Jan. 22, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:11:19
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I think a healthy dose of skepticism is one of the most important attributes one can have, but also saying most of us could use a little more of. | ||
| You guys know I'm big on definitions around here, so let's actually define the word skepticism before we go any further. | ||
| An attitude of doubt or disposition to incredulity, either in general or toward a particular object. | ||
| The doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain. | ||
| The method of suspended judgment, systemic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics. | ||
| Doubt concerning basic religious principles as immortality, providence, and revelation. | ||
| So all skepticism really is, then, is the desire for more information before making a judgment. | ||
| This seems like a really simple and pretty obvious concept, yet we're so lacking it in our public discourse. | ||
| We're so quick to dismiss people the second they say something we don't like, we ignore evidence when it doesn't fit our narrative, and too often we pick sides when we don't really know the facts. | ||
| This is why pundits on cable networks, radio, and online media are yelling all the time. | ||
| Instead of making a compelling argument based on fact and reason, they just yell with righteous indignation so you think that what they're saying must be true. | ||
| After all, they're really fired up, so they must have a true and decent cause, right? | ||
| Well, usually the opposite is true. | ||
| Of course, it's not just these talking heads who could use a healthy dose of skepticism. | ||
| We're in the midst of an election year, so all of us should be skeptical of everything each one of these politicians running for office says. | ||
| We shouldn't take their word for it. | ||
| Instead, we should question whether what they're saying is true and take the time to learn the facts. | ||
| Politicians prey on an uninformed, uninterested, and non-skeptical electorate. | ||
| It's our job as citizens to make them more honest and more forthright. | ||
| Pretty sure we all know they're not going to do that on their own. | ||
| Going even deeper, it's not just pundits and politicians we should be skeptical about, but it's also our very selves. | ||
| The word skeptic even has a slight tinge of negativity to it, right? | ||
| Like, oh, he's a skeptic, you better watch out for him. | ||
| All the skeptic actually wants is more information to form an opinion on the world in a rational way using facts and proven methods. | ||
| Sure, that's not as comforting as blind faith, and it certainly isn't as easy, but perhaps the satisfaction is in the journey of questioning. | ||
| My guest this week is Michael Shermer, an author who has written much on this subject and is a thought leader in the skeptic movement. | ||
| Using science and provable methods, he talks about how we can have morality that is based in fact, not fiction. | ||
| It's a harder road, but it is one that more and more people seem to be taking. | ||
| It's also an idea I try to use in all my interviews. | ||
| I'm the first to admit that I don't know everything, and I'm genuinely curious to learn from people of all walks of life. | ||
| Talking directly to them is one of the few ways that we can actually do that. | ||
| 140 characters is nice, but there's nothing like the true personal connection. | ||
| At the end of the day, none of us truly know the meaning of life and the answer to the big questions. | ||
| We can think, we can guess, we can create, we can destroy, but we simply cannot know. | ||
| It's the age-old question that will remain until the end of time. | ||
| In a way, not knowing is perhaps the most human trait there is. | ||
| So when preachers, politicians, or conspiracy theorists tell you they know what's really going on, just know that they're full of something, but it ain't knowledge. | ||
| Michael Shermer is the author of many books, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, and is very skeptical of everything I'm saying right now. | ||
| Michael, welcome to the show. | ||
| Yeah, I doubt it. | ||
| You are a professional skeptic. | ||
| Yeah, as it were. | ||
| Given that I publish a magazine called Skeptic, I guess that's technically true. | ||
| Yeah, and you run Skeptic.com, so we've got a book called Skeptic right here. | ||
| You're a skeptical dude. | ||
| Yeah, I am. | ||
| Not by nature, necessarily. | ||
| I would like to believe lots of things. | ||
| I'd like to believe that the stock market is not cratering this week. | ||
| I'd like to believe that, you know, aliens are out there and visiting us. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of things. | ||
| If there was an afterlife, you know, I'd like to live for centuries to see how all this turns out. | ||
| You know, but the fact that I'd like it to be true doesn't make it true. | ||
| So I have to kind of override my own subjective biases and preferences in favor of the facts, which is sometimes hard to face. | ||
| Yeah, so I started the show by talking about reason and using logic and science to get a sense of morality, which you've written a lot about. | ||
| But before we get into that, I want to talk a little bit about your history and your sort of evolution to getting to where you are. | ||
| So you weren't, you didn't grow up religious, right? | ||
| But you became religious for a small period of time around high school or late high school. | ||
| Can you tell me Yep. | ||
| Well, I was an evangelical born-again Christian in high school and college for my four years undergraduate and in the start of graduate school. | ||
| So about seven years total. | ||
| My parents weren't religious, but they weren't anti-religious. | ||
| You know, back then the whole atheism thing was not a thing. | ||
| It was just something most people didn't talk about. | ||
| But the born-again movement was kind of picking up in the seventies and my friends were into it in high school. | ||
| So, you know, it's that sort of after parental influence, then there's peer group influence. | ||
| And that was my case. | ||
| My friends were doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember my friend Frank was really religious. | ||
| And when I became born again, it happened at a Presbyterian church because this other friend of mine went there. | ||
| And when I came back to school on Monday, I told Frank, I did it! | ||
| I went to the Presbyterian church. | ||
| He goes, no, no, that's the wrong one! | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Which one did he want? | ||
| He was Jehovah Witness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm like, wrong one. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So, that was my first inkling that, okay, there's these little factions and tribes even within the Christianity movement. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anyway, but I took it fairly seriously and I went to Bible classes and then I went to Pepperdine. | ||
| Which is a Church of Christ school, very conservative. | ||
| President Ford came to speak and, you know, it was in a bubble where everybody believed. | ||
| And, you know, when you're in the bubble, psychologically, it makes sense. | ||
| It's logically coherent, it's internally consistent, and everything falls into place. | ||
| And it's not really until you're out of the bubble and you encounter other worldviews that you think, huh, you know, maybe mine's not so solid as I thought. | ||
| And that was how I kind of chipped away at it later. | ||
| Right, so what kind of stuff were you questioning before you got into the bubble that led you to jumping in and becoming born again? | ||
| And actually, before I let you answer that, when you're born again, I always think of born again as someone that's left the religion and come back, and that's why they're born again. | ||
| Oh no, no. | ||
| Born again just means... You're born physically and then you're born again when you accept Jesus as your Savior. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's sort of a new, you start life anew and you get eternal life because you've accepted Jesus. | ||
| So that's what they mean by born again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And evangelical, they mean you were supposed to evangelize. | ||
| So this is why evangelicals are always talking to people about Jesus. | ||
| hold up the placards at sporting events, John 3:16, "For God so loved the world He gave His | ||
| only begotten Son for you." And they wear the black face in football with the three, John 3:16. | ||
| >>Right. And then they thank God after they win. >>Yes, so the idea is that you wear it on your | ||
| sleeve. You are the shining beacon on the hill. You do not hide your faith underneath a bushel, | ||
| a basket. You tell people about it. And in a way you kind of have a moral obligation to do so, | ||
| because if you know that this is the way, the truth, and the light, and you get eternity for | ||
| this person's soul, you really have to tell them about it. | ||
| They're missing out. | ||
| So, it's not like the old school, like maybe George H.W. | ||
| Bush's, you know, he was a Methodist, and they're pretty quiet about it, you know, you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, and we just don't talk about it. | ||
| Evangelicals are not like that. | ||
| They're more like H. George W. Bush. | ||
| You know, you tell people, Jesus was my favorite philosopher and I'm a born again, and you witness to people literally going door-to-door, and I did that. | ||
| Obnoxiously so. | ||
| So you did all that, and then you're in the bubble, and then what caused the chipping away that led you to sitting here? | ||
| Well, I went to graduate school at Kelsey Fullerton, which is a secular school. | ||
| And it's not, again, it wasn't that atheism was a big thing. | ||
| It was just that no one was religious, or if they were, they were quiet about it. | ||
| And so I began taking classes in, you know, social psychology, anthropology, and I could see the, you know, psychological basis of belief and where you happen to have been born determines what you believe. | ||
| Particularly in anthropology, you study all these indigenous peoples who've never even heard of Jesus Christ, let alone Christianity or anything like that, you know, and it's like, well, why would they be condemned? | ||
| They don't even know about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, so, oh, well, they, you know, God has a special place for them, a little way station or something, you know. | ||
| What about the Jews? | ||
| I mean, they believe pretty much everything I believe, but, except Jesus. | ||
| Well, God has a special place, okay. | ||
| Well, you know, how does this all work, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then also the problem of evil. | ||
| I never thought that theologians provided a cogent answer to that. | ||
| Why bad things happen to good people? | ||
| And I don't mean like homicide, you know, okay, so we have a human nature, we're sinful, so people do bad things. | ||
| That's the quick answer to that. | ||
| Why childhood leukemia? | ||
| Why tsunamis that wipe out entire villages of tiny children? | ||
| Why do they have to suffer? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And beyond the, because God works in mysterious ways and He has a plan for everybody, which was never satisfying to me. | ||
| You know, that pretty much did it. | ||
| And then finally, well, I wrote about this. | ||
| You know, my girlfriend at the time was in a car accident and broke her back. | ||
| And I was pretty much on the way out at that point. | ||
| But I remember being at the emergency room Thinking, this poor woman, I mean, she is the sweetest lady and why would this happen to her? | ||
| This is not right. | ||
| You know, so I sort of made one last ditch effort and prayed, you know, and it's not that this was the big test and if it fails, then I won't believe it. | ||
| It's just like, you know what? | ||
| Of course, she's still paralyzed today. | ||
| It's like, okay, you know, I just don't think there's anybody up there pulling the strings. | ||
| Yeah, so why do you think so many people are just afraid to say, I don't know? | ||
| Because that seems to me to be the real question and the real basis of sort of everything that you do. | ||
| You're not proclaiming to know any sort of wisdom that I don't know, right? | ||
| I mean, we know different things, but you're not proclaiming to have the answers and people are so afraid of that question. | ||
| What do you think that's about? | ||
| Well, I think cognitively we know now that once you comprehend an idea, a concept, anything, the brain automatically just believes it to be true, just accepts it as part of the factual world that is. | ||
| And then being skeptical of it, or saying, I don't know, or I'm not sure, or I challenge this, is an extra cognitive load. | ||
| You can do it, lots of people do. | ||
| So, think of the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 thinking. | ||
| Type 1 cognition is rapid, intuitive, instinctive, emotional. | ||
| Type 2 thinking is deliberate, slow, methodical, rational. | ||
| And most of our thought processes that we initiate are Type 1. | ||
| We just kind of have a feeling about things. | ||
| Gut instinct, go about the world. | ||
| And Type 2 requires, okay, wait, let me stop and think about this. | ||
| Maybe I shouldn't make that investment. | ||
| Maybe I better not marry this person. | ||
| Maybe I shouldn't buy that company. | ||
| Whatever it is, that requires additional steps. | ||
| So it's an extra cognitive load. | ||
| It's uncomfortable. | ||
| It takes time, and anyway, and that's true with religious beliefs. | ||
| I think, you know, it just feels like, you know, the Earth is the center of everything. | ||
| We're the center of creation. | ||
| God's here for me. | ||
| It just, you know, everything that happens, happens for a reason. | ||
| It just kind of feels right. | ||
| So it's really just, I mean, it's just as simple as comfort, really, is what you're saying. | ||
| It's just like there is some stuff out there that I don't understand, And I better just pick this belief because then I don't have to spend that much mental energy on it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's almost like, you know, creationist arguments or arguments of people about, you know, who built the pyramids or whatever. | ||
| It's just, well, God did it or the aliens did it. | ||
| And then for me to deconstruct the whole thing, like in a debate or on a TV show, you know, I have to go through, well, how do you know it happened? | ||
| You've got 15 minutes to explain natural selection or, you know, whatever. | ||
| It's just easier to go, oh, God did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So is some of that also the way our technology works now with Twitter of 140 characters and Vine of six seconds and all these things. | ||
| Those are what you just described. | ||
| Those are type one thinking, right? | ||
| Because it's just quick, easy stuff. | ||
| And this, I guess, is type two, where we're actually going in and out of an idea. | ||
| But in a way, It would be really hard for Type 2 to ever win the great debate, right? | ||
| You just don't have time. | ||
| It does win, but it takes time, and it's deliberate, and it takes effort. | ||
| It's uncomfortable. | ||
| You know, Sam Harris' doctoral thesis was based on this idea of scanning brains while people read statements that are obviously true, obviously false, or you can't tell, you just don't know. | ||
| And he showed that the brain activity is very rapid, And simple and easy and positively reinforced with dopamine for questions that were obviously true or false. | ||
| The ones that you had to deliberate on and so on were the areas of the brain that lit up were, not only did it happen slower, but they were associated with things like bad smell and disgust and negative emotions. | ||
| So really, you know, an idea that stinks or an idea that's bad. | ||
| In other words, being skeptical, saying, I now comprehend this and I doubt it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a little bit like why lying is cognitively a heavier load, because you have to know what the truth is, and then take another step and go, okay, now I'm going to manipulate the truth in this particular way, and I have to remember both of those, and then maybe you tell it to a third person. | ||
| Now you've got three different stories. | ||
| So the load gets heavier, and it's harder, and it's just easier to go the simple route. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you happen to see Sam's blog post around Christmastime about lighting a fire? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| It was a really interesting piece because a lot of what we're talking about, it's not just couched in religion. | ||
| I think that's what his point was, that he was saying that we're all comforted by a nice fireplace and a fire, but then he goes into the carcinogens and the toxins and all this horrible stuff. | ||
| And I read it that day, and then I did light a fire that night. | ||
| I think it was I think I read it on Christmas Eve and I lit a fire and I think it illustrated his point perfectly like we have this idea we really like the fire right it's a really nice comforting thing and then we can cognitively know that it's doing a lot of damage to us so not all crazy beliefs and crazy actions are sort of based in religion | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I mean, it goes across the spectrum. | ||
| Again, aliens are like deities for atheists, as I call them. | ||
| Even if you don't believe in God, but there's somebody out there who's looking out for us, who knows we're here, loves us maybe, looking out for us morally, something like that. | ||
| That's kind of how aliens are described. | ||
| In a way, it is like somebody cares about me. | ||
| It's like the fire. | ||
| It makes you feel good. | ||
| The afterlife is like that as well, where all scores are settled. | ||
| You know, where you get to have the perfect body, and you're 29 years old, and so on, and all justice is served, and it just feels good. | ||
| I mean, that's the way the world should be, and you can just look around and go, well, it isn't. | ||
| You know, it's so funny what people take comfort in, because just this past weekend I was watching the History Channel, You know, they've gone from what once was history, now they do a lot of God stuff, right? | ||
| So I think it was God vs. the Devil was the name of the show, or God vs. Satan, or one of these things. | ||
| And there was so much horrible imagery, you know what I mean? | ||
| Burning people, and endless war, and Armageddon, and all this stuff. | ||
| And I kept thinking the entire time, this is incredible to me. | ||
| I mean, this is what people are taking comfort in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it was pretty horrible stuff. | ||
| So that right there shows a cognitive disconnect. | ||
| Well, so part of that is that we're also moralizing animals, moralizing primates. | ||
| We care deeply about justice and right and wrong. | ||
| So it's not just we want a good life, an easy life, a life with plenty of food and water and milk and honey. | ||
| It's not just that. | ||
| we want a cause we can be behind that we feel is a good cause, and all causes have to have | ||
| an anti-cause. | ||
| So, who is preventing us from achieving this utopian? | ||
| It's those guys, those bad guys over there, and they are preventing us from having eternal | ||
| bliss forever. | ||
| How bad are they? | ||
| They are really bad. | ||
| And what does that mean we can do to them? | ||
| Whatever we want because they are so bad. | ||
| And that's what leads to genocide and wars and conflicts, even homicides. | ||
| You know, 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature. | ||
| The guy deserved to die. | ||
| Well, he scratched my car, he insulted me, or he stole my girlfriend, or you know, whatever. | ||
| There are always these kind of moralistic reasons. | ||
| So, there was an interesting commentary on this recently about the interest in Trump and other strong leaders, and then reflecting back on the interest in Mussolini and Hitler back in the 30s, and George Orwell writing about this, saying, I really get this, you can see the passion in the people. | ||
| It's not just that Hitler or Mussolini said, I will give you economic prosperity and jobs and three square meals a day. | ||
| It's that we are going to change the world. | ||
| We are going to make Germany great again or Italy great again. | ||
| So it's about easy answers then, right? | ||
| Again, going to your type one thinking and these guys like Trump that just Black and white, yes. | ||
| Straight, simple. | ||
| Simple stuff. | ||
| So how do we, and this is I guess really what you've done sort of more than anyone else, how do we wrestle that conversation back and get it to a place where people are willing to extrapolate ideas and open them up and get in there and really figure out what's going on? | ||
| Hard to do. | ||
| How do we do it? | ||
| Well, you do what we're doing now, but most people don't sit down like this. | ||
| You go to a bar or whatever and it's much more black and white. | ||
| In part, I think the diffusion of culture through the internet and all the radio stations and television stations helps. | ||
| You know, despite the, say, History Channel 2 with the ancient alien stuff, you know, it's like, formerly all Hitler all the time, now it's all conspiracy, then it's all Bigfoot, then it's all aliens. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| But at least there's... And I love that stuff. | ||
| We're going to talk a little bit about it. | ||
| I love that stuff, but I know that, you know, they're just playing with your mind long enough to... Right, right. | ||
| It's good to remember television is a series of commercials with blank spots in between that have to be filled with something interesting to keep you from the clicker. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The clicker culture. | ||
| So, well, and then literacy rates, you know, the more literate people are, the more they read, the more options they have. | ||
| So, it's true, Twitter, 140 characters, but you can embed a link to an article that maybe is 3,000 words, and then maybe from there you go to the 10,000 word analysis, from there you go to the book. | ||
| And so anyway, as a book author, I like to think, maybe I'm delusional here, that people still like to read long books, I hope. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And move from the Twitter to, you know, to Facebook. | ||
| Listen, I hope so too. | ||
| That's why I'm doing this. | ||
| I mean, that's exactly why I'm doing this. | ||
| So it's interesting, you're talking about why people have done bad things in the name of morality, but how do we get morality then without religion? | ||
| How do we, using science, and this is what you've written a lot about, how do we use science to get some sense of morality so we don't end up doing the same things that the religious people are doing? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, it starts with the recognition that moral values are part of our human nature. | ||
| We have a sense of right and wrong and justice, and it's built into us. | ||
| And you can see it in all humans and actually all primates. | ||
| Even other mammals, like elephants and dogs and so on, they have a sense of guilt. | ||
| And shame and things like that. | ||
| And they have a certain amount of empathy, sympathy, cooperativeness, as well as selfishness and greediness and so on. | ||
| They have these suite of moral emotions, maybe scaled down from what we have. | ||
| So it's there in our nature. | ||
| We evolved it. | ||
| We got it as part of the package of just being human. | ||
| So that was just a survival thing, right? | ||
| Just survive. | ||
| Like Darwin, you have to play nice with people otherwise they're going to... Exactly. | ||
| So you start with something like Dawkins' selfish gene model, and what would a self-replicating molecule do to perpetuate itself into the future? | ||
| It needs to build a cell to put itself in, and then multiple cells, and then an organism. | ||
| survival machine to carry it forward. | ||
| So our bodies are beholden to the genes. | ||
| We are the gene survival machine. | ||
| And so why shouldn't I just be as selfish and greedy as I possibly can, hoard all the resources, | ||
| take all your stuff, and knock you on the head? | ||
| Well, because you would do the same calculation as me, and I know that you know that I might be thinking that, | ||
| and I know that you know that I know that you might be thinking that. | ||
| And so therefore, maybe it's better if I'm just nice to you and. | ||
| But I can't just fake and pretend I'm a nice person, because in time you will pick up the subtle cues that I'm not genuine in my feelings about you. | ||
| I'm just coldly manipulating your emotions to get something. | ||
| In time, people can see that in other people. | ||
| So you can't just fake it. | ||
| You have to actually believe it. | ||
| And actually feel like, I want to be a good person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so you have that tension then. | ||
| The good moral emotions and the dark side emotions. | ||
| And they're there for all of us. | ||
| So isn't that strange though? | ||
| Because that does show sort of, you're giving me the scientific explanation of why to be good. | ||
| And then at the same time, that is sort of why religion would tell people to be good too, right? | ||
| To better their community or to work with people or that kind of thing. | ||
| So there is some place that you could use both of those things to come up with... Well, I think what religions discovered this by trial and error over thousands of years, there are certain things that we shouldn't do because most people don't like it. | ||
| You know, so, you know, killing and, you know, this kind of thing, even though there's a lot of bad stuff in the Bible, they kind of figured out, look, we're a community, so we need a set of rules. | ||
| You know, maybe we disagree about the rules, but dang it, we need the rules and everybody has to obey them. | ||
| And if not, then there'll be punishments. | ||
| And if you think you got away with it because there was no one around, there's an eye in the sky. | ||
| You know, this is in a way the basis of God beliefs. | ||
| In part, there's multiple reasons for God, but that's one of them. | ||
| There's, you know, there's a moral eye in the sky keeping track. | ||
| Now, if you're a psychopath and you don't care, well, all right, it's not going to work for you. | ||
| But for the bulk of the population, that would work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so in a way, you know, the conservative Christian belief in the sinful nature of humans is in a way a Darwinian model as well, because yes, we're greedy, and if we think we can get away with it, we might. | ||
| So it's sort of like a prisoner's dilemma or a game theory type model. | ||
| tit for tat, and okay, I'll start off cooperating, and if you cooperate, I'll cooperate again. | ||
| But if you defect, then I'm gonna nail you for that. | ||
| So that desire to nail you, to get justice for the thing you did that was wrong, | ||
| that's actually a good strategy. | ||
| You know, the Gandhian turn the other cheek, Jesus turn the other cheek, | ||
| that's not a good game theory strategy, 'cause that just means you'll be exploited by other people. | ||
| Right, it never works out well for that person, unfortunately. | ||
| No, and it won't work for a whole society. | ||
| Those kinds of societies won't survive, because other groups or clans or whatever will take them over. | ||
| So it actually helps to cultivate a reputation of being a badass. | ||
| You know, you take my stuff, I'm gonna kick your ass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, all right, all right, Shermer, all right, okay. | ||
| I respect you. | ||
| But you're coming to that point using a moral compass, right? | ||
| I mean, you're saying, I'm doing this sort of for myself, but that in itself is sort of for the greater good, right? | ||
| Well, it turns out to be a byproduct, but I think there's evolutionary arguments you can make that that actually really is good for the group. | ||
| Not a group selection argument, just that the more of us individuals that are cooperating within our group, our group will be better off for that. | ||
| The group is not the target of selection, still the individuals. | ||
| But societies are better off. | ||
| And so what I argue in the moral arc is that over the centuries, tweaking social, political, and economic systems this way and this way, we've been kind of Hovering around this idea that there is a better way to live in a utilitarian type of way. | ||
| More of us will be better off and live longer and prosperous and healthy lives if we do this rather than that. | ||
| A democracy versus a dictatorship. | ||
| Relatively free markets of trading and allowing people to do their thing versus a command and control economy like in North Korea. | ||
| Or having a set of rules and a rule of law and a police force is good. | ||
| Good fences make good neighbors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So we've been doing these experiments. | ||
| So that's what I mean. | ||
| It's kind of like a science. | ||
| It's like, OK, let's run the experiment and see how it goes. | ||
| And then we'll tweak the variables in four years, called an election. | ||
| We'll try it again. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's no there there to get there. | ||
| There's no utopia. | ||
| We're just trying to make a little bit of progress. | ||
| So we'll increase taxes there and lower them there. | ||
| We'll change the gun control flaws here, but not there. | ||
| And we'll see. | ||
| Let's just see what happens. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're saying when politicians promise they can fix everything, they're not actually telling the truth. | ||
| I think that's what you're saying. | ||
| It's a shocker, I know. | ||
| What do you make of people that would believe everything that you've said, that live their lives in a secular way, using science and reason and their own personal morality to guide their lives, but at the same time Do take that leap of faith and still believe in some crazy stuff, still believe that maybe there's someone upstairs watching them. | ||
| Because I think that's probably where most people fall, that they do live their lives based in secular ideas. | ||
| But at the same time, if you really sat them down and said, well, you know, because people want to believe at the end that they're going to go and play tennis with God at the end of the day or something, right? | ||
| Will there be competition in heaven? | ||
| This is what I want to know. | ||
| Because if it's too boring, there's nothing to do, there's no challenges. | ||
| Yeah, then it wouldn't be worth it to you. | ||
| No, not to me. | ||
| But what do you make of that type of person? | ||
| It's a super good point because in reality most, say, conservative Christians today are more liberal socially than liberals were in the 50s, say. | ||
| But they don't even know it. | ||
| They're just like, well, I'm doing this because it says so in the Bible, and I'm a Christian, and Jesus, you know, it was like that He said, you know, Jesus should love all the gays and blacks and so on. | ||
| It's like, where does He say that? | ||
| And where are you getting this? | ||
| Well, I know where they're getting it. | ||
| They're getting it from culture that's been shifting for decades. | ||
| From the bottom up, just from everybody changing the way they talk and think about how shows are presented, how scripts are written, novels, books, and so forth. | ||
| All of us have expanded our moral sphere to be more encompassing. | ||
| And so the standouts like the Donald Sterlings of the world who insults African-Americans as the owner of the Clippers. | ||
| His life is just ruined for these idiotic statements. | ||
| But most old guys back in the 50s used to think like him. | ||
| My dad was kind of like that. | ||
| And it's like, Dad, you can't say that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, is that one of the scary things about societies changing too quickly? | ||
| I mean, I know I follow you on Twitter and you do push against some of this regressive left stuff and some of the social justice warrior stuff, because in a way, they're going to come for us too. | ||
| Things will keep changing and then some of the things that you're saying right now that don't sound controversial at all to me, depending on the way we evolve and depending on the way ideas, you know, the way that they move throughout time, someone 20 years from now could look at this and say, ah, you see, Shermer was a real bigot. | ||
| For some reason we can't even think of right? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, of course that we you know, we worry about that or wonder about that You know that we look back on say the debates about interracial marriage. | ||
| It's like what were they thinking? | ||
| Right and and just you know the last year looking back and you know gay marriage. | ||
| What were they thinking? | ||
| Yeah, you know, we know what they're think is so recent and so but now what are we thinking now that in 20 years people go? | ||
| What were? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| I think about that all the time. | ||
| I'm tweeting out all this stuff all the time and 20 years from now someone's going to go, man, that guy was a complete lunatic. | ||
| And they might be saying it now. | ||
| That would be funny. | ||
| Well, we don't know because we're buried in the culture. | ||
| It's just hard to say. | ||
| I will say, you know, just projecting forward, maybe the rights of the unborn, and here I don't mean fetuses, I mean future generations to inhabit an earth that's habitable. | ||
| That is, there's resources available and so on. | ||
| So the environmental movement, I think, is part of that. | ||
| That would be one area. | ||
| Artificial intelligence is maybe another one. | ||
| Is data a person? | ||
| Do they have personhood? | ||
| Those kinds of things I think we can think about, although those are not particularly controversial. | ||
| The social justice warriors, so-called, and regressive left, it's an interesting term that's really caught on. | ||
| That was Majid Nawaz. | ||
| So I think it's very effective. | ||
| That's an example of how far, first of all, how far we've come. | ||
| How much moral progress we've made. | ||
| That the biggest thing on your plate as a college student is to protest Halloween costumes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That means things are pretty dang good. | ||
| So is that the part that we need to focus on more then? | ||
| Because I do think that, you know, we all get in this big worked up frenzy over this stuff and they sent out this letter and, you know, they didn't want them to wear offensive Halloween costumes or something. | ||
| So to that, if you just look at it in that narrow view, it's like, oh shit, free speech is really being attacked. | ||
| But if you look at it, and I think this is what you're saying, if you look at it from the broader spectrum, it's like, look what's left. | ||
| Now we're just fighting over Halloween costumes. | ||
| So in that sense, things really have progressed really well. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Compared to, say, what students were protesting in the 60s and 70s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, again, that's a sign. | ||
| But also, these moral pendulums tend to swing back and forth to one extreme to the other. | ||
| And I think it has gone too far now. | ||
| I mean, you know, it seems like free speech as a moral principle is being trumped by other moral values that some people hold. | ||
| The right to not hear something uncomfortable or offensive or something like that. | ||
| I was arguing this back in the 90s with the Holocaust deniers when I wrote my book on, investigated them when they were kind of big. | ||
| And Canada had anti-Holocaust denial laws. | ||
| It was incorporated under their hate speech laws. | ||
| I remember first reading about this going, hate speech? | ||
| Why is that hate speech? | ||
| I mean, if you're Jewish, I can see, but who's actually being harmed by this? | ||
| These guys, you could just, Just shine a light on them. | ||
| You can see how wacky they are. | ||
| And they'll go nowhere because they don't have anything. | ||
| Why suppress them and lock them up? | ||
| And then I remember when David Irving got arrested in Austria. | ||
| He didn't even say anything. | ||
| He was just going to give a lecture. | ||
| And Hitchens defended him publicly. | ||
| And I thought, that's good. | ||
| In this case, free speech trumps that so-called hate speech. | ||
| Because the problem is who determines what's hateful? | ||
| Sure, and doesn't that hitch defending him, you debating these people and allowing for these terrible ideas, right? | ||
| We all know the Holocaust happened, this is a terrible idea to deny it, but doesn't that show you that the secularists are pretty consistently on the right side of things, that we are the ones that are defending ideas, even when they are scary to us and things that we don't like? | ||
| Most of us. | ||
| Most of us, right? | ||
| But people don't, you know, if you do something that's against religion, generally religious people aren't going to defend you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where secularists will, they'll stand up for the idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Some religions do defend free speech and they're willing to allow their religion to be criticized. | ||
| But for the most part, most of us, you know, sort of circle the wagons and protect our group or whatever. | ||
| And so it takes an extra effort. | ||
| It's sort of that type two cognition. | ||
| Wait a minute, free speech is really important. | ||
| So you have to sort of run through the arguments that John Stuart Mill made in his On Liberty that, okay, what if they're right? | ||
| Okay, they can't be right. | ||
| Yeah, but what if they're right just like a little bit, you know, then you'll learn something. | ||
| And second, Second, you can learn something from just the debate. | ||
| How confident are you in your arguments? | ||
| Can you explain evolution by natural selection in five minutes in a debate? | ||
| Because that's what you've got to do. | ||
| Opening statement, rebuttal, rebuttal, rebuttal, Q&A, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Can you do it? | ||
| And when you actually have to do it, like this in the case of debating creationists, boy, I really sharpened my skills about how do I know evolution happened? | ||
| What are the four best arguments we have? | ||
| And it's actually kind of a good exercise in that sense. | ||
| But mostly it's just let this guy talk and the whole room can see how idiotic these arguments are. | ||
| Just go for it, dude. | ||
| Right, isn't that a little bit like when, uh, who's that creationist that did the... Ken Ham? | ||
| Yeah, when Ken Ham debated Bill Nye, right? | ||
| And it was like, this was actually ridiculous, and all he had to do was just let him hang himself. | ||
| But we're so afraid of doing that, aren't we? | ||
| We're so afraid of just letting someone go and... | ||
| It's counterintuitive. | ||
| It doesn't feel like that's what we should do. | ||
| We should circle the wagons and smack them down. | ||
| But no, it's actually better if you don't. | ||
| If you just provide better arguments and let the world see how bad those arguments are. | ||
| And yes, maybe he'll convince a few people. | ||
| In the long run, truth will win out. | ||
| The bright light of reason will shine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he was just trying to sell tickets to the amusement park or whatever that is. | ||
| Maybe an attention and some fundraising for his ARC park, which I see is going forward today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Boy, I don't know. | ||
| Bill, I know Bill. | ||
| Bill's a good friend and he had some doubts about whether he should do it or not. | ||
| I think in the long run it was a good thing to do. | ||
| He did a good job. | ||
| Because there's a fear of debating these people, because then you could end up debating every crackpot ever, right? | ||
| Because there's always, and we see, this is something I see, you know, every now and again I'll see you argue with someone on Twitter, or some of the other people that I admire arguing with somebody, and it's like, man, how much energy, and I'll do it sometimes too, how much energy should we put in to debating people either that have, you know, just ideas that are terrible, or aren't debating from an honest place, or that you know are gonna twist your words after, and there's a certain opportunity cost with that. | ||
| There is, and so one of the criteria I use is to what extent do people care about the subject? | ||
| Is it an influencing thing? | ||
| Is it being discussed in the political debates currently, or is it in the newspapers? | ||
| So like in the Holocaust deniers back in the 90s, it was kind of a big thing. | ||
| They were on Donahue and Montel Williams, and there were articles written about them in Time and Newsweek and New York Times. | ||
| And the Schindler's List came out, and there was big debates. | ||
| They were challenging it, and there was articles about it. | ||
| So, I thought, you know what? | ||
| It's time for us to engage that. | ||
| What are they claiming? | ||
| What exactly? | ||
| So, they actually gave me this list, 39 arguments that Holocaust historians cannot answer. | ||
| I said, alright, give me the list. | ||
| So, I actually went down and just worked my way through the list. | ||
| And a lot of them were hard to find, actually. | ||
| And a lot of Holocaust historians that I consulted, they did not know the answers to these things. | ||
| And now we know because I and others went out and tracked these things down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Richard Evans did this in Irving's trial. | ||
| David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a denier. | ||
| Now here's an interesting sociological thing because I've always called David Irving a Holocaust denier, but he likes me because we've gone out for beer and dinner before. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I engage him and I talk to him. | ||
| David, what's going on with you? | ||
| What are you working on now? | ||
| And so we have this thing. | ||
| He likes me. | ||
| He doesn't like Lippstadt because she's nasty to him or didn't talk to him. | ||
| So one of the things I like to do as an investigator, I shouldn't call it an experiential journalist because I like that. | ||
| That sounds pretty good. | ||
| Maybe if Sean Penn could do it, maybe I could do it. | ||
| You sort of get out there and you talk to people, and really they do open up if you're nice and respectful to them, friendly. | ||
| So, just tell me about this. | ||
| What is it you think is going on? | ||
| Because I don't really understand the arguments. | ||
| And they'll kind of open up. | ||
| And then if you give them a few beers, they'll start talking about, oh, the Jews, you know, the Jews are doing that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Tell me more. | ||
| Tell me more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So is that how you ended up sort of beating him in the public space? | ||
| That you got to know the guy, you were able to sort of unravel some of the arguments, and I would guess that it's one of those things where you can just get, when you pull out one little pin, the rest of it starts to fall. | ||
| Exactly, right. | ||
| You know, I don't say beat, but you know, just you sort of lay it out there. | ||
| Here's what he said, here's what he did, here's his arguments, and so on, and then just let the arguments Yeah. | ||
| And so, those guys are largely gone now. | ||
| And the creationists, you know, they're still hanging on. | ||
| But the poll numbers are starting to shift. | ||
| And the whole young earth creationism is largely being marginalized. | ||
| You know, the Ben Carsons of the world, you know, he's a Seventh-day Adventist, so they're young earth creationists. | ||
| This is where all this silliness about the pyramids come from. | ||
| It's because he's a Seventh-day Adventist, and it follows from these other beliefs that he holds about Genesis and all that. | ||
| But you can see, he's not going anywhere, and he's just one. | ||
| More popular is either pretty mainstream or really not very religious centrist like Trump. | ||
| You know, I think the power of the moral majority is passed. | ||
| I don't think to get elected you have to be an uber religious person anymore. | ||
| Yeah, you know, so Trump was just at Liberty University and this is a guy who by any estimation that I've ever seen has no real religious Religiousosity to him, that's not even a word. | ||
| But he was up there and he's quoting... Yeah, there was definitely an extra S in there. | ||
| But he's in there, he's at Liberty University, and he's quoting scripture wrongly, apparently. | ||
| He mucked up a couple things. | ||
| But I was thinking, this is really what's wrong with our political system, really, in the most perfect way. | ||
| Because here's a guy who, for whatever... All the reasons that people like him is because he's saying things very clearly, whether it's true or not. | ||
| He's just saying... And here, even he, Who says, I'm beholden to no one, has to pander still to the religious right. | ||
| So we're not fully out of it yet. | ||
| Yeah, not fully out of it, no, for sure. | ||
| But yeah, you have to have a little bit of it, but it's not, that's not what's going to win the election. | ||
| I think it's going to be the centrist votes this time, which is more secular, just more real world problems, you know, that kind of thing. | ||
| Anyway, so, but still there, it's another interesting, you know, it seems to be the Republicans, the right, are the ones identifying You know the problem of terrorism what what's behind it, | ||
| you know certain religious beliefs that are behind it now. | ||
| It's true I know some of the Isis fighters are young men out for | ||
| money and sex and adventure and whatever But but underneath it is you know, that sort of apocalyptic | ||
| in otherworldly utopian society this you know, this kind of really quasi | ||
| religious beliefs that are driving them and And it's the left that doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that. | ||
| They're so afraid. | ||
| Again, political correctness run amok. | ||
| So afraid to use the word. | ||
| Our own president won't use the word, and he's a guy I admire. | ||
| He's obviously very bright and thinks that he's a type 2 thinker all the way. | ||
| Maybe it'd be better if he sometimes used type 1. | ||
| Sure, at least in this instance, because then he would at least say the word. | ||
| But yeah, this is coming out of the left, so I'm a liberal. | ||
| What do I do about this? | ||
| This has been the theme throughout the four or five months that we've been doing this show. | ||
| I understand, I've watched it, and I think you're doing exactly what we have to do, is push back. | ||
| and you just push that pendulum back. | ||
| And if enough of us do that, then it will get knocked back | ||
| and people will stop saying those, they'll start identifying things correctly, I think. | ||
| Yeah, why do you think the left is so hung up on this one issue? | ||
| So that if any time, you know, I was just watching another program | ||
| where after the Cologne sex attacks, right? | ||
| A thousand men and there were rapes and all this terrible stuff | ||
| that immediately the argument became, Well, you know, Christians do bad stuff too. | ||
| And, you know, the West's done this and we've bombed this or that. | ||
| This sort of knee-jerk reaction to make everything, this moral equivalence and sort of make everything about us. | ||
| Had it been a thousand Christians that had done this, they never would have flipped it the other way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| I mean, we just keep talking about it. | ||
| Okay, well, a couple things. | ||
| First of all, why do they do it? | ||
| Well, because, as Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate, the blank slate model that culture determines everything and otherwise people are equal, that's more of a left-wing than right-wing view of human nature. | ||
| Conservative Christians have more of a realistic, what Steve calls a realistic model of human nature, that is, it's both genetics and culture. | ||
| And second, again, this all-inclusiveness, we don't want to offend other people because look what we were doing to blacks in the 50s and 60s and Jews in the 30s and 40s and that was really bad. | ||
| Okay, so that's sort of taking a principle and then running with it. | ||
| Right, no one's denying that. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| And so therefore it would be wrong to stereotype all Muslims. | ||
| But it gets to the point where even if you say, if you preface every sentence with, of course most Muslims are good and nice and moral people that would never do this, but Then you can't even get past that. | ||
| But what? | ||
| But what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now my wife is from Cologne, Germany. | ||
| She's German and she just moved here last year and married me and we live here now. | ||
| But we were going to go to Cologne next month for Carnival and now we're not going because she's worried about... Really? | ||
| And her mother was just attacked about a week ago. | ||
| So this is a week after, two weeks after the New Year's thing. | ||
| And there's a lot of this going on that's not being reported because they're afraid to use the word. Her mom was attacked by an Arab-looking | ||
| Syrian man who mumbled something about Western women and grabbed her breast and really | ||
| offensive bottle of booze. It's a lot of these young men that are drunk and they're sort of | ||
| using this excuse to what extent they're really religious. Who knows? | ||
| Sure, it's a confluence of a zillion things, but that's why we have to talk about it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. So where is that going right now? | ||
| Yeah, so where it's going right now. | ||
| Angela Merkel, who I've admired very much, I think maybe she just went too far. | ||
| That we have to do some screening. | ||
| But the moment you say screening, are you talking about targeting certain people? | ||
| Isn't that stereotyping and doesn't that lead to genocide? | ||
| So you end up down that road. | ||
| Just take a little step, just a tiny bit to find out what's going on here before. | ||
| That's why Trump made that comment and he's called a bigot and a racist. | ||
| But wait, he's just saying maybe we should just figure out what's going on here first. | ||
| Right, it gets twisted into something and I'm not defending what he says at all and that's also why language is so important to this because we've gotten so afraid of saying anything the wrong way or writing anything the wrong way that you'll immediately be labeled a bigot and a racist and the rest of it when all you're saying is We should have some decent screening to figure out who's here. | ||
| And you're also giving me a first-hand example. | ||
| I mean, your wife's mother was attacked. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This isn't made-up stuff. | ||
| No, and this, you know, it's cold. | ||
| She's a 65-year-old woman all bundled up with umbrella and hat and jacket and everything. | ||
| And so it's not like they're out groping young women in bars wearing miniskirts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just, just grab anything that's female. | ||
| And, you know, so who knows what the motivations are. | ||
| You know, some of it, again, is just young men on, you know, just on a rampage. | ||
| But again, I think it's not just random who's doing it. | ||
| And everybody's afraid to say what it is. | ||
| So Merkel, who I think has been a great leader, I think she's just gone too far. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of the situation? | ||
| I wasn't planning on going here, but I'm glad we're taking this road. | ||
| That Germany, a lot of people are saying, and I've had a lot of people email me about this, that they're saying that the reason that they opened the borders the way they did was because there's this incredible guilt because of the Holocaust. | ||
| So they don't want to see people, you know, if they can help, they want to help. | ||
| But now it's gotten out of control, and now what this is going to do is help the far right. | ||
| We're seeing hints of this here with Trump and xenophobia, and we're seeing this all over Europe now. | ||
| So again, it's when the left doesn't deal with things honestly that we allow the right. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| I mean, if the left wants to defend their position, they should do the opposite of what they're doing, because it's the right that are going to sweep in. | ||
| So my wife tells me that the sentiments in Germany about this, and before this, attitudes toward Israel, and the Middle Eastern conflicts is that we just have to | ||
| bite our tongue because what we did was so bad that we just have to always support Israel. And even | ||
| though there's numbers of people and branches in the society that do not support Israel, they | ||
| can't say anything. | ||
| And even though there are debates about Palestinians and who's doing what and who's the real terrorist. | ||
| No one has perfectly clean hands in that conflict. | ||
| But in Germany you can't say this because of the guilt. | ||
| There's a lot of guilt. | ||
| And they've paid reparations to Israel for a long time. | ||
| You know, so Merkel's trying to navigate around is very difficult to do. | ||
| And so in part there's that, but also they're the strongest nation of the EU and she was trying to set a precedence. | ||
| And I see why she was trying to do that, but I just think it's probably gone too far. | ||
| And now there's a lot, my wife tells me, there's a lot of these strong right, you know, Nazi type groups that are now bubbling up saying, see, I told you, I told you. | ||
| Yeah, well actually next week I have Tommy Robinson on, who's the former head of the EDL, who Majid Nawaz, who you mentioned earlier, at one point helped get him out of the EDL because he felt it was too far right and there were some neo-Nazi elements. | ||
| And he had emailed me about coming on the show and I had a real sort of debate within myself whether here's someone who I know a lot of people think he's just a racist, and then I get a lot of people that say, you know, he's talking about things that people don't want to talk about. | ||
| And I felt, well, if I talk to him, are people going to think I'm a racist? | ||
| And then that was why I felt like I had to do the interview. | ||
| And I have to do the interview because I can't be afraid of just the conversation and where that's going to place me. | ||
| But that's where they've got us right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, but they're not. | ||
| They don't have us there. | ||
| We are talking about it and we'll do that. | ||
| And we will push back and that's a good thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, so in Germany and Europe, you know, they've made a major transition from 500 years of very tribal and balkanized, constant in conflict history to a completely different kind of society. | ||
| And so when these tensions have been bubbling up, No, no, we don't want to do that because look what happened. | ||
| This led to all these conflicts and genocides and so on. | ||
| But part of the problem is recognizing that there really are bad people in the world. | ||
| They really do mean harm. | ||
| They really do behead people and they do bad things. | ||
| For whatever reason, they're not all psychopaths. | ||
| A lot of them are just morally motivated. | ||
| As I mentioned, 90% of homicides are moralistic in nature. | ||
| But this is true for genocides and ethnic cleansings and pogroms. | ||
| They're morally motivated. | ||
| They have wrong ideas. | ||
| But could ideas that dangerous ever have gestated without religion? | ||
| Because almost all, if you think, you know, Holocaust, pogroms, what's happening right now in Europe, all of these things, there's a religious underpinning to all of them. | ||
| So could this type of mass stuff ever happen without religion? | ||
| Well, it did in the 70s and 60s, 70s, 80s with Marxist regimes and terrorists. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot of terrorism in the 70s. | ||
| I mean, way more than now. | ||
| CNN just ran that. | ||
| They had those series, the 70s, the 80s, and so on. | ||
| And the one in the 70s, one of the episodes was just an hour long of all the terrorist attacks. | ||
| I lived through it, but I forgot how many there were. | ||
| And, you know, to the point where Monty Python parodied it in The Life of Brian. | ||
| People's Judeo front, the front of people's... | ||
| Where are the people in front of Judea? | ||
| Those idiots over there! | ||
| That's how many there were back then. | ||
| The rates of murders were much higher in bombings in the United States. | ||
| But those were moralistically driven. | ||
| But Marxism is sort of a quasi-religious, so what's behind when we say religion? | ||
| It's this idea of a utopian society. | ||
| There's a place we can get to, either heaven above or heavens on earth. | ||
| We can get there. | ||
| If it weren't for those people that are stopping us, the capitalists, the imperialists, or the Jews, or the Christians, or whoever it is. | ||
| It's engaging the moral module in the brain, whatever that is. | ||
| To be worked up about a cause right so that's it. | ||
| I love that concept that it's You're always fighting the other, whoever the other is, and it can be through the religious prism or the secular prism. | ||
| And it's sort of up to us to figure out which one we're going to go with. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm worried about the EU and Germany because, you know, they've been moving in the right direction of very porous borders. | ||
| You can travel across all the countries. | ||
| There's no border checks. | ||
| And it's just like driving across the United States now. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| And they've become much more economically prosperous because of that. | ||
| And politically, more freedom and more democracies. | ||
| All those things are good. | ||
| But now there's this... I'm fearful there'll be a backlash. | ||
| Close those borders. | ||
| We see it's happening right now, right? | ||
| And then if they abandon the currency, the euro as a currency, that's going to be bad economically. | ||
| Yeah, well let's move off politics for a little bit, get to some of the sort of more out there stuff and fun stuff. | ||
| Because you do talk a lot about conspiracy theories, and I've seen you talk about aliens and JFK assassination and all this stuff. | ||
| It's fun to debunk this stuff, right? | ||
| It's sort of fun to think about them, you know, even 9-11, thinking, you know, at least entertaining the ideas, whatever they may be, that our government did it, or this or that, whatever it is. | ||
| It's sort of fun to always entertain those ideas, but basically you come down on all this stuff that, I think what Carl Sagan would say, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. | ||
| Is that, did I sum up your view on how to deal with this stuff? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| The thing with conspiracy theories that are different than other claims that we deal with at Skeptic is they do happen. | ||
| There are conspiracies. | ||
| Watergate was a conspiracy. | ||
| The assassination of Lincoln was a conspiracy. | ||
| And there's all those stories about the stuff that Kissinger was orchestrating South American dictatorships. | ||
| We like this dictator versus that dictator. | ||
| We're pulling the strings. | ||
| We're sending money, arms for hostages. | ||
| All this stuff was going on. | ||
| Those are conspiracies by definition. | ||
| And so we have to acknowledge that that does happen. | ||
| But of course, to the conspiracy theorists, the fact that that happened over there means that my pet theory must be true. | ||
| Not necessarily, but not all conspiracies. | ||
| So how do we tell the difference? | ||
| What's the criteria? | ||
| Well, there's sort of a conspiracy detection kit. | ||
| Like the baloney detection kit, where the more people that have to be involved, the less likely the theory is going to be true. | ||
| Because people are incompetent, they can't keep their mouth shut. | ||
| We find out about it. | ||
| I remember I was on G. Gordon Liberty's radio show back in the 90s, and he asked me about conspiracies. | ||
| I was like, well, you know more about it than I do! | ||
| You did it! | ||
| You're the Watergate guy! | ||
| I didn't want to say this, but you couldn't even break into a hotel room! | ||
| People have this vision of governments as these super powerful agents that can do anything. | ||
| Mostly they're just like bureaucrats at the DMV. | ||
| That's what you're dealing with. | ||
| Right, so in a way it's the same thing as religion. | ||
| The people that are going down the conspiracy path, they want some easy answer for an extremely complex issue that we really often have no answer for. | ||
| It's like the economy is not this complex system that no one can really understand or predict. | ||
| It's twelve guys living in London, calling the shots at the Illuminati, and they're pulling the strings and making this happen. | ||
| So it is the same thing as religion, because that feels nice. | ||
| If you if you could sort of wrap yourself around that, that that's how the world actually operates, it's sort of the same thing as saying, oh, well, then there's a God and I'm going to believe that because it is like a God or committee of gods or something that's pulling the strings. | ||
| And it grants way more power than anybody actually has, which is what we grant to gods, that they have more power than we have. | ||
| Otherwise they wouldn't be gods. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, so what's the point of that? | ||
| So yeah, we work through those. | ||
| And now politically, since we've talked about left and right, 9-11 is an interesting take because that seems to be more on the left. | ||
| And left and right both have their own hand-picked conspiracies that they prefer. | ||
| But the anti-vaxxers tend to be a little bit of both. | ||
| You get anti-government Right. | ||
| And they think the government is in cahoots with Big Pharma. | ||
| And then the left, well, Big Pharma is making money off of vaccines. | ||
| So you get a little bit of both. | ||
| Right, that's interesting. | ||
| So someone like Bill Maher, I think, is anti-vax for the most part. | ||
| He's firmly on the left, but... Yes, but there it's skepticism of authority. | ||
| Which authority are you skeptical of? | ||
| The government or the corporations? | ||
| And the perception is both have these incredible amounts of power. | ||
| And studies on this show, they really don't have as much power as we think that they do. | ||
| I mean, CEOs come and go, and corporations rise and fall, much more than we think that they do. | ||
| We think of the Microsofts of the world, even Google, Apple, they will fade, they will. | ||
| They're on top now, but this will change, just like IBM, General Motors, whatever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Oh, but I was in Berkeley last week promoting The Skeptic Book, and I did a talk for KPFA Pacifica Radio, which is very far-left progressive. | ||
| So I was at this church, which was kind of wild, with a big cross behind me. | ||
| But there were protestors there. | ||
| I thought, protestors? | ||
| Oh my God, what is this about? | ||
| You know, and they're handing out literature. | ||
| You know, the Engineers and Architects for 9-11 Truth, and Schirmer vs. Reality, Building 7 could not have collided. | ||
| You know, and I'm like, whoa! | ||
| Oh, I saw your tweets, honey, about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so this is that the government is, you know, pulling the strings and doing these things because of oil and the war. | ||
| So it's after the fact reasoning. | ||
| It's the hindsight bias. | ||
| So we went to war. | ||
| It was a big, bad idea, but we did it for oil. | ||
| Therefore, we must have triggered the war in the first place. | ||
| Don't conservative and Republican administrations do those sorts of things? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So do Democratic. | ||
| Roosevelt could not get America into the war to help Churchill, who he wanted to help, because of the American firsters. | ||
| were very powerful in the late thirties and they could all see the Nazis rising and Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to do something about it and uh... but uh... Charles Lindbergh and the American Firsters were very powerful. | ||
| Pearl Harbor and the story were going to war. | ||
| So isn't that an example of using an event that you didn't orchestrate to do something politically you want to do? | ||
| But it sounds like a nice conspiracy theory that they knew it was going to happen and they allowed it to happen. | ||
| So there was two conspiracies about that and same 9-11. | ||
| Either they did it or they knew it would happen and allowed it to happen in order to get this political motive. | ||
| Neither of them are true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the reason we know this is because the evidence that's used in favor of the conspiracy is hindsight biases. | ||
| Look at this memo here. | ||
| The famous August 9th memo from Condoleezza Rice, you know, Osama bin Laden will attack on U.S. | ||
| soil. | ||
| Wow, how come Bush didn't do something about that? | ||
| Because there is 10,000 pieces of info like that every week, and then you're sorting through it and no one's talking to each other. | ||
| It's just chaos. | ||
| So are you ever able to debunk a conspiracy theory to a point where the theorists themselves will concede it? | ||
| Because that's sort of the fun in it. | ||
| There's no end, right? | ||
| So even if you lay down something that is just ironclad, Still, they're going to find some way to get around that. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| I mean, how often do you win in that, you know, win? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To the people that I'm debating or talking to, probably never. | ||
| Probably never. | ||
| But we're after is, again, the undecided voters. | ||
| The people that are like, yeah, what's the story with that? | ||
| I heard something about that memo. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| And then they, okay, forget it. | ||
| Never mind. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nothing to that. | ||
| And you try to influence them by just some basic questions. | ||
| Like I rifled through all the other things that Islamic terrorists have done. | ||
| London and Madrid and Boston and African countries and so on and so on. | ||
| Are they also part of this vast right-wing conspiracy? | ||
| No, no, no, of course not. | ||
| But that particular one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is a little bit like, okay, we know those crop circles were faked, but the ones over here we don't have videos of, those are the real ones. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, and there also seems to be a need to explain things that can't easily be explained. | ||
| So even going back to the Cologne thing, I saw that day a fairly well-known feminist saying this was probably the work of anti-immigration people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That allowed this to happen because she didn't want to really deal with the world as it was and deal with the difficult questions related to immigration and race and religion and all of that stuff. | ||
| So instead you kind of use it for your own purposes and then you just open up another conspiracy theory and then that gets retweeted enough and then you've opened up a whole other... In that case it's okay to just call it bullshit. | ||
| Well that's what I did. | ||
| This is a bridge too far. | ||
| Let's do a little more on politics though because you consider yourself a libertarian, correct? | ||
| Sort of, yes. | ||
| I'm more of an issues guy, but I've leaned libertarian most of my life since college. | ||
| But I've changed my mind on certain issues that libertarians are not too happy about. | ||
| And the reason I avoid using the term so much now is because It pigeonholes you into a category, and then it makes it more like a religion. | ||
| Like, okay, so libertarians, so you can't believe in any gun controls, right? | ||
| It's like, well, no, actually, I think maybe background checks are a good idea, and, you know, magazine clips should be a certain, you know, just a few things, you know. | ||
| It's like, you've abandoned us! | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like, what are we, a tribe? | ||
| Right, it's like a rhino. | ||
| You're a Republican, name only, you're a liberal, you're a lino or something. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, right. | ||
| These are the points you have to hold to, all of them, or else you're not in our tribe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so, well, maybe I don't want to be in the tribe, maybe I just want to look at issues in it. | ||
| What I like about the Libertarians is I don't like either the far right or far left, and so it sort of pushes toward more of the middle, I guess. | ||
| The problem with the spectrum is that it's not really a spectrum like that. | ||
| There's other places you could be, more of a diamond shape. | ||
| But nevertheless, that and things like climate change. | ||
| It's like we're supposed to be against believing in climate change because we're pro-capitalists. | ||
| It's like, wait, either it's getting warmer or it's not. | ||
| This is just an empirical question. | ||
| It has nothing to do with politics. | ||
| Yeah, does that show you, that's a good example of how politics and religion and just rationality | ||
| It all gets mucked up. | ||
| So I hear you because a lot of people, you know, I have always considered myself a liberal. | ||
| And now I see, I get emails and tweets every day, people going, ah, Dave's on his way to becoming a libertarian because I will always stand up for liberty. | ||
| And I believe that the individual person ultimately, I think you could, you know, for gay marriage, for example, while I can defend it from a liberal point of view, because I think people should be allowed to marry who they want. | ||
| It's also very easily defended by a libertarian point of view, right? | ||
| Or medical marijuana or things like that. | ||
| So that's a place where I like that I think classic liberals and libertarians can sort of come together. | ||
| And I do think that that concept is sort of where politics should go in general. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, Dr. King made the point about gay marriage back when, you know, people say, oh, you shouldn't get involved in that back in the 60s. | ||
| And, uh, you know, and he said, no, our freedom is wrapped up in their freedom. | ||
| You know, if you can suppress somebody because of this particular way that they are, then you can suppress them for other category. | ||
| We want just freedom across the board. | ||
| And that's right. | ||
| That's the principle. | ||
| Yeah, so is that idea, though, really what's so dangerous about identity politics? | ||
| Because it's not what Dr. King said, that we have to protect everybody else. | ||
| It's actually identity politics, like we gotta protect ourselves, and then, you know, what happens to everyone else is sort of... | ||
| Secondary. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's just tribalism. | ||
| It's just, you know, this is our tribe. | ||
| These are what the things we believe. | ||
| Even like the humanism, when I got involved in the whole skeptics movement in the late 80s, early 90s, I thought, well, I'm a humanist. | ||
| And then I, you know, I started reading the humanist magazines and going to their conferences. | ||
| But I could clearly see they had a list of talking points that were just, just clearly right down the straight political left. | ||
| It's like, well, what about these things over here? | ||
| You know, all those evil Republicans, evil conservatives, like, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| I thought you're a humanist. | ||
| Just science reason. | ||
| Stay out of politics. | ||
| But again, we're just, we're political animals. | ||
| You know, we just want to be tribal. | ||
| And so, you know, libertarians, you know, it's like herding cats. | ||
| You know, we're never going to be a big party, so I'm not even sure it's a worthwhile label. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd love to figure out a way to sort of get those principles out there more. | ||
| Even though, as I just said, I don't need the label for myself, but I think you can make a lot of strong moral arguments not using religion through the libertarian lens. | ||
| Language matters, so maybe we're in favor of liberty and freedom. | ||
| Aren't you in favor of liberty and freedom? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That sounds good. | ||
| I've been trying a new one. | ||
| Instead of gun control, gun safety. | ||
| I believe in gun safety. | ||
| I think people should be trained if they have a gun. | ||
| I think they should keep their gun locked up safely. | ||
| Don't you agree? | ||
| You know, anyone in the NRA should go, well, yes, of course, that's what our organization is. | ||
| Gun safety. | ||
| That's why they were founded. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But control makes it sound like you're trying to control my freedom. | ||
| You're trying to control my individuality. | ||
| And that feels wrong. | ||
| You know, so the language does matter. | ||
| I think how we use these things. | ||
| So the gun argument's kind of interesting because I think there is a certain element of conspiracy theory with the people, the people that are totally pro-gun to the point that you should be allowed to have whatever it is you want and that one day you're going to have to rise up and fight the government and all that stuff. | ||
| And I understand, you know, I've said on the show many times, like, I get it, we left England, you know, because we didn't want to live under a king and a tyrannical government and no taxation without a resident agent and all that stuff. | ||
| But there's an element of conspiracy to that, that the government is coming to get these people, right? | ||
| So the more that the government tries to get their guns, the more they want their guns, right? | ||
| So doesn't that become this endless cycle? | ||
| So how do we break that? | ||
| Obama has sold more guns than any other president. | ||
| I mean, they say that constantly, right? | ||
| So how do we break that cycle? | ||
| Well, I think we need to get to organizations like the NRA and say, you've gone down the wrong path. | ||
| You really should be in favor of safety, and these are the kinds of things we need to have. | ||
| Background checks. | ||
| I mean, just change the conversation. | ||
| So you're in favor of a terrorist getting guns for free and killing people in America? | ||
| You think that should be? | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| They should be. | ||
| Well, how can you tell if they're a terrorist or not? | ||
| I mean, we just have to have background checks for everybody. | ||
| They're not going to tell you at the border. | ||
| Yeah, I'm coming here to kill Americans. | ||
| So, you know, you need the general principles there. | ||
| And what about, you know, let anybody fly an airplane? | ||
| Well, no, they should be licensed. | ||
| Of course they should be licensed. | ||
| So, I try to use those arguments and also take the approach like I do with Christians. | ||
| You know, I used to be one. | ||
| I used to be a Christian. | ||
| You were a Christian? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What happened? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So then at least they're listening. | ||
| I used to be against all gun control. | ||
| I had guns, I grew up with guns. | ||
| I had a handgun in my home for 20 years. | ||
| But you know, I changed my mind. | ||
| You change your mind? | ||
| Yeah, I started reading, thinking about it, looking at these studies and so on. | ||
| It sort of opened the door to a conversation. | ||
| But guns are almost talismanic now. | ||
| They're almost like religious icons representing freedom and liberty and God and Jesus and I don't know. | ||
| It's all wrapped up in a package now that people just lose their minds when you talk about it. | ||
| So as long as we're talking guns, let's knock out a couple other just hot-button political things and see if we can figure out the moral argument for them before we wrap up. | ||
| So something like abortion, which as a general rule I'm for the woman being able to make decisions about her body, but at the same point I would understand that having an abortion at eight months Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm pro-choice. | ||
| or even six months, in my opinion, you're definitely destroying a human life. | ||
| Now, if you're, people don't wanna have that conversation. | ||
| People are afraid to have that conversation. | ||
| So what moral argument can you make that is for, I assume, I'm guessing you're for abortion. | ||
| I'm pro-choice. | ||
| So you are pro-choice. | ||
| So what's-- | ||
| I'm not necessarily for abortion. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so good use of, that's why language matters. | ||
| But what moral argument can you make that's for abortion that also understands that at some point | ||
| before that thing leaves the woman's body, it is a life at the same point. | ||
| Well, I think the law has tracked this fairly closely to our intuitions that a third trimester abortion is wrong. | ||
| The gray area in the second trimester No, Gary, in the first trimester, kind of tracking our sense about whether it's an individual or not. | ||
| Is it a person that's thinking, cognizant, can feel and suffer? | ||
| And so there, I think you can make the case, I try to in the moral arc, that the freedom of adult women to have control and choice over their own bodies slightly trumps the rights or whatever of the fetus, just barely. | ||
| I'm not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice, and it would be better if the numbers got down. | ||
| But on that, if it's our goal to decrease the number of abortions, the best thing you can do is get women educated, prosperous, and access to birth control, and the numbers just go down. | ||
| Right, and that's where we really fail as a society, right? | ||
| Because the same people that don't want abortions also cut sex education, and then it's like, you know, and then they cut social services so people feel like if they're gonna have a kid and not have money for it, well they don't want that kid. | ||
| So it's like, again, it's another one of these never-ending cycles. | ||
| Then the other argument I make in the moral arc is a historical one, that historically men have always lorded it over women, particularly about sex and paternity and so on. | ||
| And if you just look at the history of marriage and the history of men and women's relationships for thousands of years, it's always men trying to control women. | ||
| And there's good evolutionary reasons for this. | ||
| Pinker argues about this in The Blank Slate. | ||
| A whole chapter on sex and all that stuff. | ||
| Men are obsessed with controlling women's sexuality. | ||
| And this is one of the big things that have helped the women's movement is to break those chains and give women the freedom. | ||
| So that's my final argument, is that in addition to the rights of the fetus and so on and all those, but just in the long run it's better to give women more freedom than less and to keep men out of that area of control. | ||
| Yeah, so that sounds like it would line up with some libertarian values, because you're going to the liberty of the woman. | ||
| Most libertarians are pro-choice, for sure. | ||
| There's a few, like Ron Paul, who sort of considers himself a libertarian, but he's Christian. | ||
| So there you see that interesting conflict. | ||
| He was also a gynecologist, right? | ||
| He is a gynecologist, so that's a lot. | ||
| He must have just been like... | ||
| Again, libertarians are all over the board. | ||
| There's plenty of atheist libertarians, but there's plenty of believers who are just in the middle. | ||
| They're not religious at all. | ||
| And they're also very much split on foreign policy. | ||
| Should we be isolationists or do we need to go help people that need help? | ||
| I get those arguments. | ||
| But on the other hand, don't we have a moral obligation to help people whose own freedoms and liberties are being oppressed by tyrannical dictators? | ||
| Yes we do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is what that split in the left that we were talking about earlier is really hugely about. | ||
| What can we do and are we imposing our values and all that? | ||
| But let's just do one more and then we got to wrap up. | ||
| So I want to talk about a moral argument you can make on the economic level, I think is really interesting. | ||
| You know, when you hear people talking about, well, Bernie wants to tax everybody at 90%. | ||
| We know it's not 90%. | ||
| It's a progressive tax. | ||
| So it's not, you know, without getting into too much into the numbers there, but it's not really taxing you at 90%. | ||
| It progressively increases versus a flat tax. | ||
| Can you make a moral argument for economics that makes sense? | ||
| I'm not sure absolutely across the board, but the idea of running different experiments | ||
| where say different states in the 50 states have different tax systems, | ||
| and you can kind of look at the outcome of what happens socially in that, | ||
| and economically in that particular state. | ||
| You know, does it become more or less prosperous with progressive tax versus a flat tax? | ||
| I would actually like to see some states just do a straight flat tax and just see what happens. | ||
| Or maybe try it for a while. | ||
| You know, maybe we should abolish the IRS, do a straight 16 and a half percent, whatever it was. | ||
| I think Cruz wants that, right? | ||
| So just see what happens. | ||
| Run the experiment. | ||
| We can always go back. | ||
| I'm in favor of just trying different things. | ||
| On a lot of those things, I'm not sure that there's an absolute single answer. | ||
| Here I like Sam's metaphor of the multiple peaks on the moral landscape. | ||
| So how do we decide which peak is right? | ||
| There's no right peak that's right for you. | ||
| So this is kind of the libertarian argument. | ||
| You want to paint your house red with a purple door? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But in our neighborhood, we don't like the houses that look like that. | ||
| They all look the same. | ||
| That's what we like in this neighborhood. | ||
| But that neighborhood over there, make it Topanga, where everybody has these wild hippie homes. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| So you have different communities that live different ways. | ||
| I don't like the argument, if you don't like America then leave, go to Mexico. | ||
| Come on, my friends are here, my family's here, my kids are here. | ||
| Let's see if we can do local politics and just run different experiments. | ||
| Yeah, and often if you're complaining about it the most it means you care the most. | ||
| Yes, well hopefully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well listen, I could have done this for another three hours, so you're definitely gonna have to come back because I barely got to any of the stuff on my notecard, so I thank you. | ||
| And I want to thank Michael Shermer for joining me, and you can check out his work at skeptic.com and at michaelshermer.com. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| All right, there you go. | ||
| We'll do it again next week. |
Export Selection