worry about anybody saying they don't want to talk about their faith. | ||
| Everybody loves to talk. | ||
| It's like the one thing that people will... the one commonality among people of faith. | ||
| They love to talk about it. | ||
| So, speaking of talking about it, you also hit upon how people are very selective in what they believe. | ||
| And if you get them to admit, well, I don't believe that this or that happened, right? | ||
| I don't believe about chopping off hands or chopping off heads. | ||
| That's the crazy part. | ||
| But I believe in this other stuff. | ||
| But I think what you were saying is that, basically, if you can get them to sort of start admitting something's not true, that's sort of how you pull the string, right? | ||
| To then leading to getting them to admit some other stuff, probably. | ||
| Yeah, and a lot of that is you have to create conditions, and again, this isn't me, there's a long body of literature, there's a long line of literature about how to change the behavior of people who don't want their behavior changed. | ||
| It's from drug and alcohol counseling, it's from motivational interviewing, cult exiting, this is out there, but nobody has really synthesized it. | ||
| No one has brought these disparate elements together. | ||
| So, I was partly thinking this when I was reading the book. | ||
| What would you say is the problem? | ||
| If there's the average person that's a believer that uses religion for community, you know, celebrates some holidays, whatever the religion might be, but isn't doing anything, you know, not the people that are beheading people. | ||
| But if you're just some average person that doesn't necessarily take your faith seriously, but you get some sense of community, whatever it is, do you see an inherent problem in that? | ||
| Or is that just for you? | ||
| It's like, well, you're just sort of deluded, but all right, go with it. | ||
| I do see a problem because I think that people are wasting their Life energy on something that's not true. | ||
| They're harboring a belief about reality that is almost definitely false. | ||
| And we just know this empirically because of the number of different religions that make different claims about the world. | ||
| They can't all be right. | ||
| In fact, there are contradictions. | ||
| Perfect one, Jesus was crucified. | ||
| Jesus was not crucified. | ||
| Islam, Christianity. | ||
| Muhammad was the last prophet. | ||
| Muhammad was a prophet for Mormons. | ||
| So people are harboring views about reality that are true. | ||
| The other thing is, I've heard people say that a lot, and I have to push back with you on something. | ||
| I'm not so sure that people can hold a private belief. | ||
| I'm not so sure that somebody can have a belief and not have that belief bleed out into action. | ||
| Not necessarily by speaking it, but just by the way they are. | ||
| Can you give me an example? | ||
| Yeah, well that's what it means to hold a belief. | ||
| I'm thinking about homosexuality, but that's too charged, so I'm going to use your blazer. | ||
| I don't like guys who... | ||
| This is a nice blazer. | ||
| I don't like guys who have Brooks Brothers blazers. | ||
| In fact, I can't stand them. | ||
| They smell different. | ||
| They look different. | ||
| But I'm not going to let that. | ||
| I'm not going to show that. | ||
| I can work with someone who has a blazer. | ||
| I think what it means That's almost a denial of what it means to have a belief, to hold a belief about something. | ||
| So, I'm also not sure that these beliefs are as benign as people think that they are. | ||
| And every time I bring that up, people will bring out a study. | ||
| Well, look at this. | ||
| Like, you know, religiosity in this group. | ||
| It's a huge difference, but let's just go with it. | ||
| less intellectually adroit people will say, you know, some causal, correlated, okay, whatever. | ||
| It's a huge difference, but let's just go with it. | ||
| Look, what happens when you have religion, you have lower incidence of, you know, heart | ||
| disease or whatever it is. | ||
| I think that the word you used before was apt. | ||
| It's community. | ||
| Those benefits can be found from community, and you can get communities of like-minded | ||
| people without believing any superstitious silliness. | ||
| You know, you can get— (mumbling) | ||
| You can like the same sports team. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that you say, well, what's the harm of someone rooting for the Patriots? | ||
| I don't know anything about football. | ||
| What's the harm of someone rooting for the Patriots? | ||
| Well, that's disanalogous because you're not claiming that it's objectively true. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| And so, if I think that the Patriots are ordained by God to win the Super Bowl, or whatever it is that they do—you know, again, I don't know anything about sports. | ||
| Super Bowl, that was good. | ||
| You linked football and Super Bowl. | ||
| Yeah, thanks, thanks. | ||
| Well, don't take me down that road. | ||
| I'm in big trouble. | ||
| Then I'm going to get 50 hate mails. | ||
| People love football. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I think that the problem is that people make objective claims, and they live their lives accordingly, and this is all you got, man. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| So, wouldn't it be better for those people to be invited to see reality for what it is? | ||
| Wouldn't it be better to give those people an opportunity to flourish? | ||
| Because if your beliefs, if one belief, it's like, you can look at it as like an architectonic structure, like a big building, right? | ||
| If one of your beliefs on the bottom level of that building It's contaminated, like a base belief, like Jesus rose from the dead. | ||
| Then all of the beliefs that flow from that, or stem from that, become suspect. | ||
| So what's the harm? | ||
| The harm is that if you want to enable yourself to flourish, and you want to enable your community to flourish, you have to align your beliefs with reality. | ||
| Because if you don't, then what you think is objectively moral, the right thing to do, will actually be leading you away from flourishing. | ||
| Right, so that's interesting. | ||
| So almost in a way, you then systemically, you have to constantly be compromising. | ||
| Because no matter how much new evidence comes in to prove something else, you really have to skirt around it because you've built sort of your base in things that aren't provable. | ||
| Yeah, and you put your finger on the cognitive problem. | ||
| The cognitive problem is then that in order to reconcile that, they make a virtue out of not revising their beliefs. | ||
| They make a sin, then you need to import new words. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Words that have, words that are anathema to belief revision, like sin, like sacred. | ||
| And that buttresses or protects those beliefs from being revised. | ||
| So there's a whole mechanism to keep this, that in almost, like I talked about in the book, it's almost, if you look at it epidemiologically, how these things spread, like memes, they spread mimetically. | ||
| When you really think about that, the harm is that literally billions of people are living in ways that they think is just and kind and right, and it's not. | ||
| And nation-states are created around that. | ||
| And we are in a very serious problem with technology, the instantaneous flow and access of information. | ||
| We are in a problem that we can no longer afford not only to ignore that, but to disallow—there we go, the rest have left us again—but to disallow conversations about those things. | ||
| We—look, a shocking number of people In this country—and I'm ashamed to say this, but that doesn't—don't shoot the messenger—do not want Muslim immigration. | ||
| They want to target people and not their beliefs. | ||
| We need to have a talk about that. | ||
| Ignoring that is not only not going to make it go away, but it's going to make that percentage increase. | ||
| And that's the thing that the regressives just cannot seem to understand. | ||
| Right, so—and, of course, we're back to it, but so— No, but it's OK. | ||
| But the point being that—so then if you were to take someone like Sam, who's having extremely difficult, complex, thought-out conversations about the difference between Islam and Muslims and Islamism and violent jihad and all those things, and if you put him in the same bank as Trump, there is nobody left. | ||
| I think that for me is why I've taken this thing on. | ||
| Because I saw this guy, I told Sam to his face, I didn't even know who he was before that. | ||
| Believe it or not, I didn't really know. | ||
| I didn't follow him on Twitter, I had never read any of his books, I had maybe heard of him. | ||
| But I watched that thing and I thought, Jesus, here's a guy trying to tell the truth on some pretty controversial things, and look at the way he's being bombasted. | ||
| And even trying to ask questions. | ||
| And that's what's so interesting. | ||
| And that's what you... Moral... Look, it's complicated. | ||
| Moral arguments are just complicated. | ||
| That's why you have guys, very smart individuals, who have substantive disagreements about, you know, eating animals, factory farming. | ||
| This is complicated. | ||
| But that's more reason and not less reason to talk about it. | ||
| And what they've done to Sam is that they have created conditions to make it impossible for people to speak. | ||
| They have really done exactly the opposite of what they— | ||
| —So that's the danger of what's going on in the colleges, really, | ||
| because you're—we're using Sam as one example of this. | ||
| But if they can breed that ideology in the colleges, now it goes to what you were saying before. | ||
| You worry about the future, because now you're going to bring up all these people | ||
| with all this idea. | ||
| So is some of this, though, that to have these conversations? | ||
| First off, people, we view things on Vine in six seconds, 140 characters, and I'm really happy to be doing Long Form again, and I really do believe it's coming back, and I get emails every day saying that people are digging it, so we're on to something. | ||
| But it's part of it that to have real discussions about real things, And especially when you do it from the religious angle and atheism and all that. | ||
| Well, you have basically Bill Maher and Dawkins and a couple other people that are really in the limelight of it, and that you're putting too much on a few people. | ||
| And that's sort of the reverse of how this should go if you want to have real open discussion, right? | ||
| Yeah, you are putting a lot on a few people. | ||
| For example, I'll defend Bill Maher related to this, and people say, well, he's sort of a dick about it, and he's throwing it in everyone's face and all that. | ||
| And I'll always say, well, I grant him a leash on this, because he's fighting the good fight, in my view. | ||
| He's fighting something that's so hard to do, and really using reason to explain complex things. | ||
| So if he's a little bit of a dick about it, All right. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| There's plenty of dicks on the other side, too. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| And, again, I think, again, Affleck's—that clip was just perfect. | ||
| Affleck's response was so emblematic. | ||
| Now, I don't know if Rogan's right. | ||
| I have no idea if this guy is such a good actor. | ||
| He had us all believing. | ||
| I really—I can't—I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I do know is that that reaction is more typical than ever now, and we need less of that reaction. | ||
| Here's one way that we may want to think about getting less of that reaction, and I'm not being facetious when I tell you this, I'm being incredibly sincere. | ||
| Virtually every time I speak to someone, not every time, you know, if they're a professional apologist, then that goes out the window. | ||
| Virtually every time, excuse me, when I'm speaking with someone, I always think to myself, maybe they know something I don't know. | ||
| And if you can just attempt to hold that in your head, and I have found, in conversations with religious people, it's been very helpful. | ||
| I will admit to you, I almost cannot do that any longer with the regressives, because they make a slip of the tongue into just some monstrous, heinous act, or I always feel that it's personal, like it's deeply personal, like there's something There's something in me that they need to cleanse or something. | ||
| Well, that's what I mean about the authoritarian thing. | ||
| In a weird way, they're doing religious trickery. | ||
| They are doing, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The horseshoe. | ||
| They're using a lot of the tactics. | ||
| So the question is, what do we do? | ||
| How do we engage these people? | ||
| I mean, this is a very difficult question, particularly when they now have at their disposal, they've been They've infested academia. | ||
| What do we do when these people are now the rule makers? | ||
| Well, it's interesting that the more I try to bring this towards atheism, the more it comes back to this. | ||
| Because it seems to me that the attacks that they've done on the new atheists, where they use it as a pejorative now, you're a new atheist, it's some sort of evil creature, even though I don't know anyone really that identifies as a new atheist. | ||
| I don't think. | ||
| Maybe Sam does. | ||
| I'm not even sure. | ||
| But they've just muddied the water. | ||
| You were just saying you don't identify as an atheist. | ||
| I don't even identify as an atheist. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, you can attempt to smear me, you can attempt to... But the irony is, Joe and I talked about this, it's like, I have never heard a person use the word intersectional who wasn't just a nasty person. | ||
| Who wasn't just a really, just mean-spirited, angry person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, and I think that is part of the, of course I should be indignant because I'm a good person. | ||
| Good people become indignant at these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| We're going to talk about atheism now. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to go back to atheism. | ||
| Okay, let's go. | ||
| This is fun. | ||
| We're going to do, what kind of chart could we do on this? | ||
| I'm ready. | ||
| Yeah, I know you're going with me. | ||
| I think part of the problem is also that when people have made the choice to make the leap of faith, right, whatever the religion that they've jumped in, in a certain way, even though I think in their eyes they're doing something very lofty, in a certain way you're doing, you're just, I view it as sort of like you're giving up sort of. | ||
| You're like, the world is a pretty fucked up place, I don't know the answers so I'm just going to leap So is that part of why it makes the rational person's argument to them very difficult? | ||
| Because you're arguing against something that's not rational in its most pure form. | ||
| Did I get somewhere there? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, only because I think different people believe for different reasons. | ||
| And so I don't know. | ||
| Here's what I do know. | ||
| Unlike this Belief that seems to be memeing out everywhere, seems to be going around. | ||
| You can actually reason people out of unreasonable positions. | ||
| In fact, I was just talking to my buddy a couple days ago, John W. Loftus. | ||
| I wrote the foreword to his new book. | ||
| He was a disciple of the greatest Christian apologist. | ||
| He reasoned himself. | ||
| Jerry DeWitt. | ||
| The list goes on and on and on of people who have done that. | ||
| And I think it doesn't start with reason so much. | ||
| It starts with honesty. | ||
| You really think there was a talking snake? | ||
| Like, no bullshit. | ||
| But yet, if you looked at your garden, and you're raking up, and a snake started talking to you, you'd be freaking out, right? | ||
| And nobody would believe you. | ||
| And no one would believe you, right? | ||
| So these things cohere in a very complicated... | ||
| Not to use a big word, but a covariant set of beliefs that reinforce other beliefs, etc., etc. | ||
| So, I don't think that we can narrow it down to one node or one data point for why people believe. | ||
| I think it's a very complex equation. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny, I haven't thought of this so literally until just this second, but years ago, I think in 1997, so I was 21, I went to Egypt and I was at Mount Sinai, which is supposedly where Moses got the Ten Commandments. | ||
| And I hiked up the mountain. | ||
| It's a long hike. | ||
| You're supposed to do it at night. | ||
| I did it during the day. | ||
| I ran out of water. | ||
| I mean, I was basically delusional. | ||
| My stomach was messed up from I ate some bad pigeon in Cairo. | ||
| I mean, I was, if I was, if there was ever a moment where I was going to have a spiritual awakening, like that's where it was. | ||
| Cause I was compromised in my body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I remember, I'm not kidding at all. | ||
| I mean, I remember going to the top of that thing and thinking like, if, if there's something here, You gotta give me a sign, right? | ||
| Like, if there's something here, and this is where Moses supposedly saw the burning bush and got the Ten Commandments and all that, then you gotta give me something! | ||
| And there was nothing. | ||
| So, for me, that was sort of like, oh, yeah. | ||
| God's very good at hiding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great hider, this guy. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that that's kind of, I mean, if you really think about this, I apologize ahead of time if this lowers your IQ by a couple points. | ||
| Oh, geez. | ||
| People will say, well, that's why you need faith. | ||
| Because there is no evidence, or there is nothing for God, you just have to have faith in that. | ||
| But you don't act that way in any other aspect of your life. | ||
| Like, you know, there's no other arena in which you think like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Can I go back to your friend again? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Is that okay? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because I'm still thinking about this. | ||
| So, what if you had another belief that had nothing to do with Muslims or Islam, that that friend found odious? | ||
| They would probably let it slide. | ||
| I think that's where you're going with this, right? | ||
| That's where I'm going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what I'm amazed about with this whole thing. | ||
| This seems to be the one sticking point that they can— That is correct. | ||
| So what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
OK. | |
| So that's an opportunity—I'll tell you what that is. | ||
| That's an opportunity for your friend to reflect, to sincerely reflect about The moral priority that she or he has given this one issue, and to ask yourself, well, does that seem—just as an outsider, as an outsider, does that seem that this one issue should trump everything else? | ||
| Frankly, I don't even know you. | ||
| I'm concerned about their well-being. | ||
| I'm concerned about their priorities. | ||
| Well, that was also part, when we were having this discussion, which again was on text, which also felt so weak. | ||
| It felt like nothing. | ||
| You know when you're having a real conversation with someone and you can feel weight to it and you can feel importance? | ||
| To do it over text felt ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, not even email, which also wouldn't have felt great, but I could not get this person to sit down with me. | ||
| There would have been nothing else, and that's your point. | ||
| There would be nothing else. | ||
| And when I said, well, is there evidence of this? | ||
| Have I ever, in all the time that you've known me, was I secretly doing this? | ||
| Yeah, so here's the thing that I've been thinking about, the thing that I try to be careful of. | ||
| I've been noticing, it's like, I... | ||
| Sometimes if somebody has a belief that's just so out in left field, it's really easy for me, and I try to rein myself in with this internal tendency. | ||
| I don't verbalize it or articulate it. | ||
| I'm thinking that these people have mental disorders. | ||
| And then I'll talk to people who believe in actual talking snakes and such. | ||
| And again, they're very nice people. | ||
| They're very easy to talk to. | ||
| I debated a guy in Perth. | ||
| I still keep in touch with him. | ||
| We've written to each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There is something about— He literally believes that he talks to snakes. | |
| No, in talking snakes, like in the Bible. | ||
| Oh, in talking snakes, not that he did himself. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no. | ||
| That's a whole different level of person, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, that is. | ||
| And it's—it's very difficult for me, Dave. | ||
| I try not to characterize people whose beliefs are so far afield of mine that they have mental disorders. | ||
| And I find—I think I find that the type of people who go into religion are the sort of people who tend to be imbalanced anyway, and they find a nice community for that, a way to discharge those bizarre beliefs. | ||
| It's the same thing with the regressives. | ||
| Uh-oh, are we supposed to keep talking about— Keep going, keep going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that they find this wonderful social justice warrior place where they can be behind their keyboard and angry and smear people, and they get all the hate and they get all the rage. | ||
| And it's very difficult for me to rein myself in and not write them all off as people who have mental disorders. | ||
| And that's part of my work, man. | ||
| I'm trying. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| In the most that I can possibly hear someone, I hear you. | ||
| Why, I find it exhausting. | ||
| It is exhausting. | ||
| I wonder, so for you, even before the regressive thing took hold so much, this discussion, a discussion about, you know, free thinking and critical thinking versus faith and things you can't prove. | ||
| And then you toss in some of the regressives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How exhausting is this for you on a day-to-day basis? | ||
| Because I do find that it can be extremely exhausting, that at the end of the day I can have trouble shutting off my mind or I'll wake up at 6 and I flick on Twitter and then I immediately see craziness before I've gotten out of bed. | ||
| And I do find it sort of exhausting. | ||
| What about for you? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's because you care a lot. | ||
| And I don't really care about the negative things people say. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I legitimately don't. | ||
| I have pressing things that I care about. | ||
| My family, my health, friendships, relationships. | ||
| I guess in a sense, I'm genuinely interested in what people believe and why they believe it, and how it's possible to hold preposterous beliefs. | ||
| So it's just perennially interesting to me. | ||
| What's problematic, though, and what is exhausting, are the constant ways that I Self-censor, because I'm afraid of academic punishment. | ||
| And I just had another complaint filed against me. | ||
| The ways that I can't—and it's not that the administration has said anything to me. | ||
| It's the culture in which we're—the academic culture now is you just have to be extremely cautious about what you say, particularly in regard to Islam or particularly in regard to—there are certain things. | ||
| You don't have to be conscious whatsoever if you want to criticize big pharma. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's the other thing. | ||
| Like, in class, you can say, fuck, shit, you can say anything you want, but don't use a pronoun wrong, or don't say, you know, don't slip, again, 49 with the retarded word. | ||
| I don't do that anymore, but, you know, the things that are exhausting to me are the Mechanisms that are in place that prohibit the free expression of ideas and not necessarily that I don't have tenure and I'll never get tenure, not necessarily that anything, it would be a career ender, but it is a theft of my time. | ||
| It is now I have to constantly deal with it and I have to have it in the back of my mind. | ||
| And then, oh, if I say something else, I have another complaint and then I'll be the guy who gets all these complaints. | ||
| So it's working within these. | ||
| And, you know, the other thing I was thinking about last night, Is that what this does, in essence, is it pushes the whole system towards mediocrity. | ||
| It pushes the whole system, because then people are afraid to voice controversial ideas or opinions or give sides that students wouldn't hear. | ||
| They want to be the people who don't get complaints filed against them. | ||
| So they take the easy courses, you know, and what they're not talking about is like, for example, nothing to do with the regressive left, but—or and—cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy. | ||
| We read a great book about that. | ||
| We're not talking about the status—Peter Stinger has really interesting stuff about this philosopher—of what should the status of cognitively disabled people be. | ||
| And he says they should be more equivalent in treatment to—I don't want to mischaracterize him—but to basically pigs and cows. | ||
| I think that that's an important conversation to have. | ||
| And the whole system is then being pushed towards mediocrity because professors don't want to deal with it. | ||
| They don't—they just can't—they stomach or handle all these ridiculous student complaints, so they just don't teach it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why are you never going to get tenure? | ||
| Oh, I was told that I could publish ten books from Harvard and I'd never get tenure here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was like the best thing that ever happened to me. | ||
| The moment after this guy, I won't say who it is, this person told me this, I wrote an article. | ||
| I'm like, well, okay, well, since I'm never going to get tenure and I know that there's nothing I can do independent of my accomplishments, I'll never get promoted. | ||
| It just felt, it was the most freeing feeling ever. | ||
| I left his office and I wrote a little piece Something like what should the role of the educator be? | ||
| And I said that the role of the educator should be to change students' beliefs if they're not in alignment with reality. | ||
| Seems to me totally uncontroversial. | ||
| My colleagues freaked out about it. | ||
| The piece went viral. | ||
| This is brief chronology, and this is how I got in touch with Sam Harris. | ||
| And then some guy from—Paul Pardee from Philosophy News said, you want to do a podcast? | ||
| I'm in the podcast. | ||
| Sam Harris tweeted, we need more educators like Peter Boghossian. | ||
| This is how I got in touch with Dawkins. | ||
| Dawkins tweeted it. | ||
| And that just started this whole cascade. | ||
| But I have never felt more free to talk about anything that I want, knowing that I could be fired at any instant. | ||
| I love that, actually. | ||
| It's a freedom that I relish. | ||
| Well, I love it because it shows you the importance of ideas, which is really, that's the big thing here that everything else is couched in, right? | ||
| That you had an idea, you shared it, and then your idea was shared by people that you respect and admire, who you credit in your book for helping you get to this place, and then they Spread an idea. | ||
| And that, I guess, to sort of bring this all around, is what the regressives are fearing. | ||
| And that's why they want to silence everyone, because they don't like—they don't like your ideas, right? | ||
| So that they're not going to debate them. | ||
| Yeah, they don't like it. | ||
| They think they have the truth. | ||
| It is really a bizarre kind of epistemological myopia. | ||
| Not even—it's just that they have these ideas that they're completely convinced are true, again, | ||
| like religion. | ||
| Holding them makes them better people. | ||
| They're sacrosanct. | ||
| You can't criticize them. | ||
| Not only can you—you can't even ask about them. | ||
| You can't even ask how they derived it. | ||
| Because if you do, you're a big interracist. | ||
| And they're so morally sure. | ||
| Oh, boy, they're sanctimonious. | ||
| I guess that's why I wanted to bring this around to relate it to religion, | ||
| because I've been trying to put this all together. | ||
| And there is these underpinnings that are so the same of the authoritarian, religious thing. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| It really is all there. | ||
| It's like they hate religion. | ||
| They're on the left, so they hate religion. | ||
| Christianity. | ||
| They hate Christianity, right? | ||
| And they have one religion that they want to protect, because it's the downtrodden religion. | ||
| Just everything they do is in—it's a constant shell game. | ||
| They're just moving the goalposts all the time. | ||
| And how intellectually exhausting must that be for them? | ||
| I don't think it's that tiring for them. | ||
| Well, because they're just so ingenuine and insincere. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I've come to believe. | ||
| Because many people—every day I get email, people saying, why don't you sit down with one of these guys? | ||
| And there's, you know, there's a list of the public ones that I could sit down with, right? | ||
| And I know some of them personally. | ||
| What could we do? | ||
| If they've been exposed repeatedly as liars, as they have, and as repeatedly with bad intentions, so then for you, for you, someone that deals in the moral landscape without religion, right, and deals in critical thinking, What should the decision process be for me? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because I think about it all the time. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I could do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I could do it. | |
| Okay, so here's a piece of it. | ||
| My friend Jerry Coyne said this to me, a very evolutionary biologist, a very useful piece of information. | ||
| I'm trying to say this without giving this person any identity, but here's what I think you should do. | ||
| I'll give you the piece of advice you gave me. | ||
| People are going to criticize you no matter what. | ||
| So if someone says to you, hey, I'm going to donate to charity, I'm going to do this, the question I think is, do you think that this person is sincere and honest in their engagement with you? | ||
| Not what would I get out of it, not what would they get out of it, not even what would it do to further the discourse. | ||
| But is this a sincere person who's willing to sit down and talk with me and look at the evidence, and are their beliefs defeasible? | ||
| Are they willing to say, you know, hey look, Dave, I came in here, I thought this, I had a conversation with you. | ||
| But equally important, you have to ask that of yourself, right? | ||
| If that is absent from that discourse, it's just a farce. | ||
| So why would you? | ||
| You should never listen to someone on Twitter who's going to say, well fuck you, get your own show. | ||
| You're not held hostage to the irrationality of others. | ||
| Yeah, I like that. | ||
| That's a good ending. | ||
| That sounds like a good ending. | ||
| We could have done so much more here. | ||
| And I pretty much, I could have just mixed these up. | ||
| I don't even know that I really looked at them, but I could have just thrown them all over. | ||
| I'm dying to know what's on there. | ||
| You can have those. | ||
| We will absolutely do this again. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And I won't bring any of those cards, and we'll just see what happens. | ||
| But the beauty of this is that this This is big, and this is what a lot of people have wanted to talk about, and I like the fact that I'm able to talk about it with people that are dealing with it in different ways. | ||
| So at the academic level, and the religious level, or belief level, and then people are dealing at the political level, and all that stuff. | ||
| And you've been a catalyst. | ||
| I mean, you've brought people together. | ||
| You've talked about an issue that's important. | ||
| More and more people are becoming aware of that, and you've become a figure in which people go to, and they look to, and they respect. | ||
| For these sorts of conversations to help them navigate these difficult terrains, because these are not easy issues. | ||
| They're particularly not easy when, again, a lot of the arguments that people on the regressive have, they really should be taken earnestly. | ||
| You know, treating people, not treating people differently on the basis of skin color, I mean, these are really important things, and we need to be sensitive To how we behave. | ||
| We need to be more kind and more just and more compassionate. | ||
| The way to do that is not through the regressives. | ||
| The way to do that is by being honest and sincere with ourselves and having these sorts of discourses, having these kinds of dialogues. | ||
| I want to thank Peter Boghossian for joining me. | ||
| You can check out his work at PeterBoghossian.com and buy a manual for creating atheists wherever books are sold. |
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