Feb. 18, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:04
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today are two of the guys who pulled off the biggest Sokol hoax since, well, the original Sokol hoax. | ||
| Peter Burgosian and James Lindsay. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having us on. | ||
| I am happy to have you guys here. | ||
| You're an old pro around here. | ||
| It's good to be back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pleasure. | ||
| Your first time, oddly enough. | ||
| I'm all new. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That sounds very impressive to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Social Text. | ||
| Called Social Text. | ||
| And their editors accepted it and published it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was a big mess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| And you guys set out to prove it was 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. | ||
| Now that's true, but the rest of the paper was completely ridiculous. | ||
| It came under considerable criticism, and so we took a look at that criticism and we said, okay, let's see if we can replicate this on a grand scale. | ||
| So to be clear, that was the first one that you did where you were trying to... Yeah, Peter and I did that one. | ||
| Yeah, but that was the first one that you guys did that you were trying to get through this system, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| The gatekeepers to show that they couldn't distinguish between made-up silliness and their own scholarship. | ||
| And then we took a look at that criticism and we decided to replicate that on a massive scale. | ||
| So we wrote twenty papers in ten months, and for context, these are papers that go to peer-reviewed journals. | ||
| Seven papers in seven years is tenure at most major universities. | ||
| And we wrote, with the help of Helen Pluckrose from Aerial Magazine, who in the UK is not here now, obviously. | ||
| We had seven of those published. | ||
| Okay, so let's pause there for a second. | ||
| Tell me, let's just go through some of the greatest hits of these papers that you got through. | ||
| I mean, they're quite brilliant, but are there any that you'd each like to tee off? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| All of them, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was the paper, what was it called? | ||
| The title. | ||
| Queer performativity, or canine rape culture. | ||
| Yeah, and Portland Dog Park, or something like that. | ||
| The fact that you can't quite remember the name sort of shows you the absurdity of what you guys are doing. | ||
| Well, some of them we gave, like, they all have, like, the serious subtitle, and some of them have an easy-to-remember, funny, real title. | ||
| Dog Park is what we called 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. | ||
| Now, we should lay out a little more specifically what it is that you were saying in the paper because it was such an important academic. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The genital closely observes the genitals of Close to 10,000 dogs. | ||
| Yeah, inspected genitals. | ||
| You're very committed, Pete. | ||
| I am committed. | ||
| Unless it's raining. | ||
| And then interrogate their owners as to their sexual orientation. | ||
| But we needed something else in there. | ||
| You know, like, choice lines, dog parks, or petri dishes for canine rape cultures. | ||
| But we need something else. | ||
| And again, the trick to this thing is... | ||
| What's morally fashionable? | ||
| Who has the most oppression variables? | ||
| So I thought, well, you know, a black female criminologist. | ||
| So then I like Googled black female criminology. | ||
| I just looked at Wikipedia and it was like, I found someone, I'm like, okay, let's look at this through a lens of black female criminology. | ||
| They can't reject it because they'd be saying that there's something wrong. | ||
| They'd be not validating someone's lived experiences. | ||
| So we looked at the whole thing through black feminist criminology. | ||
| Boom, published. | ||
| So we got seven of those and are accepted with seven more. | ||
| The Mein Kampf, we write. | ||
| Yeah, wait, let's not gloss over that one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Because this is actually incredible, what you did. | ||
| Okay, well, you want to go for the Mein Kampf. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's too liberal. | ||
| I mean, that's actually incredible. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| That's mind-blowing right there, yeah. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| And so then we took those comments, we modified it a little bit, we massaged it to fit for a social work journal by working in social work stuff. | ||
| We sent it off to a feminist social work journal. | ||
| And the Feminist Social Work Journal gave us a few more comments. | ||
| You need to make allyship problematic because if I claim I'm an ally, | ||
| now I have a power dynamic with the person I'm allied with. | ||
| So problematize that. - Right, really just a slave, that would be better. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, something. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's where it gets really scary, right? | ||
| Because that's a practical field. | ||
| Right, so before we go too far on that, let's just back up for one second. | ||
| What sort of led you two and Helen to decide to do this in the first place? | ||
| So my audience is pretty familiar with you, but maybe you want to give a little bit of why you? | ||
| Why is it that you said, this is what we have to do to sort of strike this thing at the knees? | ||
| Many people had recognized what the problem was. | ||
| The problem being post-modernism, the problem being a corruption in scholarship, the problem being that many disciplines have lost a focus on truth. | ||
| They thought they already had the truth, so they placed an agenda before the truth. | ||
| And we're deeply concerned about speech issues on campus. | ||
| We're deeply concerned about the fact that Kids in class couldn't view alternative opinions. | ||
| And I myself don't hold those opinions. | ||
| I'm not a conservative. | ||
| I'm not Christian, obviously. | ||
| But I wanted people to have the opportunity to voice their ideas and then other people to have the opportunity to respond to those ideas. | ||
| We took a look at this and we traced it back to a single body of scholarship. | ||
| Basically anything that has the name studies behind it. | ||
| And so what had happened is that these people have, these folks have taken over the educational | ||
| administration and they're institutionalizing ideas found in this body of literature. | ||
| And it's absolutely toxic to us. | ||
| It's poisoning us all. | ||
| And we wanted to take a look at those canons of literature, which is actually when I called | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I know a little bit about this. | ||
| Yeah, a little bit, do you? | ||
| And getting blasted for being a racist because of the Islamophobia thing | ||
| and the gross and racist moment with Ben Affleck. | ||
| You know, all this stuff was going on, we're like, what's going on? | ||
| You try to have conversations, you know, like Sam Harris is a reasonable guy, | ||
| he's an honest broker, what's happening? | ||
| And we start getting called racist for talking about it, and then every time it comes back to this, | ||
| well, racism doesn't mean what the dictionary says. | ||
| Racism doesn't mean what you think it means. | ||
| Only white people can be racist. | ||
| Only men can be sexist, and it has to have structural power behind it | ||
| and all this stuff, and we're like, that's a peculiar definition, | ||
| and maybe, okay, systemic racism's a thing. | ||
| It's real, okay, fine. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| But that's not the whole story here. | ||
| You know, you're using a particular term, you're meaning a particular term by a very general term, right? | ||
| Racism is something else. | ||
| When you say systemic racism is real, what do you mean by that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| There have been great improvements. | ||
| However, there are still some issues. | ||
| There are still some concerns. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a bias there. | ||
| Right, so this, just for the record, I mean this is where I've gotten into that moment with Larry Elder that you mentioned before. | ||
| I don't know, I personally wouldn't call that systemic anymore. | ||
| I don't think it's in the system anymore that maybe individual people act in a racist way or in a sexist way or something like that. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But that doesn't mean there isn't historical events which everyone acknowledges. | ||
| Right, so I don't think that there is a institutional thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, I just think it's important to make that distinction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And there's historical hangovers and etc. | ||
| There's a lot to it. | ||
| But sure, I can accept the idea, like let's just run with the idea that this whole structural racism thing is a thing. | ||
| 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 | ||
| published in the peer reviewed literature. | ||
| Now there's a study that says, whatever it is. | ||
| Right, and they point to that. | ||
| They point to the study. | ||
| And they say, so that's, they don't need faith. | ||
| They point to this, this is how we know. | ||
| And your former guest and our friend Brett Orenstein calls it idea laundering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They have an idea. | ||
| They have a moral impulse. | ||
| They want to discharge that. | ||
| They have these make-believe journals, and they publish it, and then they start teaching it to folks, and then that's how it spreads. | ||
| It's like a contagion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, we couldn't have the conversation, right? | ||
| Because that's what they would do. | ||
| Because you try to have the conversation, and they say this thing, and you say, well, how do you know that? | ||
| And they're like, this. | ||
| And they point to the scholarship. | ||
| And Pete's idea was, that's the same as when a Christian is, you know, ranting about fire and brimstone, and you're like, how do you know that? | ||
| this and they point to Deuteronomy or whatever, you know, and it's the same concept. | ||
| And so then you can't, what do you do? | ||
| How do you argue? | ||
| Well, the only thing you can do is say, well, maybe that scholarship's questionable. | ||
| And then that conversation was impossible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because if you question the scholarship, you're racist. | ||
| So we said, well, let's look at the scholarship. | ||
| So you were piecing this together for a long time because I quote you every other week on this show, | ||
| when you started calling this postmodern movement a secular religion. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's, what's it, Mike Nayna's YouTube channel. | ||
| Yeah, it's YouTube, you know, Mike Nayna's the name of it. | ||
| And the parallels are They're not just conspicuous. | ||
| You can't ignore them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Well, so as the guy who wrote a manual for creating atheists, deprogramming religious thinking is something you've been interested in a long time. | ||
| So did you view this as the first blow to I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, so we've seen so many examples of this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I suspect though they would not afford that freedom if they were really in charge, to those of us that maybe don't believe in this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that would be advisors could do that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I think ultimately there's, the battleground is to get people to realize | ||
| that that's unacceptable. | ||
| So a good metaphor for that is, I don't want to alienate any of your hard Christian people. | ||
| If you've ever been driving, I know this is a dated example now | ||
| with like cool futuristic radio and podcasts and things, but you drive in and you're on a road trip, | ||
| you're in a different region, you're dazzling the dial on the radio | ||
| and you're like, I can't find anything good to listen to. | ||
| And you flip the thing, it's like country, and you flip the thing and it's something else. | ||
| It's talk, you don't want to listen to that. | ||
| You flip the thing, ah, some rock song comes on. | ||
| You're kind of like getting into it, you're rolling, you know, | ||
| you hit the accelerator a little bit. | ||
| And then they're like, Jesus is my light. | ||
| And you're like, I know what this is. | ||
| And he changed the dial again right away because you hear that and you didn't want to get proselytized to. | ||
| You wanted to listen to, you know, some Metallica or something. | ||
| So you didn't want to hear that. | ||
| 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 | ||
| these guys Bogosh and Lindsey Pluckrose they did this thing | ||
| and maybe we didn't I mean Pete says I like to nuance a little further than Pete did | ||
| about delegitimizing their canon I think that there's probably some legitimate | ||
| work going on but who can tell what it is | ||
| how do you know if I can make up stuff and Pete can make up stuff and Helen can | ||
| make up stuff and we can just massage the literature to let it be | ||
| How do you know when it's the real thing and when it's not? | ||
| So what we need is to clean that up and get to the bottom of when the work is using good rigorous methods and when it's not and review all this stuff. | ||
| So, I know you guys obviously got support out of the quarters that I would have expected you to get support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tremendous support. | |
| 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. | ||
| In whispers, yeah. | ||
| 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... | ||
| It's a life they lead. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And maybe I need to, I don't know. | ||
| But I became mad at him. | ||
| Like immediately my reaction was, you coward. | ||
| But then I thought about how much he's invested. | ||
| And so I think Pete's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But aren't you guys then, you're sort of saying both things at the same time? | ||
| I mean I get it, like let's be compassionate towards people and I get it, people have other | ||
| considerations and careers and families and all those things and I'm not denying any of | ||
| that but you guys aren't superheroes, I'm not a superhero. | ||
| No, people have to speak up and I'm incredibly grateful for the people who have spoken up. | ||
| And has anyone not survived? | ||
| I mean, I think this is the other thing that we have to push. | ||
| Has anyone that spoke up about these things, that's spoken up? | ||
| Yes, people have lost their jobs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And, you know, James Damore at Google, and Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| No one's been executed. | ||
| But no one's been executed. | ||
| If anything, these people are all stronger at some level. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with that, actually. | ||
| To me, that's where we have to go with this. | ||
| I'm really incredibly grateful for the people who've spoken up, and my email box has been flooded with letters of support. | ||
| Students, people they don't know, people all over the world, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. | ||
| And what we are seeing is more and more people are putting their names on this now. | ||
| That's the big change we are. | ||
| That's the big change. | ||
| We're seeing people in biology, for example, saying things. | ||
| That's what gives me hope for this whole thing. | ||
| And so I have only two colleagues who have publicly come out and said that they support me out of the whole university. | ||
| And, you know, the Portland State University Vanguard published this crazy smear hit piece on me with a huge nose as if I'm a villain. | ||
| And they spelled his name wrong. | ||
| They said, seven of these 11, 10 with PhDs couldn't even spell two of the three names correctly. | ||
| But it was a smear piece. | ||
| It was anonymous. | ||
| The people who signed it, it was anonymous. | ||
| With students and faculty and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| They're so triggered and they're so brave. | ||
| If they had the truth on their side and they were so right and you were so evil, well, you could at least put your name on it. | ||
| You know, that's the big thing too, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| But is this the brilliance of what they've done? | ||
| And I mean that obviously slightly tongue in cheek, which is you label everyone a racist | ||
| and a Nazi and everything, and then you say, "Well, these people don't deserve platforms." | ||
| So either they won't give you the platform in the first place, or if they've given you | ||
| the platform, well, they already have their out, which is, "I don't sit on platforms with | ||
| Nazis." | ||
| Well, that's-- | ||
| So thus, they've created this engine that gives them the ultimate escape and gives you | ||
| no opportunity to defend your ideas to them. | ||
| And one crucial piece to that, which is one of the differences between traditional religions, | ||
| Christianity in particular, is that they don't value discourse and dialogue. | ||
| It's just not part of their canon. | ||
| In fact, if anything, it's viewed as a form of violence. | ||
| And so when you have folks who, not only they don't value it, they're already winning the | ||
| culture war, right? | ||
| I know that might be a controversial statement, but certainly they're winning the culture war in the academy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No question about it. | ||
| I think we're making some gains now, but I think by and large, yeah, you're right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so I think that's also operative. | ||
| So this is where it gets a bit deep if you want. | ||
| Why does that happen? | ||
| I mean, obviously, you can look at it and just that this is a brilliant strategy in | ||
| a sense. | ||
| But their literature, again, like I said earlier, they're terrified of complicity. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're going to be complicit in something. | ||
| So sharing the stage with somebody with abhorrent views equals complicity, and also giving them a platform. | ||
| But it's really difficult to understand that for people outside of this kind of, and we call it applied postmodern. | ||
| It changed in the 90s. | ||
| It's not the same as Foucault and Derrida and all this nonsense deconstruction stuff. | ||
| It's a bit more focused. | ||
| It's really, it's identity activism. | ||
| If you're outside of that view, it's very difficult to understand how this all works. | ||
| Why do they see something like conversation or dialogue as violence? | ||
| And the reason is that they see that everything is has identity and they see identity as an ideology, | ||
| as ideology connected to identity, bakes that ideology into whatever it produces. | ||
| So you and I are, Pete, we're three white guys sitting here and we're saying we should have conversation, we should | ||
| have conversation, and their answer is, | ||
| "Well, of course you should say you have conversation." | ||
| White people baked up the idea of having conversation to get to ideas | ||
| so that they can maintain their power. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it's got this huge, nasty conspiracy theory element that comes down to the very roots of what we would call | ||
| So it's got this huge, nasty conspiracy theory element that comes down to the very roots | ||
| of what we would call applied postmodernism, which is that privilege and power exist to | ||
| applied postmodernism, which is that privilege and power exist to perpetuate and | ||
| perpetuate and legitimize themselves. | ||
| legitimize themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Is that the paper that the first mention of intersectionality? | ||
| Yes, that is the birthplace of intersectionality. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then when you start tying... It's incredible. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| It's unbelievably profound. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 | ||
| Is there a mosque in America, or anywhere in the West for that matter, or anywhere in the East, or anywhere, that will have gay marriage? | ||
| And the answer is no. | ||
| There might maybe be one discredited, one somewhere apparently. | ||
| So it's like, how can we be for both of these things? | ||
| This actually doesn't make sense. | ||
| And that sort of little bomb in their brain does set off something, I find. | ||
| So you need little tricks like that. | ||
| So the best thing... Which then they'll tell you you're an Islamophobe anyway or something, but... | ||
| I found that actually asking people how the dog park paper, the dog humping paper got honored, and then explain what the paper says. | ||
| How did this paper get honored as exemplary scholarship in feminist geography? | ||
| I watched, kind of, it's like the eyes unfocused and come back in. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's an incredibly effective question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So what tangible evidence is there that this thing is starting to succeed? | ||
| Beyond that, you know, there was some cover given by some big names. | ||
| There was some good press. | ||
| Not all the press was good. | ||
| Plenty of places went after you guys, too. | ||
| I mean, is there more credible evidence? | ||
| Even then, what did they go after, though? | ||
| They went after our motivations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a lot about your motivations in particular. | ||
| Mr. Controversy. | ||
| Formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence. | ||
| Huge controversy. | ||
| So, what's the question? | ||
| What can be done? | ||
| What's the evidence that we're turning? | ||
| I think, first of all, we've had probably 10 to 1 support to detraction. | ||
| So people writing these negative pieces, yeah, they're out there, but I think it's 10 to 1 support. | ||
| And I keep hearing, I know it's mostly whispered, but as Pete said, some people are starting to put their names to it. | ||
| A lot of people did in his support after Portland State. | ||
| I'm hearing a lot of people say things like, you got him, and they know you got him. | ||
| You got him and they know you got him. | ||
| That's powerful. | ||
| These are people in humanities departments that are telling, of course I can't say who they are, | ||
| but they're saying, "They know you got 'em." | ||
| And then we expected, you know, the tornado to come after us | ||
| and then there was no tornado. | ||
| It was just kind of this rolling over thing and eventually this nasty hit piece | ||
| in Pete's student newspapers. | ||
| Which was nothing. | ||
| And that's my point, is that people survive the monster and I want more people to understand that. | ||
| That is. | ||
| It's so many people. | ||
| And now people are starting to put that toe out or stick their head out a little bit. | ||
| They're writing things. | ||
| They're putting their name on it. | ||
| They're speaking up in their classes. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| I get emails all the time. | ||
| Hey, you know, you emboldened me to speak up in my class. | ||
| And I mentioned some of these papers. | ||
| I've mentioned this. | ||
| So we see a groundswell of people willing to question and challenge. | ||
| The name's a huge thing. | ||
| When people come out, I now have all these organizations that have endorsed me against the possible termination for my offenses. | ||
| 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? | ||
| So they charged me, there are two charges. | ||
| One is not going to the IRB, human subjects, and they considered the researchers human, | ||
| excuse me, the journal editors human subjects. | ||
| And I was found guilty on that, and it's escalated to-- | ||
| Wait, can you explain that a little bit further? | ||
| Yeah, so there are these things called IRBs, and anytime you experiment on people, | ||
| originally from Tuskegee and medical experiments, you need to get permission from this board | ||
| and tell them exactly what you're gonna do so that they know that the subjects | ||
| upon whom you're doing whatever intervention are gonna be fine. | ||
| So, IRBs, I was found guilty of not going to that. | ||
| Those are public documents that can be revealed when I received it. | ||
| And then that has escalated to the provost and the president of the university, and they can make a decision about punishments. | ||
| I was also told that I have to take a training, and I can't be a primary researcher or researcher on anything until this has been adjudicated. | ||
| Then it's the other charge is fabrication of data. | ||
| These are very serious charges, the fabrication of data in particular. | ||
| And the idea behind that is that you don't want the research stream to be contaminated, right? | ||
| So we can't have people making stuff up, basically, publishing it. | ||
| And then why people do that, the motivation is to advance their own careers, to get grants, to publish and get tenure or what have you. | ||
| Even though that's obviously not what you guys were doing. | ||
| You weren't falsifying data to sell off a paper that was going to make you look like a rock star to get another position. | ||
| You were actually trying to help the institutions. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you in any hot water beyond? | |
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It should have to admit when it's wrong. | ||
| It needs to be studied, right. | ||
| And that's not what's happening now. | ||
| Race is a huge issue. | ||
| Look how explosive it is, for example. | ||
| For the last several years, it's been the most explosive social topic. | ||
| How are you going to do it if you're not doing it rigorously? | ||
| Do you think though it's possible that race, let's say, is the most explosive racial topic because of what they have created, what they have sown? | ||
| When you increase people's awareness of race, Or gender or identity. | ||
| You make it touchier, you make it a bigger deal, you make people look for reasons to dig into it, and you do explode the issue. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, are there a couple KKK members? | ||
| Are there a couple white supremacists? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Do they have any institutional power? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Does anyone with any academic power or anything think that they're good? | ||
|
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No. | |
| But this thing has power behind it. | ||
| So that's why I fear it much more. | ||
| And the way that it's used, racism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, and that's why it hurts us all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or the idea. | ||
| I mean, I certainly agree with that. | ||
| I have to pause on the Trump thing. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| I've been on a Trump diet. | ||
| I just, I so can't stand it. | ||
| We almost did an hour without saying Trump. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So how worried are you then when this really seeps into the political system? | ||
| I'm really worried. | ||
| It does seem to me that that's the horizon. | ||
| The horizon right now, if you look where all the energy is, it's behind the set of young democratic socialists. | ||
| Perfect comment. - Who believe all of this. | ||
| So that's why I think it's a huge danger. | ||
| I personally feel like Trump is borderline an unmitigated disaster. | ||
| Now we've done really well, our institutions have been strong, | ||
| so I get worried about anybody who wants to tear down institutions | ||
| given that they are a checker. | ||
| If he's an out of control executive, the institutional thing itself | ||
| is what controls the out of control executive. | ||
| That's the point of limiting executive power is that the institution is broader | ||
| and you don't put it all in a tyrant or whatever if that comes along. | ||
| I don't know that he's a tyrant, he's whatever. | ||
| But if I think, let's say that I think, and it's not perfectly true, | ||
| that he's the most dangerous thing that's happening in the world right now. | ||
| I actually, and this is, you want your controversy to see if I can top Pete for once. | ||
| Yeah, come on, give me something here. | ||
| I think that Trump is a result of the regressive left. | ||
| I think that he got elected because he stood up and he would, you know, all these, these scolds for years and years and years. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| You can't think that. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| And Trump would just say it. | ||
| And so who, who's watching this? | ||
| You have this entire group of people who are sick. | ||
| I live in the South. | ||
| I talk to them all the time. | ||
| I know these people. | ||
| These are good, decent people. | ||
| They're no, most of the time, no fan of Trump in general. | ||
| They don't like what he's doing politically. | ||
| And yet they're like, He doesn't care that those people said, you can't say that. | ||
| He said it anyway. | ||
| You know, you can't say such and such about this group. | ||
| Trump says it. | ||
| They think, wow, here's this kind of like avatar of me being able to, you know, somebody else who can take the fall for it, take the heat for it. | ||
| Because if I say it, I'm going to get blasted. | ||
| He says that he doesn't get in trouble. | ||
| That appealed to a lot of people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I actually haven't heard that yet. | ||
| Yeah, so they're going to let the trans athletes compete as women in the 2020 games. | ||
| And that's going to happen literally a couple months before the next election. | ||
| The trans bathroom thing was a giant wedge issue. | ||
| Who drummed it up as a wedge issue? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that's a whole, like that's a fracture point in society right now. | ||
| And it is one because the gender theory doesn't play out to where anybody can understand what's going on. | ||
| And it feels like they're being told how they have to think on issues. | ||
| And so then you finally have somebody who comes along, you see something that's outrageous, | ||
| whether it's about them, when you start having like a trans wrestler | ||
| that like slams a woman to the ground. | ||
| Yeah, and we're seeing these pictures all the time. | ||
| It's gonna be horrifying. | ||
| Well, we're seeing these pictures now. | ||
| Like the MMA fighter and stuff. | ||
| It's just like, it broke her jaw. | ||
| And it's just horrifying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, where are the liberals? | ||
| Where are the liberals? | ||
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Where? | |
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| We can name 20 people. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a big fan of blame at this point. | ||
| I just want to fix it. | ||
| Well, I mean, if we want to fix it, we have to figure out where our fault points were, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I completely agree with that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So the people in the middle get exhausted and they only make a choice when they feel | ||
| forced to make a choice. | ||
| And then they, they don't choose to be with that extremist group. | ||
| They choose not to be with those, and they take a very broad stroke side. | ||
| What's the solution to this? | ||
| Shut up extremists, we're going down the middle now. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| So it's somebody comes out with an extremist thing, and it's that same thing I said earlier. | ||
| I know what that is. | ||
| No, we're not doing that. | ||
| I think one of the most important things, and this is in our forthcoming book | ||
| about how to have impossible conversations, Peter and I just finished. | ||
| One of the most important things is to learn to disavow the extremists on your side. | ||
| So if you see yourself on the left, say, you know, those guys, they don't represent me | ||
| way off to the left. | ||
| I think I'm on the left, but I distinguish myself from them and learn how to articulate that. | ||
| And then the left can clean up its side. | ||
| You can get that main body of people on the left speaking out saying those, the 80% don't represent us. | ||
| here's what we really believe And on the right, the same thing. | ||
| If you're on the right, you say, you know what? | ||
| Fine, I'm on the right. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Those dudes way over there, these guys that want to dissolve the government and drown it in a bathtub, used to be the saying, right? | ||
| Shrink it to the size you can drown in a bathtub. | ||
| They don't represent me. | ||
| Okay, that goes too far. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| We need a society that functions. | ||
| That goes too far. | ||
| I have conservative values. | ||
| I have this, I have that. | ||
| But that goes too far. | ||
| And if you, then the right can start cleaning itself up. | ||
| Because right now, if the left tries to insist the right clean up, the right can't hear it | ||
| because it's an existential polarization. | ||
| See, it's interesting to me because I agree with you, obviously, on the left part, | ||
| that the left need, the liberals need to do that. | ||
| But to me, the right basically is doing that. | ||
| They're fighting constantly about these things because you've got healthy branches of Trump people and Never Trumpers and Libertarians. | ||
| There's actually some debate versus one side has the religious and the excommunicated. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think that's the case. | ||
| To provide some sort of groundwork. | ||
| That's kind of the substitution hypothesis, right? | ||
| And so my background for the last several years before I became a renegade feminist was... That should be your Twitter bio. | ||
| It is, actually. | ||
| Oh, that is your Twitter bio, right? | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, a renegade gender scholar. | ||
| There was something happening there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a renegade gender scholar. | ||
|
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Yeah, right, right, right. | |
| This is a substitution hypothesis. | ||
| The substitution hypothesis is important, and I think that... | ||
| You know, next time we have a conversation with Peterson or... Yeah, we should talk to him about that. | ||
| This is, I think, one of the things that people misunderstand. | ||
| So religious psychology was my thing, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's the scariest idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I know for a fact not only can we do this, but we are doing it. | ||
| People are starting to respectfully speak out in their classes. | ||
| People are starting to sign their names to petitions and letters of support. | ||
| And people are starting to genuinely attempt to be honest brokers of conversation | ||
| after a minimum of five years of feeling that they couldn't speak openly or they couldn't speak | ||
| freely. | ||
| So there's no question at all that the tide is turning and that something has changed in the air. | ||
| I think that the next steps forward are that not only do we continue to question within the | ||
| class, within the academic environment, but we also | ||
| do so in a way that's civil and polite and respectful. | ||
| We never want to lose that in our society. | ||
| And we've seen the consequences of that already. | ||
| So-- | ||
| Reason has been slapped around, and people feel, rightly so, that they haven't been able to speak out in a way that accords with their conscience. | ||
| And the step to get back to those values, I think, is to continue to attempt to be civil and have an honest conversation with somebody. | ||
| And if you're met with rage or anger, the response is not to meet someone with rage or anger. | ||
| I'll keep doing it if you guys keep doing it, fair? | ||
| We'll keep doing it. | ||
| We're not quitting. | ||
| All right, follow these guys on Twitter. | ||
| It's at ConceptualJames and at Peter Boghossian and we'll link to where you want me to link to one of the videos? | ||
| I think going to Mike Nena's YouTube channel is the place to go. | ||
| If you want to see what we're up to, what we've been up to, what we've done, what he's putting out, it's all on the same theme. | ||
| His YouTube channel is our hub and don't miss it. |
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