Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay detail their "Grievance Studies" project, exposing academia's postmodern orthodoxy through twenty hoax papers, including a rewritten Mein Kampf chapter accepted by a feminist journal. They argue this "secular religion" of idea laundering fuels polarization, where moderates exhaust themselves defending against existential threats from both extremes. While Lindsay attributes extremism to a psychological need for control amidst institutional deconstruction, Boghossian urges continued polite engagement as society attempts to restore shared meaning and societal stability after years of silence. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, then, with that spirit, I'm going to ask you the first question.
For people who have no idea what the original Sokol hoax is, because we're obviously going to spend a lot of time talking about what you guys have done in the last year, what was the original Sokol hoax?
When people say, oh, they did a Sokol hoax, what is that?
So Alan Sokal is a physicist at NYU, and in the 90s, 95, 96, he was looking at this postmodern cultural criticism, and he was reading what they're doing, and they're using math words, they're using physics ideas and terms, and they're just...
Making up stuff, you know, like the some theorem about any some theorem about equality or inequalities in mathematics and they'll say oh well this obviously means that there's inequalities and you know run with the the pun on inequality and say some social stuff about it and he started reading some of the stuff that they were publishing he thought there's no what not only are they abusing science there's no way they even understand what they're saying and he wanted to check that out so he wrote this paper transgressing the boundaries toward something what is it a A transformative hermeneutic of quantum gravity.
To put it more simply, he wanted to argue that quantum gravity is a social construct, of course.
And so he did this thing and he wrote this complete nonsense paper, what they call a pastiche, where he just took quotes from the famous postmodernists and filled them with nonsense and used lots of mathematical and physical scientific words and misused them to say goofy things.
And he sent it to a preeminent social commentary, postmodern social commentary journal at Duke University.
And then the same day they published it, he came out and said, ah, you know, this was a fake.
He published an expose article about it and said, this is why I did it.
Ended up writing a New York Times bestselling book called Fashionable Nonsense, talking about how these guys use these fashionable terms and just say the right political things.
It's all nonsense.
It doesn't really mean anything.
And so that was sort of the state of, you know, what was going on in postmodern cultural theory in the 1990s, and he struck a big blow against it.
Big controversy, New York Times, you know, front page, story, all over the world, people dumping on him, and some people supporting him, some people dumping on him.
So that was the original hoax and he was trying to show that, you know, they were abusing scientific terminology, taking it out of the scientific context and using it to make political points for, of course, academic leftist kind of fashionable points of view.
Right, so this is a great precursor to everything that you guys have done, because it's so consistent with the conversations that we've been having for years, and so many of the conversations I'm having on the show, that this postmodern leftist orthodoxy, it's actually nonsense.
We did, and the first time we wrote a paper The conceptual penis is a social construct, and we argue that, among other things, penises are responsible for climate change.
So, the most famous of the papers, as far as people having heard about it, was one that Peter wrote the first draft of, and that was the dog humping paper, as Will referred to it.
But we all, we gave them all nicknames, or code names, or whatever, throughout.
So the really, the nitty gritty part like human performativity and human reactions to
queer performativity and rape culture in urban dog parks or whatever, it's all just kind
of scholarly mishmash.
It's hard to keep up with, but that paper is sort of the greatest hit because not only was it accepted for publication, not only was it published, but the journal deemed that it was one of the best papers in feminist geography and gave it special recognition, was going to make a big deal of it.
The original point of that paper was to argue that rape culture is a big problem.
And the best way that we could intervene upon that would be to train men the way we train dogs.
And so that was the original concept.
And the idea was we're going to start with our conclusion and try to get there.
How do we get to train men like we train dogs?
And so I told Pete, because he takes his dogs to the dog park every day, I said, Pete, use your experience from the dog park.
Maybe we get a dog training manual and try to figure it out from there.
And so he goes off.
The dog training manual thing just wasn't working so he just starts writing his experience, not his experience, just absurd made-up experience at the dog park about he sits at the dog park four or five hours a day but never in heavy rain and observes dogs and their their humping behavior and their fight.
Yeah, that was by far the most difficult of the papers.
Absolutely.
Incredible, I guess, is fair, because it was really hard.
We had proper internal meltdowns trying to figure out how to make this work.
We took a chapter of Mein Kampf, Hitler's auto-ethnography.
Manifesto.
Yes, Manifesto.
It's an auto-ethnography for the first half.
And so we were flipping through it trying to, we thought, the original thought behind that really was, I think Helen suggested it, we should take some awful old thing, it wasn't specified that it would be Mein Kampf yet, like a theologian just railing on something or whatever, some famous old tract that's just gross, and then rewrite it as postmodern activist, progressive activism or whatever.
And so it naturally led very quickly to Mein Kampf.
That's the example.
So I'm reading through Mein Kampf, and then chapter 11 is the big home run chapter.
It's like, that's, I think the, you know, something railing on the Jews shows up 400 times in chapter 11 alone.
And I was like, well, that's too extreme.
Can't actually use that one.
Flip to chapter 12.
This is where Hitler makes his call for how are we going to organize the Nazi party and what sacrifices are necessary?
And I'm reading through this.
I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this is it.
Yeah, so I copy and pasted that straight out of off the internet onto a word document and I went through and everywhere It said our movement the party whatever took that out stuck in intersectional feminism and then I started making the sentences make sense around that and then We went through and changed all the wording just a little so it get past plagiarism Yeah, and that gave us this kind of unreadable document that was just this transliteration of Hitler's chapter 12 about how to be Nazis and then I mean, it's incredible.
Then we just added in theory.
That's absolutely incredible.
Yeah, so Helen went through primarily and was like, "Oh wow, this reminds me," she was
reading a lot about choice feminism, which is that if a woman makes her own choices,
that's feminist, which seems like a pretty reasonable approach to feminism if you want
to go with one.
And so Helen was looking at how they were criticizing choice feminism and thought that
might be a good way to go with this.
So she's like, "Wow, this looks like this one paper, this looks like another one."
This will fit here.
And then I went through some of the intersectional, you know, critical race feminism scholarship, the black feminism scholarship.
It's like, oh, wow, this sounds like that.
This sounds like that.
And we just started weaving in theory in between pieces of Hitler while we tried to maintain the tone and flavor that Hitler was putting out.
So Hitler lays out a 14 point plan to design the Nazi party.
And we condensed it down to eight.
Reordered them so that they kind of made sense and some kind of a theoretical structure and we sent it off to feminist theory a journal And we thought, there's no way.
We just wanted to see what would happen.
We had no thinking that this would possibly get in.
And Feminist Theory peer-reviewed it.
They rejected it, but they peer-reviewed it.
And then all of a sudden, that was right when we went to Portland in February last year, and it was like, this is a big deal that they took it to peer-review, because we're going to get comments.
So the goal of that paper became, get reviewer comments on the section of Mein Kampf.
See what they say about it when they review it, still assuming they reject it.
We took those comments that feminist theory gave us, saying, oh, it's too liberal.
You're trying to universalize feminism, and that means one woman can speak for another woman.
And so we did that and we sent it in back to 'em and they accepted it.
And it was like probably days away from actually being published
when the Wall Street Journal broke their story.
But they accepted this rewritten chapter of Mein Kampf that stayed true.
And the key to that, what really happened with that is that Hitler was pushing the politics of grievance.
Hitler grew to power because he was pushing politics of grievance.
Germany got screwed.
We're gonna rise back up to a great Germany.
Blah blah blah.
Grievance, grievance, grievance, grievance.
Well, we called our stuff that we were targeting grievance studies because they study social grievances through not German identity or national identity, but through Personal identity, race, gender, sexuality, and so on.
And so the politics of grievance were very appealing in a feminist social work journal.
That grievance can go into social work and inform social workers on how to make feminism more solidified to improve social work outcomes.
You called me that day and you were like, am I crazy?
Am I going crazy?
And I was like, probably.
Carry on Pete.
Yeah, please go on.
And so he said, he said, you know, I've been looking at, to give a little more context, actually, we were, before I get to that, we were in, we were in looking at social media and a lot of the people that are trying to have, mostly on the left,
are trying to, you know, centrist liberals are trying to have honest conversations
about issues about race, sexuality, and so on, and what happens?
Boom, racist, sexist.
Sam Harris is getting-- - Nazi.
Blasted for being a sexist over some comment he made.
What I mean is that certainly there are structural forces that have For decades, or centuries possibly, at least in the United States, disenfranchised certain individuals.
Going way back, we have slavery.
We come out of slavery, and then there was segregation, and there were Jim Crow laws, and we come out of that.
And there was systematically screwing over the housing markets in certain cities.
Chicago was particularly bad for that.
So there was this kind of ghettoization of it.
All kinds of stuff like that have created a... I think that these scholars are correct to say that there's something of an unlevel playing field going on.
You know, they do these studies where they put out things and they put a white sounding name or a black sounding name and then it doesn't come out clean.
And whether it comes down, I don't know whether there are issues say within the police or whatever, that maybe there are lots of racist cops and maybe there aren't, I don't know.
But whether it's codified or not, I don't think that that problem, where it's not codified anymore.
Well, when you say racism, but you mean structural racism, you're cheating.
You're saying one word that means something to almost everybody, but you mean something really narrow and specific by it.
We see this with, you know, racism.
We saw it with sexism.
See it with diversity.
You see it with inclusion.
You see it with equity.
You see word after word after word.
And this is how we traced back to the literature.
It's like, where are these kind of oddball definitions coming from?
Oh, at the time we thought sociology.
And so this is where Pete calls me one day.
We'd started looking at this literature and Pete calls me.
He's like, am I crazy?
Am I losing it?
I look at this scholarship, and I was just talking to somebody about it, and they didn't get it, so help me out here.
I look at this scholarship, and it's like this gender studies scholarship plays the exact same role for gender scholars that the Bible plays for Christians, that the Koran plays for Muslims.
Is that what's going on here?
And I had just written this book, or was in the process, I don't remember exactly the date, I'd written this book trying to look at the psychological motivations behind belief in God and what people mean by that.
And I was like, actually, I think you are exactly on it, you know, because The idea of God represents things like morality and purpose and community and various things to different people.
And here you have religions all have scriptures or nearly all have scriptures.
I think you actually do have the same thing here.
You have this special revelation going on.
Where people are able to put down their opinions and somehow it gets legitimized through a moral process.
In religion, it's, you know, holiness.
You're holy enough, you put down your opinion, you're Augustine, you put down your confessions and now it becomes sacred writ.
And in this case, it's through this kind of weakness in the progressive moral architecture
that allows for people never want to be even, not just do they not want to be racist, they
don't want to be considered racist, they don't want to be accidentally secret considered
racist, they don't want to be complicit in racism.
There's in this whole thing to where this is such a huge taboo, they're so afraid to
become racist, that they've let this stuff pass to where people can write theoretical
prejudices and opinions in as if they are scholarship, and then it gets validated and
It's a secular religion and we've been talking about that for years and then all of a sudden all, you know, I see Andrew Sullivan, I see McWhorter, I see all these people talking about it.
I'm not saying, you know, we're first or anything, the hipsters of the secular Well, you were the first person that I heard talk about it in that kind of way.
Yeah, because it was so obvious, because we came out from this, from the New Atheism, and the parallels were striking, and just on that, I think Mike Nayna has a video on that, that we tweeted, in which you can see, you can literally see the canoe story that happened to Brett and Heather.
Yeah, it's impossible to watch this little documentary he's done on Evergreen just recently.
So for your viewers that don't know, Mike Nayna is actually a documentary filmmaker who came in.
He was looking at the same kinds of problems going on in Australia, getting curious about it, that ended up by chance.
leading to us crossing paths we told him about what we were doing last fall 2017 and he was like okay I'll document it as long as I'm allowed to tell the truth about everything we're like yeah that's what we want to do anyway so we have a documentary filmmaker that's been following us around tracking what we've been doing and because the problem's so complicated he slowly you know the Helen and Peter and I get all this like we did this project and we wrote these papers we've actually kind of had the secret secret fourth member who is this filmmaker who is he learned more and more about it became kind of an integral contributor to our thing thinking and our ideas and how to communicate it.
And so he's now working on a documentary, a feature-length documentary about us and
the work we did.
But he also is running a YouTube channel with shorts about either us, what we're doing,
and he just released this hour, almost hour-long documentary, first half of a longer piece
on Evergreen that's like Netflix quality.
I mean, it's for real.
You really do want to check it out on his YouTube channel.
And it is impossible, I would say, to watch that and not see, holy crap, this is a religion
and this is how it operates.
And this isn't just a religion, this is a hardcore one.
I think that their canons, the way they come to knowledge, the method that they rely on is, at the very least, a reasonable person or, barring Walter Kaufman's definition, every reasonable person would have to look at that and say, wait a second.
They've generated these self-contained ecosystems that anyone looking at it from the outside would realize.
But I do think that that One of the things this project showed was that those canons are now delegitimized.
There's no reason a serious person would take a look at that and say, you know, because you had asked before your initial question, like, what are the papers?
What are the journals?
You know, we published a piece in Hypatia in which that piece said There was the jokes on you, and it was criticizing us for the conceptual penis, but it was very meta-paper because the joke was actually on them for publishing the paper.
So I think that a reasonable person who would look at this would say, wow, there's something going on here.
But look at the reaction to this.
It's interesting.
Yes, I wrote a manual for creating atheists, and what's the next?
What would a reasonable person say?
A reasonable person would say, wow, I know that sexism is wrong, I know that racism is wrong, I know that these forms of discrimination are wrong, and we want to study them right, and these folks pointed out a very serious flaw in the literature, and I want to maintain my intellectual and scholarly integrity, and we're going to try to fix those problems.
But they have not done that.
What they have done instead is exactly what he predicted, and what we wrote about in the Ariel piece, which was instead of taking a look at how they produce knowledge, they now scrutinize the authors who submit So they Google, so they make sure that the authors are legit.
So instead of being a sincere inquirer, again, they think they already have truth, exactly like a fundamentalist.
I mean, I would say this is where they could have taken a look in the mirror after Trump got elected.
They could have taken a look in the mirror after saying everyone's a Nazi, and then we can punch Nazis, and the list goes on and on, of when there could have been a moment of reflection.
We've never seen it.
So I know when we spoke a few days before the Wall Street Journal piece went up, and we were talking about, well, maybe there's a chance this will wake some of them up.
And I said to you, I was like, no, of course not.
I mean, there's nothing that can be done.
So then in the face of that, if you agree with the premise, then what can be done?
Other than you can keep doing this and we can keep talking about it, we can keep waking other people up.
But for the people that are in that cult, which I actually think is an appropriate name for it, then what do you do?
You have to do what you always have to do, which is you have to find ways, which means you have to find legitimate ways and effective ways and not authoritarian ways to curtail their influence.
If they are unwilling to wake up or change their mind or reconsider Then that's fine.
Within a liberal society, everybody's allowed to follow their conscience.
That's the principle of freedom of religion.
Because you're allowed to worship as you will.
So if you want to worship the woke god of social justice, Whatever.
Well sure, you don't see it from hardcore religionists either.
They wouldn't afford the freedom if they got the power either.
Theocrats are just as scary.
So if you want to curtail their power, the answer is always in secularism, and it does have to come from other people.
So there are different audiences here, right?
So there's everyday people, and should they you know really think twice before they
enroll, if it's a kid going to college, before they enroll in a gender studies
program.
Yeah, probably. Should somebody be stepping up in the advisory
sector of the academy and saying, "I think you have a lot of talent, say it's a young black
student."
You have a lot of talent.
You could go to graduate school.
You could study.
And instead of saying, there's this opportunity for you to study this niche thing about lived black experience and writing an autoethnography and get your guaranteed PhD because nobody's allowed to say you're wrong.
Maybe you could go into some field.
It doesn't have to be, you know, everybody always goes to STEM.
Maybe it's engineering or whatever.
It doesn't have to be that.
It could be anything.
Be a historian.
Be an economist.
Be a political scientist.
Go in and study something more rigorous that enhances your critical thinking and your dialectic process.
Administrators, though... But is the flaw of that, although I think you're right at some level, is the flaw there that because they're viewing this as a religion, there's almost no way Yeah, I think ultimately, the battleground is to get people to realize that that's unacceptable.
of how the world works.
Like they really want to erase everything about the past.
You thought you were into something and it's the wrong thing.
And so that feeling you get though, when you hear the religious thing that you didn't know was religious and it just hooked you all of a sudden into religion, that's the reaction that people should have.
They hear this woke stuff.
Check your privilege.
I know what this is.
I'm not going along with that.
and if they want to point to something they want to point to some hard evidence
So, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker, and Dennett, and all these guys, okay.
That's not to be surprised, because these guys have been talking about these things.
Did you get any support, though, out of, did you get anything out of, say, more lefty professors that you didn't really think were gonna... In whispers.
And this is, again, the consistent story with all this.
Lots of it.
I find when I get emails from that type of person that says, oh Dave, you know, you're doing the right thing here and you're calling out the nonsense of the left and I just can't do it because I'm at a university or I have a job.
Like, I actually am starting to hate those people.
I mean that sort of, slightly sarcastically, it's not the right word.
But I'm really, I've had it with those people.
I'm not a superhero, I'm just doing what I think is right.
What is your feeling about that set of people at the university?
We need to be more... I don't mean this to sound any other way, but we need to be more compassionate for them.
Some people, they don't have the... They're just cowards, and it's not their fault.
They just live in a state of timidity or fear, and they don't want to lose their job, or maybe they prioritize employment and their families and whatever it is over the truth, and that's...
Yeah, if you're in a system where the system itself does not take kindly to this and I think academics have a lot of sunk cost going on into their careers.
You don't have a lot of great options if you bail from the Academy.
You've spent decades getting where you are.
It had to be a passion to get there.
So it's like I want to say, I share with you by the way, one of the first people who talked to me in Whispers, after we came public, was a friend of mine with multiple PhDs, big time academic guy, and he came up and he was so excited, and he was even talking low even though we were alone.
And yeah, it was like, you know, whispering almost to me, literally, even though we were just the two of us, and he said, you know, I'm so thrilled with what you did, it's needed to happen, blah blah blah, the Academy needs to change, it needs to reform, please don't tell anybody I said this.
And my reaction, and I'm a very, very calm, patient person for people who don't know me.
I don't think I get mad maybe once a year, if that, over anything.
Compassion is necessary for the silent Professor's but what we need also is for those who are courageous enough to open their mouths, right?
but more people who say Look at the old communist thing where the communist regime has fallen but everybody's kind of going along with it and Everybody knows if they're the first person to step out that they're gonna get shot or dragged off or whatever and it's gonna silence Everybody else but if everybody at once in the town or the city or whatever all said, you know communism's bullshit They couldn't do anything about it.
Well, that's also the part of it is that at the James Damore event, when it was just James Damore and myself as hosts at Portland State University, we emailed the Women's Studies Department with James Damore and myself and we said, come on stage and let's have a, it wasn't a debate, a spirited conversation.
Got two rejections and nothing else.
Two days later, February 19th, James Lindsay, Helen Plunkett and myself, the first thing I said at the James Damore event, please, women's, anyone with a PhD, because you don't want to punch down, right?
Anyone who is qualified, a PhD, is published in this area, please come up, we'll give you a seat on stage, you can talk right beside us, and we'll have a spirited conversation.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And then at MythCon later on, the organizers try to find someone.
They told me they spent 80 hours trying to find a qualified person.
Someone in the field of gender studies.
No one would go on with James Lindsay and Clay Religion myself.
I think we're making some gains, and I think that can be, metrics are like how many people are putting their names when they come out on these letters, or when they're speaking publicly about it, but why would you So this is where it gets a bit deep if you want.
Why does that happen?
If you know you're already winning, it's like the presidential debate.
You want to have more if you're losing and fewer if you're winning.
If you don't understand that that's how they view the world, it looks like they're playing
If you don't understand that that's how they view the world, it looks like they're playing this very dirty game,
this very dirty game, but they actually really think that.
This is something that we did that's different, by the way, from Sokal.
As Sokal wrote the pastiche, we started with these hoaxes.
The first six papers we wrote, the ones that just died, because if you remember, he said
20, and then we talked about 14 of them, seven accepted, seven more in play.
We started with hoaxes, and we couldn't get hoaxes in.
We couldn't replicate Sokal, and we think the reason is either it could be our skill,
but it could also be that something changed.
And we think that something fundamentally changed in the late '80s and early '90s.
And under Kimberlé Crenshaw's critical race theory and intersectionality, she literally says that we need to apply postmodernism in mapping the margins.
And she says that we can't achieve things if all we do is deconstruct.
So we need to admit that some things are real.
Identity is real and oppression based on identity are real, and we need to use postmodern methods, apply postmodern methods of deconstruction to achieve things through those assumptions.
So it's a big turn.
So they literally see that privilege and power exist to maintain themselves, legitimize themselves, and so there's this whole kind of weird conspiracy theory element to it.
from their perspective that, oh, you want to use reason because reason was invented by Western values that want to perpetuate themselves and dominate the world.
Right.
And you want to use science and evidence because same reason.
And you want to have conversation for the same reason.
It's like the very thing that got you into the cognitive sinkhole in the first place, the thing that can emancipate you from that, you deny access.
It's like Boko Haram, Western education forbidden, right?
The one thing that these folks need is Western education, right?
So the very thing that caused the problem in the first place, they avoid, they won't take because it will liberate them from the thing that causes the problem.
So that's what we set out to do though, is to understand.
When our hoaxes failed, we set out to understand them on their own terms.
They call this being an outsider within.
And it was actually huge, like, in lesbian research early on, and lesbian social research, because, you know, you go into female-oriented spaces or whatever, and they don't quite fit, so they're an outsider, but they're inside, and then they document it, and that's one of their kind of methodologies they approach.
So we became that, outsiders within their thing, and we wanted to actually understand the way that they think, and so now we sit in this odd position where, you know, I have one foot in applied postmodern Uh, theology, if you will, and I have one foot in reality, and I can now see the world both ways, and that's kind of like the thing that sets us apart from Sokol.
It's the thing that we have to offer that's very different, because we understand where they're coming from, why they're coming from that place, and how their logic and their approach is broken or damaging or unethical or whatever it happens to be in the Yeah, so you mentioned sort of high-level ways we can break them out as I mean one one simple I found a couple simple ones as I've talked to kids at schools one is you know you'll say to them they'll say that they're for Islam and they're for gay people and then you'll say well can
Right, but you need them to understand a certain amount of what you've done.
Like the one about, wait a minute, I'm for Islam and for gays, but if no gay can get married at a mosque, well now it seems like something sort of more obvious, something like that.
One of the things I just wrote about this last year in Skeptic Magazine, one of the things that I've learned from over a quarter century of critical thinking is, instead of asking people, what is your evidence for that, which is a totally reasonable question, I switched to what's called a defeasibility question or disconfirmation question.
I front load this in all of my conversations now, and it's basically a simple question, how could that belief be false?
So someone tells you something and you say, well how could, I'm not saying you are wrong about that, just how could that be false?
Even asking that question opens up spaces and enables people to process things in a way in which they ordinarily wouldn't.
Yeah, so let's just jump there for just a sec, because this is not as if it hasn't had a professional cost for you guys, but for you in particular, and I know you don't want to play the victim, but can you just explain what the hell is going on over at Portland State right now?
We can talk about the motivations, but trust has been eroded in our public institutions, trust has been eroded in the academy, and it's a huge problem.
But we can talk about that.
So that investigation is ongoing.
And so again, my union rep informed me and my lawyers that the punishment for that can be termination.
So I'm now kind of caught in limbo and I honestly do not know what's going to happen.
No, I'm out of the academy, so I have no institutional review board over me.
I have nobody coming down on me.
I mean, I did basically have to stop working my job for almost two years to do this, so I'm semi-borderline unemployed.
It's kind of, you know, I don't think I'm getting into academia again.
Well, if I wanted to try to get into that.
So, I'm not in any particular hot water, but that's sort of the huge irony of this, right?
So Pete's in hot water, but why?
Because he's in an institution.
I'm free to do this and there's nobody who can come down on me, but Pete is under, you know, possibly losing his job and all of this, you know, professional misconduct stuff.
unidentified
This seems Like, it has technicality written all over it.
It's like, oh, you happen to be in the wrong position.
Now I understand that these boards are important in what they do, and an investigation needs to be had, but at the same time, it does have technicality written all over it.
There's some weird... How is it that this is ethical if I do it, but unethical if he does it, by virtue of the fact that he has an academic position that should credential him higher than I'm credentialed?
It doesn't seem to really make any sense.
For me, I've not really had any hot water.
I also live in the southeast, which helps quite a bit because as I was walking around, you know, I'm here in Southern California, so I'm walking around in Hollywood last night.
We go out and somebody's like, that guy's one of us!
And I was like, everybody where I'm from is one of us.
What are you talking about?
I don't understand.
Everybody agrees with me about, I mean, they don't agree with my politics necessarily.
I do firmly plant myself on the left, but at the same time, I, They certainly agree with me about gender studies.
They even go further than I would go.
I think gender studies is important, for example.
I think we should be studying gender in a multidisciplinary way.
I just think it should have to follow the lines of evidence.
Right, because if everything being equal, if you asked me, I mean I've been saying this a little bit more and I don't get any great joy in saying it, but if you ask me where the real racism is coming from right now.
It's coming from them.
Again, I say this all the time and everyone knows this.
Racism in conservative circles coming from the Southeast and having lived there for almost 40 years has definitely changed dramatically in my life.
The attitudes are very, very different.
I honestly, it's a whole separate show or whatever because the South has a complicated relationship with race and racism and it's not simple and there's a lot of issues but there are also a lot of improvements.
But certainly you don't see the kind of institutional racism that we used to.
There's some weird stuff around immigration and whether that touches into it or not because it's also got seriously legitimate things that need to be heard and discussed that the left, progressive left, because I don't want to lump the whole left into it, the progressive left refuses to have those conversations honestly.
You know, when you dump 1.8 million people into a culture all of a sudden, with a totally different culture, things happen.
There's real issues around immigration, and I really wish we could have grown-up conversations about it instead of, oh, it's 100% open borders versus 100%, you know, build a wall or whatever the hell it is.
And so I wish we could have a real conversation there, and part of the reason we can't is because one side is like, it's racist to have the conversation.
So I do actually generally agree with you that the crusade to make race more salient, which is almost directly out of critical race theory, and the crusade to make gender identity more salient, which is almost straight out of gender theory.
We can go on, write down all the sexuality theory, fat studies, right down the list of every identity category you can imagine, the intersectional matrix of dominance.
That increases everybody's touchiness, everybody's willingness to be offended, and everybody who can manipulate their offense to their own advantage, their ability and willingness maybe to take that advantage where it's theirs.
I believe it is the most dangerous set of ideas out there.
I believe that this set of ideas, the way you just laid it out, is far more dangerous than anything I'm seeing out of what Trump's saying.
And again, as someone that didn't even vote for Trump, I would say that that is what is going to turn neighbor against neighbor.
You will look at your neighbor and judge them by the color of their skin and what they should get for that, or because they're overweight, or because they're a woman, or because they're gay.
I mean, that is what, it's the...
It's the complete ripping of the fabric of everything that America is.
Yeah, and you know what, I don't mean to make it either or, but this... No, there's no question about it that this is a toxin, and it's contagious, and it's destroying our societies.
And again, it's coming from one place.
And if people want to know why should they care about a bunch of kooky academics, it's because this stuff spills out into the real world, and it spills out consistently.
And we've now trained an entire generation of people both to be brittle when they hear something, to be offended.
If you have a belief that's un-evidenced, or if you're an intensely ideological person, then you have to do something to make up the slack when someone contradicts you, when you're faced with an alternative idea.
You can lie, you can be offended, you can walk away, you can scream at people and call them a racist, but you can't engage their ideas.
And now we've taught, and I'm deeply concerned about this, because we've taught an entire generation of kids To not do that.
What we should be doing is to not teach them how to suspend their judgments, but to make better, more discerning judgments, particularly as that spills into the moral sphere.
And then you have an election that was a very narrow margin.
You don't need a lot of people to have flipped a margin.
So I think the reason we got Trump was very significantly to do with the fact that this stuff, especially in 2015,
decided to blow up to the only thing you can talk about.
Check your privilege, check your privilege, everything.
And I'm afraid we're gonna get it again.
And the reason I'm afraid especially is, maybe you do, maybe you don't know this, I just recently found out that they're going to let trans athletes compete in the summer games in 2020, right before the election.
There's something off here and everybody can see it.
So I really think that these, again, these gender issues, race issues, these stupid culture war issues are going to possibly prove decisive.
So anybody who's out there that thinks that Trump is an unmitigated disaster, Has to pay attention to the fact of how the audience that votes for him thinks about this social justice crap and what it's doing for that.
So I mentioned this when I had Peterson and Shapiro on, but in a weird way, is this where, let's say three guys, I can't consider myself part of the left anymore, but I know you do and I think you do, but I still consider myself a liberal.
But is this where we should all be looking in the mirror and going, man, this is actually the failure of the liberals.
That when this monster was reconstituting itself in the name of progressivism, that all the liberals just kind of jumped on board and knew something was kind of off.
Well, if we want to fix it, we have to say what's the best step forward.
And to your comment that you just made, I don't think that the solution to this is to elect people to office who are steeped in identity-based politics.
That's a reaction to... This is what I see, an escalating series of reactions as to how it's happened.
What was that recent study?
I think they wrote about it in The Atlantic.
There were seven political tribes.
Eight percent are social justice people.
Some comparable percent, in two factions, are far-right people.
And then you have this gigantic swath in the middle who are, and the key word was, politically exhausted.
So where are the liberals?
They're putting their head down and they're being quiet because those lunatic fringes are whether it's classical liberals center or right or even dipping into the left because it works that way whether it's left liberals but you know true liberals are the people who need to rise up and say hey look No.
Our society is a liberal society.
We're going to make sure it stays that way, and the rest is politics.
How we're going to sort out these issues is politics.
But we have to get to a place where we can have politics again, where these lunatic fringes don't want to have it.
But I had this idea a couple of years ago that what we're seeing is I think this is what's triggered the problem and liberals
are just sick of getting yelled at and they're tired and it's exhausting, it's constant fighting, it's constant war.
Most people don't want to fight.
But you have these two sides and each one is able to convince the people closer to it that the other side is an
existential threat.
So every time a wedge issue comes up, every person that sees themselves on the left sides with whatever that furthest
faction is, when it comes down to it, it's got to be this or it's got
to be that because they're so afraid that if the conservatives get power,
gays aren't going to be allowed to get married, they're going to overturn Roe vs. Wade, everybody's going to have
coat hanger abortions or something.
The next thing you know, climate change is going to ruin the planet.
And then the people on the conservative side see the same thing.
If the liberals get power, if those Democrats get power, we're going to have open borders.
Muslims are going to be flooding in, rapists from Mexico.
It's going to be this whole thing and they freak out and it's an, they feel existential
threat if the other side gets power.
And what that's done has been this ratcheting up of tension.
unidentified
So the people in the middle get exhausted and they only make a choice when they feel
I feel like that has come to be the case over the past maybe four or five years.
Yeah, I feel like there has been a change to more openness and more dialogue on the right, and I think it's a necessary corrective to what they're seeing from the far left.
I don't think that was the case ten years ago.
I feel like at that time the right was locked down and the left was kind of having these squabbles, and then it's kind of switched which side is recalcitrant, and I think it'll probably switch again eventually.
I'm curious, since both of you guys are outspoken atheists, is part of your worry about all of this that this set of the postmodern thing is very anti-religious in its own way?
Now, I know you're okay with the anti-religion part, but because they've used this set of ideas as their own religion, does that In any way, do you see that as a weakness of atheism?
You know what I mean?
By removing all religion altogether, they had a void of belief, so now they just pick this belief.
That maybe the skeptic community or the atheist community or something needed to do more.
And so there's three pillars to why people, at a psychosocial level they call it, why they believe or why they ascribe to religions.
What function do they play sociologically and psychologically?
One is for a feeling of meaning-making, purpose, morality, etc., understanding the world.
And that is kind of, I think, what the substitution hypothesis often touches upon.
Like, they had this path to find meaning, then it went away, God was killed by the postmodern deconstruction, now they don't have a meaning structure.
Then they look also for community.
How communities are formed, how they're organized, how you find standing within your community, that also got deconstructed.
So there's an aspect to both of those that people are trying to fill in.
I don't think that that explains extremism though.
So the work that I've done looking into the psychology of extremism is that extremism isn't... you don't go extreme because you're looking for meaning.
Because you have people who are moderate religious people all over the world Who are very, very devout, who aren't extremists.
And you don't get extreme necessarily just to form a community.
You can, those are cults.
Where you start to find extremism is where people, the third dimension that people go to religion for is to have a sense of control in life.
And I feel like we're in a state, probably because of many technological advances happening so rapidly with the internet blooming and everything's so different now than it was when I was a kid.
You know, Nintendo was the thing and now that we've got this huge internet and
global connectedness, I can text people in Australia, I could get my phone right now and do
it immediately. So we've got this whole different world now and I think what's happened is people
are feeling a loss of control. Now part of that's going to come because there's been this massive
deconstruction of institutions alongside it. But I feel like the extremism that you see
comes less from a meaning-making place and more from a feeling out of control place. Because when
you feel out of control, you try to lock things down.
And so I think that actually, if you want to look at like a big political kind of solution to ratchet things down, is it's very important right now that we start trying to look at things that will actually succeed in giving people a greater sense that society is under control.
A culture war sure as hell isn't that.
And then, you know, being politically panicked, whether it's Obama's in office and he's going to ruin the universe from the conservative side, or Trump's in office and he's going to ruin the universe from the liberal side.
Whatever it is, that panic isn't a feeling of control, it's a feeling of being out of control.
And that's why these issues carry existential concern for people and they go so extreme.
I think that both the community and the meaning-making structures are relevant, but combined they probably explain less than 20% of what we're seeing with these kind of postmodern religions or whatever.
And most of it, at least in their extremist forms, where they matter, like hipsters are a postmodern religion and who cares?
Who cares?
But where it gets troublesome is where you have people who feel like they're out of control, and if they don't exert authoritarian control, everything's going to be terrible.
And so I think that it's more an axis of control than an axis of meaning making.
Although it is more difficult to find meaning in a world where you don't just have this grand sweeping narrative of whether it's religion, whether it's nationalism, whether it's whatever it is.
Western values is a big one, right?
So, I think, you know, Brett Weinstein, I saw, was tweeting about this the other day.
I think there's a thing where we all had the shared narrative of what it means to be American, or the shared narrative of what it means to be spreading democracy abroad, or whatever the thing was, you know, this Western thing.
And even if you were religious or not religious, you could lock into that, and there was this kind of shared meaning.
So that's the one I would be thinking is the most scary that we're deconstructing.
The fact that these people are, you know, so focused on race or so focused on gender, etc., is one thing, but the fact that they're so focused on being anti-Western-centric, everything that the West did is imbued with dominance and colonialism and power and it's always trying to maintain itself, so that's the thing we need to deconstruct most.
All right, Pete, bring us home on a hopeful note that we can not only turn the tide, but we can get enough people to be brave enough and the emails won't come anonymously, and that we can restore some sanity.