April 19, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is a sociologist, a physician, a professor at Yale University, and author of the new book, Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. | ||
| Nick Christakis, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me, Dave. | ||
| I am happy to have you here, sir, but I'm depressed that I have to start the show the way I sorta have to start the show, and I suspect you know how I have to start the show. | ||
| So, do you wanna set it up for me? | ||
| Well, I mean, we do just have to get this out. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean, I knew when the book was published. | ||
| I mean, I've been working the book for nine years and I knew when it was published that I would have to revisit those events from 2015, which, you know, were just a challenging period of my life. | ||
| Thankfully, in the past, I'm really glad to have it behind me. | ||
| But I recognize that. | ||
| So you tell whatever part of it you want to tell. | ||
| Okay, so you are and were a professor at Yale. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And this is in, I think, the fall of 2015? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Fall of 2015. | ||
| And your wife, Erica, who's also a professor of childhood development. | ||
| She was an instructor, but yes. | ||
| She basically wrote a piece That said, it was a defensive free speech, and it was sort of worked around the Halloween costume idea that, you know, you should wear what you want, but you can try to be respectful of people, but, you know, we shouldn't have some sort of top-down version where people, you know, administrators or professors are telling students what to wear. | ||
| You offered her a bit of a defense on that, and now I'll throw to the clip. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Okay, let's throw it to the clip. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't need to bend down. | |
| I'm not bending. | ||
|
unidentified
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What's your name? | |
| I do not want to shake your hand. | ||
| I do not respect you. | ||
| I hear that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm looking at the smirk on your face and I'm disgusted. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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I am sick. | |
| And I'm sick watching them argue with you. | ||
| We've been standing outside, literally, for at least five to six hours. | ||
| Between you and Holloway, between last night to now, we've been arguing with people who are not willing to be listened to for a long time and all I see from you is arrogance and ego. | ||
| I am sick looking at you. | ||
| I am disgusted watching Alex argue with you. | ||
| You are not listening. | ||
| You were disgusting! | ||
| *sips tea* *sips tea* | ||
| I don't think you understand that. | ||
| And before I wasn't, before I was not angry, per se, I was disappointed maybe? | ||
| I thought maybe there was room for an apology. | ||
| You've clearly told us that you do not plan to offer an apology for your words. | ||
| You left the meeting last night to go home and then tweet, do not interrupt me, to tweet from your Twitter and then the filament's Twitter. | ||
| You showed no remorse. | ||
| You tried to let your wife leave that conversation without having answered for herself! | ||
| That is disgusting! | ||
| That is sick! | ||
| And now- I wasn't angry before! | ||
| I was not angry before, but now I am actually angry, sir. | ||
| I really- Do not interrupt me. | ||
| I was not angry, and now I want your job to be taken from you! | ||
| I don't want you to have this job! | ||
| I am disgusted knowing that you work at Yale University, where I will get my degree! | ||
| Where I will look back and think I have to argue with you! | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Don't do it, sir. | ||
| Do not do it. | ||
| This is not the day. | ||
| You do not want to play this game with me. | ||
| Do you understand what I'm saying? | ||
| You don't want to play this game with me. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Understand that. | ||
| Look me in my face, first of all, and understand that you are such a disappointment to this university, to your students, to yourself, to the things that you claim to agree with. | ||
| You are... | ||
| You want free dialogue? | ||
| You want free speech? | ||
| This is how it works. | ||
| Someone speaks, you listen. | ||
| You do not cut them off. | ||
| You do not do these condescending gestures. | ||
| You do not smirk. | ||
| You look them in the face and you wait. | ||
| You wait until it is your turn. | ||
| Okay, so before we even dive into that, the second we played the clip, you let out a big exhale. | ||
| You're just not that interested in this anymore, or it's depressing to look back at? | ||
| Both are true. | ||
| I was in the courtyard for two hours and 15 minutes, from 4 to 6.15. | ||
| About an hour of footage has been released from five or six different vantage points. | ||
| You showed one clip that's typically not the clip that's shown. | ||
| So many people put stuff online. | ||
| You can piece together the whole hour between five and six. | ||
| For the first hour that I was out in the courtyard, I listened quietly to the students. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of stuff that that young woman said that's just factually wrong. | ||
| She's alluding to an event that occurred the night before at the Afro-American Cultural House at Yale, where there was a huge event with hundreds of students. | ||
| It had been announced at the beginning that we would have to leave that event. | ||
| At the conclusion, it was—I can't remember the precise timing, but I think it was scheduled from 6 to 8. | ||
| My wife had to teach a class from 7 to 9 in the evening, so she told her students she'd be late, and we'd stay from 6 to 8. | ||
| She did, in fact, speak to the crowd. | ||
| She had to leave to teach, and we had a student in the hospital, actually, that evening that I was responsible for, and that also was known. | ||
| So when she said that we tried to leave, that's not—that's false. | ||
| You know, I think that many of the students were swept up in a kind of a mob fervor. | ||
| I think they behaved badly. | ||
| They should have known better. | ||
| I think they were trying to assert power. | ||
| If I had a tool when I was that age that could get grown-ups into trouble, you know, probably I would just keep doing it non-stop, you know. | ||
| And they have found a tool, and they often are doing it non-stop. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And so I think what distressed me is I think at some point in the background of that footage that one of the administrators, actually the author, what happened is a man by the name of Burgewell Howard, had moved from Northwestern University to Yale | ||
| and had assumed a new position there. | ||
| And he had written an email—he had written a memo while at Northwestern | ||
| admonishing students not to wear offensive costumes. | ||
| And I should say for the record that many of the students that— | ||
| many of the costumes that he or anyone else would find offensive, | ||
| I, too, would find offensive. | ||
| I wouldn't like these costumes. | ||
| I'm well aware of the long history of racism in our society. | ||
| I'm well aware of the ways in which there's trafficking and certain cultural tropes that put down other groups. | ||
| I reject. | ||
| I have a very pro-immigrant policy. | ||
| I believe system. | ||
| I think that anyone can be an American. | ||
| I love the idea that we have open borders. | ||
| I mean, I have a whole set of beliefs that are around openness and welcome and inclusion. | ||
| Yeah, I am quite a lefty. | ||
| I am a lefty. | ||
| I'm left of center play. | ||
| I mean, I have some conservative ideas, some libertarian. | ||
| I think of myself as a classical liberal, and I think of myself as very pragmatic in policymaking. | ||
| So I like markets to address most allocation of goods, but I also am very concerned about market failures, and then I want government intervention. | ||
| So anyway, that man who then had moved to Yale, and then he took out of mothballs this email that he had sent at Northwestern five or ten years earlier, got a bunch of Yale administrators to sign it, and then sent it off. | ||
| And in it, he had links to approved and non-approved costumes. | ||
| The very costumes which were deemed to be offensive, in his email, there were links to lots of those ostensibly offensive costumes. | ||
| And the students, there had been a lot of conversation at the time The New York Times had a big piece, like the previous month, about the growing use of Halloween costume advice at American colleges. | ||
| So it was in the Zeitgeist. | ||
| This was the third—his email was the third email that had been sent out telling students, giving them advice. | ||
| So in my wife's class, many of the students in the class and other students in the college where we—the subpart of Yale that we were responsible for—had told her that they felt this was very infantilizing. | ||
| they didn't really need advice on what to wear. And so my wife from a | ||
| developmental perspective wrote a response to this email which itself had | ||
| been was signed by 13 administrators. It didn't, it was framed as guidance but it | ||
| sort of had the color of law. And so she wrote a response saying, and her | ||
| intellectual point was, not wear whatever you want. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Her intellectual point was, do you students at Yale in your 20s, early late teens, early 20s, really need older adults to tell you what to wear, provide you guidance? | ||
| You should think about that and decide whether you really, and apparently many students did want such guidance. | ||
| And so then I was, then thereafter, then all hell broke loose and I was in that courtyard and did the best I could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of, the reason we chose that clip was because there is the other more famous clip of the girl really berating you. | ||
| There were many, many. | ||
| There were dozens. | ||
| That was the one that I think we showed here, and I think that's the most viral. | ||
| But I thought that one was interesting because the angle was a little different, and you could see some of the other kids, and you know, either tears or the look of horror, all of these things, when you actually didn't do anything. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's another whole topic. | ||
| I mean, many people have analyzed those events, and honestly, I don't know if I have anything to add to those analyses. | ||
| I think that the thing that was very interesting to me So one of the ideas that I've been thinking about for a long time is this tension between our individuality and our groupishness. | ||
| And we have evolved to, first of all, it's a very interesting idea, we've evolved to be individuals. | ||
| So we humans have unique identities. | ||
| So we have unique faces. | ||
| So you can look at a sea of people and can tell who's who. | ||
| And not only do we have the ability to signal our uniqueness, we use our faces for that, but we have the cognitive apparatus to detect that uniqueness. | ||
| So you can have a lot of brain power that you allocate to tell who's who. | ||
| So this ability to be individuals is crucial for our ability to function in groups. | ||
| It's very paradoxical because you need a capacity to tell who's my offspring, who's my friend, who do I reciprocate kindness to, who do I cooperate with, who's my enemy, all of these things. | ||
| So all of these capacities of individuality are crucial to our collective expression. | ||
| our ability to live together. | ||
| But equally, we have this desire to surrender ourselves to the group, | ||
| to do something called to de-individuate, to form a part of a collectivity, to suppress our | ||
| individual desires, which also allows us to work together. | ||
| But the irony is when you get too much of that, you get mobs. | ||
| You get panics. | ||
| You get, you know, all kinds of collective phenomena that are destructive rather than constructive. | ||
| So when I was in the crowd, when I was in that mob, I knew what was happening. | ||
| I could tell. | ||
| So one of the things I started doing was I started asking people, What's your name? | ||
| And I was trying to connect to them person to person, saying, you know, Hi, I'm Nicholas. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| So you're a person and I'm a person. | ||
| You're not a part of this mob. | ||
| You're a human being and I'm a human being. | ||
| And in fact, the one thing that happened that is an intellectual idea that's part of this book that I've been working on for 10 years, but that also I made in the heat of the moment, is in the moment I said to the students, I said that I believe in our common humanity. | ||
| I believe that even though this person and this person is superficially different than me, nevertheless we can talk to each other. | ||
| We all have life experiences. | ||
| We're human beings. | ||
| And then if you don't believe that, if you don't believe we have a common humanity, which I see as a wonderful thing. | ||
| Yeah, well that's what the book is about. | ||
| Yes, because I'm an optimist, for the love of God, I'm an optimist. | ||
| If you don't believe in our common humanity, why are you even trying to talk to me? | ||
| And the students jeered. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They jeered. | ||
| It's on film. | ||
| They jeered. | ||
| And I honestly, I think that's one of the most depressing things that's happened that I've ever seen, actually, is that the Yale students in the 21st century would jeer at what I regard to be a fundamental, humane, wonderful claim about human beings, is that we have a common humanity. | ||
| All right, so I know you don't want to spend the whole time talking about this. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But I think a lot of this does segue to your book for reasons that you just laid out. | ||
| I was trying to do that. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Very clever, very clever. | ||
| Here's some tidbits you could use. | ||
| Now watch what I'm going to do. | ||
| I'm going to kind of get us there and then bring us back. | ||
| But that look that you're talking about, when you say that, like we have to be able to share common humanity, I've been there, too. | ||
| I mean, I face these mobs, too, and what I find is there's an actual look they have in their face where the individual that you just spoke about is gone. | ||
| Did you think there was anything, so I guess there's really, in that case, for the people that are watching this that think that one day they're gonna go against the mob, is there any other advice you would have for them on how to do it? | ||
| Because that doesn't always work. | ||
| I mean, saying, I've done that, where I've said, I'm standing right in front of you. | ||
| I'm listening to you, yes. | ||
| My name's Dave. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it doesn't, it doesn't work that way. | ||
| Well, I think that, I think that, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, there's that scene in Lord of the Rings where Aragorn rushes the gates, you know, of Mordor. | ||
| And I, of course, love those movies, and I don't know if I would be capable of such bravery. | ||
| But intellectually, I definitely am. | ||
| That is to say, I'm not easily cowed. | ||
| And I have spent my life training myself to think as clearly as I can, to look at evidence, to collect evidence. | ||
| I'm a scientist. | ||
| I'm an empiricist. | ||
| So in the case of a mob, I don't think I would yield to a mob intellectually. | ||
| Now physically, you know, if they're throwing bricks at you, it's a different thing. | ||
| But I think you can... Which often that threat is always there, even if they're not holding a weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| The threat is right underneath. | ||
| It's a dangerous situation, I would agree, but... | ||
| Mass movements are always dangerous, but my point is that I think that if you can keep your calm, you can think clearly about what you're saying. | ||
| Also, if you've thought about these ideas before, in the cool of the day, so it's not the heat of the moment, say, like, I've really thought about these ideas. | ||
| This is not just a sudden heat of passion. | ||
| I thought about this topic or this point. | ||
| Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be a political point. | ||
| It can be a scientific point or something. | ||
| Then when you're pressed, you know, you can say, you know, I'm listening to you. | ||
| Here's what I think. | ||
| Okay, what do you think? | ||
| I think you can, I won't say you can win the battle of ideas, but you can at least fight it well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was the administration's response after this whole thing? | ||
| Well, I think the administration faced a difficult challenge in deciding what to do. | ||
| Many people have commented on what they did or didn't do. | ||
| I'm not sure I want to go into it. | ||
| It took them quite a while to come to release any kind of public statement in support of us. | ||
| So, and, you know, many members of the administration, junior members, were actually involved. | ||
| So, in the crowd that day, there were four administrators, actually, whose others have since identified. | ||
| But, you know, I don't think it was Yale at its best, and the students were not at their best, and I was not at my best. | ||
| I did my best, but, you know, I think I could have done even better. | ||
| So as someone that then has lived through it, where did this go wrong on college campuses? | ||
| Because for the past couple years, every time I see one of these stories, I think either, well, I used to think, oh, this is the end of it. | ||
| Now people will really get it. | ||
| Like I remember the one with you from the other video clip that we didn't show that people have seen, it was like, this is so patently absurd. | ||
| Maybe this'll finally be the wake-up call. | ||
| I've now come to believe that the wake-up call isn't coming anytime soon, sadly. | ||
| Well, I think this is a complicated topic. | ||
| I see, you know, this was not my area of expertise. | ||
| I'm a natural and social scientist. | ||
| I run a lab with computer scientists and molecular biologists and sociologists and evolutionary biologists and we work around the world. | ||
| We do all kinds of stuff. | ||
| So I have always been committed to liberal principles, including to free speech. | ||
| When I was at Harvard, before I moved to Yale in 2013, my wife and I came to the defense of minority students who were having their speech rights squelched on campus. | ||
| So I'm committed to these ideas, but it wasn't the most central part of my life. | ||
| And I'm not an expert like John Haidt or Greg Lukianofar. | ||
| However, so I see conflicting evidence. | ||
| I agree with you that there are a lot of these salient cases which Which they weren't before. | ||
| And Jonathan feels that they're still rising, and they have their own theories, Jonathan and Greg, about why. | ||
| I see other evidence that looks at surveys of college students and finds that they are no more or less likely to want to suppress the speech of others than adults, than older adults. | ||
| It's very tempting to silence people who you don't agree with, right? | ||
| I mean, everyone wants to do that. | ||
| Or, I don't, I want to talk to them and persuade them. | ||
| It's very tempting to like, you know, Shut the anti-vaxxers up. | ||
| Prevent them from speaking. | ||
| But that doesn't win, right? | ||
| That's not a victory. | ||
| What we need to do is persuade them. | ||
| Why do you think this? | ||
| So if you compare college students to adults, some evidence suggests they're not more sanctimonious. | ||
| Some evidence suggests they are. | ||
| Some polls, if you look at disinvitations, they're clearly rising, but they're still small. | ||
| So the critics say there's a rising level of disinvitations, which I deplore. | ||
| Can I go on a digression? | ||
| Yeah, go. | ||
| Let me be very clear, because there's a lot of sloppy thinking about this. | ||
| Nobody has a right to speak on a college campus. | ||
| So I'm not claiming that anyone has a right. | ||
| But once a group on campus invites you to speak, you cannot yield to the mob for a disinvitation. | ||
| It totally destroys the university. | ||
| It's the antithesis of what a university should be like. | ||
| So you can protest that person, but you cannot have disinvitations. | ||
| That's just ridiculous. | ||
| So those have been rising. | ||
| So the critics say, look, disinvitations have been rising. | ||
| But the defendants say, yes, but millions of talks take place and nobody objects. | ||
| So it's a tiny minority. | ||
| So to answer your question, I don't think we're beyond the hump, but I'm not the expert to tell you how bad is it. | ||
| Does it say something about the state of liberalism or in a way that this was sort of the end conclusion of liberalism, I hate to say it, that it would get sort of usurped by progressivism or whatever the new collectivist idea was? | ||
| In other words, liberals are Tolerant liberals generally are live and let live, so it was sort of fertile ground for people with bad ideas to rush in and kind of take over, where perhaps conservatives are a little harder to get in at. | ||
| Yeah, but conservatives have their own political failings, right? | ||
| They'll move in lockstep, so you can get them to organize an inquisition, right? | ||
| So, you know, it's not like we get Yeah, I'm not comparing either one. | ||
| I'm just saying that there's a weakness of liberalism, which is very sad for me to say. | ||
| The openness is exactly what invites the radicalism within. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, I think this is, I mean, I think, you know, the open society and its enemies, you know, I think there is a sense in which you can use the tools to destroy the foundation. | ||
| But I also think, and this is one of the arguments that I made, and I actually believe politically, which is that these very core commitments to freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, which the students were using right now, they were also engaging in harassment, which is a different topic. | ||
| And because I was an actor in those events, I didn't feel at liberty to help the students see the difference between freedom of expression and harassment, right? | ||
| Yeah, somehow I don't think they would have been like, oh, let's sit down and listen to him as he explains. | ||
| Explains why, you know, so you can, so the classic example is the, you know, is that, you know, you can, you can march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, but you can't stop in front of my house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because, you know, that is a threat. | ||
| the political expression in a public place is not. | ||
| So the students-- so I lost my train of thought. | ||
| Where was I going? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, basically the idea that... Oh, liberalism. | |
| So these are core, non-corrupt judiciaries, impartial separation of powers, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. | ||
| I regard these as foundational principles of our democracy, which are essential. | ||
| Liberal principles. | ||
| Yes, yes, liberal principles, which the students in some ways were using, right? | ||
| Except to call for people to be fired for expressing their ideas on a collared campus is using these principles, but to illiberal ends. | ||
| And this is what you're asking, I think, which is what you're saying is can these tools be used to like degrade the... And the answer is yes, there is a kind of threat from within, but I still wouldn't abandon the principles. | ||
| And I don't wanna abandon the principles either. | ||
| Okay, there we go. | ||
| You wanna shift to the book or you wanna keep going? | ||
| No, no, no, please. | ||
| Please, please. | ||
| I would much rather talk about this book. | ||
| All right, so it's called, Blueprint, The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. | ||
| So let's start with the tag there. | ||
| So we actually live in a good society? | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| I thought we live in the worst society ever and I thought capitalism is evil and the patriarchy and so many terrible things and we've done horrible things. | ||
| But you say this is good. | ||
| I'm appalled. | ||
| Please explain this controversial statement. | ||
| Yes, okay, so I think there has been a long tradition in the sciences and in the public domain as well of focusing on the bad side of human nature, on our propensity for tribalism or selfishness or violence or hatred. | ||
| But equally, our natural selection, our evolution, has equipped us and shaped us for love, and friendship, and cooperation, and teaching, and all these other wonderful qualities. | ||
| And in fact, I would argue that these good qualities and their benefits must necessarily have outweighed the bad qualities and their costs. | ||
| Because if I came near you, I'm now speaking over evolutionary time, over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, if I came near you and you killed me, or filled me with lies, or otherwise injured me, I would be better off living separately. | ||
| So the fact that we live socially suggests that, on balance, the benefits of a connected life must outweigh the costs. | ||
| So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to push back at these claims that humans are inexorably evil. | ||
| And these arguments, I should say, are supplementary to the body of ideas that Steven Pinker and others have been advancing about the sweep of history. | ||
| So, where Steven is interested in historical forces, I'm interested... I think the book's over there somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, and Amy's, I see, and a bunch of others. | ||
| Yeah, there's Steven, Amy, all my friends. | ||
| Neil, Neil. | ||
| The whole crew. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| So you want to be a mathematician. | ||
| Yes, please put me over there with those guys. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| You're like some of those guys. | ||
| Yes, in Shermer's book, I can see. | ||
| Yeah, these are great. | ||
| OK, so, yeah, the moral arc. | ||
| OK, great. | ||
| I'll make sure you have a copy. | ||
| OK, but anyway, so... | ||
| So Stephen is arguing that basically since the Enlightenment, with the philosophical principles and the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment, the world has been getting better. | ||
| And he's unquestionably right. | ||
| We are safer, less violent, healthier, live longer, wealthier, better off in every possible dimension. | ||
| And that is largely a product of historical forces. | ||
| But what I'm arguing—and technological forces—but what I'm arguing is that we don't just have to look to our history to find this goodness. | ||
| We can look to our prehistory. | ||
| And actually, over tens of thousands of years, we've been shaped to be good. | ||
| We have been shaped to be able to live together in productive ways, in good ways—actually, in morally good ways, I even argue. | ||
| So they both work synergistically, these two forces. | ||
| And in fact, I would even argue that these historical and technological forces are actually just a thin veneer on top of much more powerful forces. | ||
| So is there a bizarre evolutionary force that inclines us to focus on the negative? | ||
| Oh no, that's a good question. | ||
| I suspect if I had to... I get one per show. | ||
| No, no, no! | ||
| I would say... | ||
| Right, because if you ask the average person are things good or bad, people generally tend to be bad. | ||
| We watch local news that is all terrible news. | ||
| We're conditioned, sort of, so there must be something that's leading to that. | ||
| Yes, I think that, I know this has been studied. | ||
| I'm trying to quickly call the literature to my mind. | ||
| If I had to speculate on what the conclusions of that literature would be, it would be that there's more advantage to paying attention to bad news than good news. | ||
| That the fitness advantage, the survival advantage, the advantage to your well-being, From noting a fire in your vicinity, or a predator, or a killer, is more advantageous to you than noting on average the presence of water, or a food, or a kindly person. | ||
| So I think that's probably why we're hardwired to be pessimistic. | ||
| We're not. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| So we have both pessimistic and optimistic inclinations. | ||
| And of course, there's inter-individual variation. | ||
| People vary in these personality traits. | ||
| But I think, overall, we are definitely inclined to the good. | ||
| So when you described yourself as an optimist before, if you had to try to parse that out between what you think human nature is versus upbringing and everything else, could you give it some percentages? | ||
| I mean, were your parents optimists? | ||
| So that then pushed those ideas to you? | ||
| I think it's important not to conflate personality traits, which I am an optimist, I think, by personality. | ||
| With sort of, how to put this exactly, the kind of characteristics of our species. | ||
| So I think we, for example, we're a cooperative species. | ||
| We cooperate with strangers, which is very unusual. | ||
| Other animals will cooperate with kin, but we also cooperate with non-kin. | ||
| It's rare in the animal kingdom. | ||
| So I don't know how you would describe that. | ||
| I wouldn't call that optimism exactly. | ||
| I would call that something good, cooperativity. | ||
| That's a characteristic of our species. | ||
| And then above and beyond that, we also have personalities. | ||
| Some of us are optimistic, some of us are not. | ||
| But all of us, for example, love our mates. | ||
| So here's an interesting idea. | ||
| Why do we do that? | ||
| Other animals have sex with each other. | ||
| We're not the only animals that do this. | ||
| But we also love each other. | ||
| We form sentimental attachments to the people we're having sex with. | ||
| We also tend to be monogamous. | ||
| Now, by monogamous, I don't mean social monogamy or even heterosexual monogamy. | ||
| I mean, we form a long-term attachment to the person we're having sex with. | ||
| Whether it's polygynous, polyandrous, straight or gay, doesn't matter. | ||
| We love the person we're with. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why do we evolve this capacity? | ||
| Well, I talk a little bit about that. | ||
| Why do that? | ||
| And it's universal. | ||
| Everywhere in the world you go, no matter what the marital system, people love their partners. | ||
| Incidentally, unless we get too proud of ourselves. | ||
| Birds, 90% of bird species are also monogamous, but Anyway, so the point is that there are all these qualities we have, or we befriend each other. | ||
| Why do we do that? | ||
| We don't just reproduce with each other. | ||
| We form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species. | ||
| Namely, we have friends. | ||
| This is very rare in the animal kingdom. | ||
| We do it. | ||
| Certain primates do it. | ||
| Whales, orcas, and dolphins do it. | ||
| And elephants do it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, there's a reason we do it, and it's a wonderful quality of our species. | ||
| So do you think societies should be organized to help these institutions? | ||
| I mean, this is where I could throw out Jordan Peterson's enforced monogamy line. | ||
| And, you know, people had a field day with that, and all he really was saying was that societies should kind of look at marriage as a decent thing, because it's a foundational thing that will help you build a family and help you build a full life. | ||
| Do you agree that that's part of what would lead to a good society, or what should be instilled Well, I talk about that in the book. | ||
| What I talk about is that we should be very wary of efforts to engineer society in opposition to our evolved proclivities. | ||
| So, societies that try, for example, to prevent loving attachments. | ||
| I talk about communes, for example. | ||
| Communes have a problem because in a commune, they want you to feel loyalty to the group, to the commune, so therefore feeling a love for your partner is a threat. | ||
| So, many communes have gone to opposite extremes, both of which are attempting to solve the same problem. | ||
| So on the one hand, you have the shakers, who say, no sex, no loving attachment. | ||
| On the other hand, you have communes that say polyamory, everyone loves everybody, or can have sex with everyone. | ||
| Both of those are attempting to sever an individualistic connection between two people. | ||
| And the same thing happens in Eastern Germany, where they try to sever connections with friends, right? | ||
| My friends could be spying on me or ratting me out to the Stasi. | ||
| Wait, it's worth sitting there for a second, because it's a fascinating idea. | ||
| The same force at work, whether you say to people, don't have any relation, is actually the same force as have relations with everyone. | ||
| I mean, that's not something that the average person is thinking about, but if you're just having relations with everybody, you're actually having relations with nobody. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So both of those extreme strategies are tackling the same problem, which is the threat to the collectivity of individual relationships, whether it's with your partner, your sexual partner, or as I was about to say, with your friends or others. | ||
| So collectivist societies will often have everyone call you comrade. | ||
| So everyone is your friend. | ||
| Same as having polyamory, right? | ||
| It's like the polyamorous equivalent to everyone dresses the same, we all call each other friend, no individual identity. | ||
| It's a kind of science fiction dystopia, actually. | ||
| So the argument I make is that we should be very wary of efforts to engineer society in opposition to our interests. | ||
| They're bound to fail, is my argument. | ||
| Now, there are brief moments of time and certain cultures where you can apply a tremendous cultural force and suppress some of these innate tendencies. | ||
| So, for example, I talk about the Na. | ||
| So, if you look at societies around the world, the expression of love for your partner is seen universally, except perhaps with one exception, which is the Na people in the Himalayas, Who have organized society around brief sexual encounters. | ||
| You're not supposed to love your partner. | ||
| And so this is a matrilineal society, the women stay at home, the men will go out at night, basically cruising for dates. | ||
| So they'll be like, and it's not uncommon for every woman to have had sex with every man in the village. | ||
| And the men will be knocking on the door, take me tonight, take me, and she'll pick this guy tonight, and they'll have a brief fling, maybe he can come back, and at any moment, either of them can break off the relationship. | ||
| There's a whole complex cultural edifice. | ||
| Marco Polo describes this when he gets to China. | ||
| The Chinese government thought it was sapping productivity, that everyone was having sex all the time. | ||
| They were saying, we need to stop this. | ||
| They tried to stamp it out, but it still has existed, this cultural set of rules. | ||
| But even in this society, there are people who want the forbidden fruit having a committed relationship and who flee for because | ||
| they want to be with each other forsaking all others so even this society cannot | ||
| fully suppress this desire for love and I look also at friendship and show that | ||
| there are some societies very few which seem to have no experience of this | ||
| notion of friendship but those societies are extremely rare and also have | ||
| certain idiosyncrasies So, would the simple way of saying that be that there's basically an evolutionary force that no matter how far you go to one extreme, it has to sort of push you | ||
| Yes, or that it's extremely difficult to entirely suppress. | ||
| You can through force of arms, you know, you can slaughter populations, you can, you know, you can have very elaborate sort of autocratic governments, you can have procedures or other highly evolved stylized cultures that have caught into this. | ||
| For example, play is universal in children, and there's one society, the Baming people, | ||
| who really think play is awful, and really try to suppress the innate tendency | ||
| of children to play. | ||
| So there's very little play among children in that society. | ||
| But these societies are rare, and they require very large cultural forces | ||
| to suppress these innate tendencies. | ||
| You know, I was thinking as we've been talking about this that there's something also sort of related | ||
| to our political situation right now about this, that it seems like we're sort of going off the deep end. | ||
| I would sadly argue more on the left at the moment. | ||
| But I guess if I'm an optimist here, and I describe myself as a world-weary optimist. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That you're saying at some point, and whether Jonathan Haidt says it's two years down the road or whatever it is, that at some point it will eventually have to rebound, right? | ||
| Yes, for sure. | ||
| Because what is it if it doesn't rebound? | ||
| Then that's just... | ||
| No, I don't think Jordan Peterson would say it's just chaos, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think, I think, but I mean, I can't, I think we're in for another, I think it'll be about five or ten years. | ||
| Our society is gonna go through a long period of acrimony. | ||
| Now, I have to say, I'm not, you know, sort of, I don't have a whiggish view of history, like, oh, in the olden days, you know, everything was great. | ||
| I mean, let's not forget, we had colonialism, we had slavery, we had anti-immigrant sentiment forever and Well, they couldn't vote. | ||
| Yes, women couldn't vote. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They didn't have gay rights. | ||
| So there's always been this incredible disconnect between our wonderful principles in our society. | ||
| All men are created equal. | ||
| The Bill of Rights can bring tears to your eyes if you read it. | ||
| And the fact that we didn't always. | ||
| But we are, I think, getting better. | ||
| This is the progressive in me. | ||
| You know, society, we're getting better and better. | ||
| We are expanding the franchise to more and more people. | ||
| We are opening up our democracy. | ||
| We are extending rights. | ||
| We are extending liberties. | ||
| Now, of course, the libertarian will say the government doesn't grant liberties. | ||
| We are protecting liberties! | ||
| Or, you know, we are trying to stay out, but... You took it right out of my mouth. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I agree with that, actually. | ||
| I don't think the liberties are for the governments to grant. | ||
| But, anyway. | ||
| So, but I think our society isn't getting better in these regards. | ||
| I don't think you could say otherwise. | ||
| So I think that we will get there. | ||
| It's just going to take some time. | ||
| So how do you navigate through a messy time like this? | ||
| If you're someone that's just kind of awake to these ideas and you wanna be able to express your individuality, but there is a mob or an amorphous machine that is silencing things. | ||
| Or as you just said before, that you don't want a society that's gonna push down things that were sort of always accepted for a long time. | ||
| I'm slightly paraphrasing. | ||
| But so right now, it's like, if you call a man a man, they'll tell you you're a transphobe. | ||
| These basic things that seem now, we hear about them constantly as if this is just the most important thing happening. | ||
| No, I think there are other, this is the other thing, I think that, I think there are certain segments of Twitter and certain segments of our society that have made these particular topics and others very central. | ||
| And everyone, you know, there are people who want to, who are concerned about climate change, there are people who, as I am, there are people who are concerned about the private prison industry, as I am. | ||
| These are two hot topics at Harvard right now. | ||
| So there was a heckler situation where the president of Harvard was not allowed to speak about, he was at an educational conference, and these groups that were opposed to private ownership of prisons, which I am, and concern about climate change, which I also am, | ||
| they shut the president down, which is ridiculous. | ||
| And why did they shut him down? | ||
| Because they thought he wasn't paying enough attention to their concerns. | ||
| So you have this kind of rule by minorities, right? | ||
| Where a vocal minority can hijack the conversation about whatever particular topic they have. | ||
| So everyone's entitled to have their topics of interest, but that doesn't mean you have to go along with it, right? | ||
| You can have your own ideas about the topic, or you can switch conversation. | ||
| Like, I'm not interested in talking about trans rights today. | ||
| Today I'd like to talk about how motor vehicle accidents are one of the leading killers, or the opioid crisis is another important dilemma. | ||
| Or the guns. | ||
| You know, we have more people are killed by guns in our society per capita than any society in the world, almost. | ||
| It's craziness. | ||
| So all of these are different. | ||
| People are different. | ||
| Anyway, the point I'm making is that if you wish to engage in a conversation with someone about a topic they feel strongly about, I think it's incumbent on you to listen to their arguments, think, And then respond. | ||
| So do you think there's an evolutionary reason that people either basically become sort of government people or freedom people? | ||
| So the way you were laying out that argument a second ago, it's like you were telling me your progressive sort of cred, which I have to do all the time, but then you basically said, yeah, but all these things can be accomplished by libertarianism if you don't believe that it's the government job to give these things. | ||
| So that basically it sort of shows why The progressives are the ones screaming on campus all the time, and in larger society, because they think the system can be perfected to get it however they want it, where the libertarians, I think, just say, I don't believe the system. | ||
| I'm very wary of government power, right. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think the system can be perfect, so let's just keep it out of our lives. | ||
| I mean, I think you know which idea I'm more sympathetic to, but do you think there's a reason that that occurs? | ||
| I think, yes, okay, so there are a set of ideas about where do, where do, so the content | ||
| of political beliefs, like whether for example you believe in, | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| The belief you have about a particular topic is, of course, not evolutionarily shaped. | ||
| But there is a kind of evolutionary shaping to whether or not you are more conservative or liberal. | ||
| Right, so that's what I'm trying to get at. | ||
| Yeah, so some people are more rule-abiding. | ||
| For example, children that listen to their parents might be more likely to survive. | ||
| So listening to your parents is actually a good survival strategy. | ||
| On the other hand, too much obedience is also bad. | ||
| You can be led like a lemming off a cliff, so occasionally you need to not listen to what everyone else is doing. | ||
| So both are advantageous, and we're equipped with both abilities, and there's variation across people, and it's a complicated topic, so nobody thinks there's like a genetic background to being a Democrat or a Republican, but there is evidence that there is a kind of genetic predisposition to certain political polls. | ||
| But what I would say, though, is that we live in a plural democracy, so you're going to have to compromise. | ||
| You know, if you're a libertarian who thinks X, Y, and Z, and you're going to be in a society with other people who think different things, we have decided to come together as a people and vote to resolve our disputes. | ||
| And, by the way, not just to vote. | ||
| But to educate ourselves and to teach each other stuff, right? | ||
| To communicate, right? | ||
| The founders recognized that in order for us to get to the wisest decision, we have to have free and open conversation. | ||
| Well, I think that's why so much of what I do here, of course you do, but that's why so many people are so concerned about this at the college layer. | ||
| You know, I'll hear some of our critics We'll say, oh, they're just obsessed with what's happening on colleges and they're handing over all this power to the mob on colleges. | ||
| But then every day we see it then leak out. | ||
| And also these people will be the leaders of tomorrow. | ||
| That's why I don't think it's overestimating it, even if it is a small minority, which we agree. | ||
| The amount of power they can extend seems to be way disproportionate to the numbers. | ||
| Well, for sure I would agree with that. | ||
| I would agree that the vast majority of students on any college campus just want to get a good education. | ||
| And many of them have other political concerns other than some of the ones that are getting a lot of attention. | ||
| So, you know, even, for example, even with the, you know, so, you know, people are concerned about the opioid crisis. | ||
| They're concerned about gun violence. | ||
| They're concerned about police brutality. | ||
| They're concerned about the climate change. | ||
| They're concerned about all of these issues, which I think weren't concerned. | ||
| We can perfect our society. | ||
| We can be better than we are. | ||
| Do you think we can perfect it? | ||
| I agree we can be better than we are, but do you think we can perfect it? | ||
| No, I don't think we can have a perfect society, but I think we can make it better than it is. | ||
| So by perfect, I mean improve. | ||
| So I think we can make our society better and better. | ||
| I don't think we're done yet. | ||
| I think there's still deficits. | ||
| For example, our spending is crazy. | ||
| I mean, I think we can do better fiscally. | ||
| You know, I think we have a carceral state. | ||
| I think this number is right. | ||
| On a per capita basis, we have as many people in prisons as Stalinist Russia. | ||
| I mean, it's insane. | ||
| Millions of Americans are in prison, and it's way out of proportion to other countries. | ||
| There are lots of things about our society. | ||
| We have century-long heights of income inequality in our society. | ||
| There's a big debate about whether that is an unavoidable side effect of growth. | ||
| Everyone is better off, so what do we care if the income is unequally distributed? | ||
| But I think, I tend to agree with the critics that are concerned that this level of inequality is not sustainable to have a common wheel, to like have a sense that everyone is a part of the society. | ||
| We've had no income growth in the middle, like the median American has seen in a generation has seen no growth in wages. | ||
| Right, so the bottom actually has raised, and we've watched the top go bananas, but the middle basically... No, the bottom hasn't even gone up that much either. | ||
| Well, let me put it this way. | ||
| They have absolutely gone up in living standards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right, so like a poor American today is vastly better off than a poor American a generation ago. | ||
| But in terms of wage growth, there's been very little growth, my understanding of statistics. | ||
| And most of the accumulation of wealth in the last generation has gone to the top, top 1%, top 0.1%. | ||
| Anyway, there's a debate about why that happened, a technological advance, do we have the same thing during the Industrial Revolution? | ||
| These are important, deep ideas which, as a society, we should be debating and be discussing. | ||
| What's the best for our society? | ||
| Anyway, these are all much more important topics, in my view, and have much more bearing on the well-being of our society than a lot of the other crap that gets so much attention. | ||
| So what's the evolutionary reason for that? | ||
| I mean, your previous book was about social media, right? | ||
| And our connectivity, so there's gotta be some link there. | ||
| I mean, and it sort of gets back to what I was saying earlier about depressing local news. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'm trying to talk about things that I think are important. | ||
| You know, I'm doing my part as best I can. | ||
| Who's done a society in a more quote-unquote good way than we have right now? | ||
| So, the book—so I don't—I'm not—it's not a work of history, so I'm not—I don't | ||
| primarily talk about, like, the last 200 or even 2,000 years of human evolution or experience. | ||
| I'm much more interested in the long arc of our history. | ||
| And if you look at forager societies around the world, as I do, and you look at their qualities, you will see that again and again these societies have these desirable properties. | ||
| There's variation, of course, in how cooperative they are, and there's variation in marital systems, and there's variation in sustenance systems. | ||
| There's a lot of variation, but also there's a lot of commonality. | ||
| And those common features, I argue, are universal. | ||
| See, here's the other argument. | ||
| So the argument is that there are these universal qualities that are shared across all societies. | ||
| They are shaped by our evolution. | ||
| They're not just a product of historical forces. | ||
| Can you just list out a couple of them again? | ||
| Yeah, so love, friendship, cooperation. | ||
| We're a cooperative species. | ||
| You'll be kind to a stranger on the first, you know, teaching. | ||
| The fact that we teach each other stuff, which Actually, it's the ultimate source of all our wealth and well-being. | ||
| The fact that we can accumulate knowledge and distribute it across time and place, so I can tell people far away something. | ||
| And when I'm born, I benefit from all the other knowledge that has been produced for the hundreds of thousands of years before me. | ||
| It's astonishing, actually. | ||
| And I would again argue this is why what's happening on colleges is such a concern. | ||
| I would argue with that. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| There's a connection there. | ||
| Our capacity to teach and to create environments in which we foster teaching and learning are crucial. | ||
| Anyway, also mild hierarchy. | ||
| We are a species that we cannot survive with no hierarchy. | ||
| We need some leaders, and I discussed that, but we also don't like too much hierarchy. | ||
| So when you get too autocratic a power, the guys down below band together and basically kill. | ||
| So Richard Wrangham has been making this argument that we self-domesticated as a species, that over millennia, bands of weaker members would say, you know, that guy's too powerful, and he's getting all the dates, and we're gonna kill him. | ||
| And basically they did. | ||
| So we got more peaceful as time went by is one of the ideas. | ||
| Mild hierarchy, in-group bias. | ||
| So some tribalism is unavoidable in human beings. | ||
| This capacity for identity that we discussed at the beginning. | ||
| These are all qualities. | ||
| So identity, love, friendship, social networks, mild hierarchy, in-group bias, teaching and social learning. | ||
| These are seen everywhere and they lie in, I believe, at the core of a good society. | ||
| And institutions Try to suppress those at their own peril. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How can you be, sort of have a healthy dose of in-group preference without starting to fall into the trap of identity politics? | ||
| So for example, you're Greek, I assume. | ||
| You grew up in a Greek family. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I love Greek food. | ||
| My best child friend growing up is Greek. | ||
| We're still great friends. | ||
| I love Greek culture and the way they speak. | ||
| And the interest in intellectualism and I love feta cheese and all of those things. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And you could open a Greek restaurant as far as I'm concerned, and I wouldn't object. | ||
| That'd be totally fine with me. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's the most controversial thing you've said. | |
| Yes, I know. | ||
| That poor girl. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
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Opening up a Chinese restaurant without being Chinese and now they're coming after her. | |
| Not just that. | ||
| There was the person in Oregon that had a Mexican restaurant. | ||
| Yes, there's so many examples. | ||
| Unbelievable, so how can you say love a call? | ||
| I just told you all the reasons I love your culture, but let's pretend Yes, let's say it's roughly the same for you about your own culture How can you embrace all of those things without falling into the trap of identity politics because I think that's yeah So I think where a lot of people are at these days, okay? | ||
| So I have a couple of ideas in response that the first thing I would say is is that that this is one of the both the most It's still not totally clear how we evolved to have this | ||
| capacity. | ||
| It's felt that this in-group bias, this tribalism that we have, was crucial to our ability to | ||
| cooperate, that the ability to draw a distinction between us and them, that the challenge, the | ||
| problem that this ability that we evolved. | ||
| So whether we cooperate with each other and whether we are xenophobic or tribalistic or | ||
| draw distinctions between us and them, and this property, this tribalism property, is | ||
| a property that reduces the scale of interactions. | ||
| So instead of you having to cooperate with everybody... | ||
| You only cooperate with your guys. | ||
| And this is innate in human beings. | ||
| And it is felt that this ability to draw a distinction between us and them was crucial in the emergence of the very ability to cooperate with other people. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So they're tied. | ||
| They're connected to each other. | ||
| What's depressing is, is it necessary to hate the other group? | ||
| Why can't you just love your own group? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So why could you be indifferent to the other group? | ||
| Or even admire it and say, that's them. | ||
| They're not us. | ||
| We like them. | ||
| Or we're indifferent to them. | ||
| Why do we have to kill them? | ||
| Where does the killing part come from? | ||
| And this is complicated. | ||
| We don't exactly know where the hostility comes, but we tend to see this hostility. | ||
| So, for example, there are famous experiments that have been done with little toddlers. | ||
| You can randomly assign toddlers to different t-shirts. | ||
| You can test that the toddlers understand that this was random, that there was no merit to whether they got the yellow t-shirt or the green t-shirt. | ||
| And yet, as soon as you give them the t-shirts, the yellow t-shirt kids say, those green t-shirt children, they shouldn't have toys. | ||
| They're bad children. | ||
| They don't deserve, you know, anything. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| This is called the minimal group experiment. | ||
| So with the most trivial of interventions, you can elicit in us this dislike of the other. | ||
| This is not the only tool that evolution has given us to live together, this ability to draw the boundary between us and them. | ||
| There are a couple of other tools, and before I tell you what those two other tools are, let me just say one other thing. | ||
| So if you think of our society as here's our whole society, and here's our groups in the middle, and here are individuals at the bottom, if you're struggling with the problem of tribalism, there are basically two ways you can go. | ||
| You can go up a level, and broaden the boundary. | ||
| And you can say, for example, we are all Americans. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You can say, because we all have the capacity to draw the boundary, we were evolved to have that capacity, now you just say, actually these little group boundaries that we were paying attention to, they're not relevant. | ||
| So basically take all the ethnic divisions, or sexuality, or religious, or immigrant, or whatever it is, and say we're all Americans. | ||
| We're all Americans. | ||
| But it's another group at a higher level. | ||
| Yes, at a higher level. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you move up a level and you efface tribalism by appeal to larger groups. | ||
| This has been part of our history since the beginning. | ||
| De Tocqueville talks about this. | ||
| We're a nature of joiners. | ||
| Anyone can be an American. | ||
| That itself is part of the American project. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| The belief which I share that anyone can be an American is a statement that the groups don't matter. | ||
| Anyone can be an American. | ||
| You just have to buy our liberal principles and then you can be American, okay? | ||
| Right, right, even though there's a debate about that. | ||
| That's a whole other show. | ||
| There's also an interesting parable to Trump here because at some level it's like | ||
| he's talking about America all the time, so that is the higher group for all of us. | ||
| And yet I suspect with your feelings on what he's doing with immigration or some other things, | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But I would be like, anyone can be an American. | ||
| If you come to our country and you work and are productive and obey our laws and our Constitution, you're an American as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Didn't matter whether you came from Mexico or, you know, one of the four Mexican countries, as he said, you know. | ||
| Anyway, okay, so... A whole other show. | ||
| A whole other show, okay. | ||
| So, but another solution, okay, to the groupism, the tribalism, is to go down a level. | ||
| Remember we talked earlier about individuals. | ||
| So now you can say, instead of looking at people as which groups are they a member of, you look at them as individual people. | ||
| And this too has been a part of our history. | ||
| So Martin Luther King's famous sentiment, you know, I look forward to a society in which people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, is an appeal to our individuality. | ||
| See, groups don't matter. | ||
| Individuals matter. | ||
| So if we're struggling with tribalism, we can go up or we can go down. | ||
| Both help. | ||
| However, lateral to that point, there's another set of ideas, which is tribalism is not even the only tool we have in order to reduce the sense of scale and to cooperate. | ||
| So natural selection has also equipped us with friendship. | ||
| Friendship, one of the reasons it is felt we evolve the capacity for friendship, is again to reduce the sense of scale. | ||
| So instead of now I'm being in a big group, everyone has to cooperate with everyone, each of us has a subset of people who are our friends that we cooperate with. | ||
| So it's similar to tribalism but different, because now instead of defining it by a group membership, it's defined by each person has their particular friends. | ||
| So this is another tool that we innately have that we can use to sustain our cooperative instincts and push aside the tribalism. | ||
| So how much do you think on a day-to-day basis are we, normally I get the water for people, you had me so wrapped up there. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But I forgot. | ||
| On a day-to-day basis, how much movement do we as individuals have to sort of either go around, let's say go around our evolutionary behavior? | ||
| Well, I don't think... Okay, so I do believe in free will. | ||
| I mean, I think you have some capacity to self-mastery and make your own decisions in life and your own, you know... But you're also born with certain innate qualities and you're also born a human being, which is you're part of a particular species that has a particular set of characteristics. | ||
| So, I think that as individuals, you know, we have some control over how we act. | ||
| I don't think our individual actions will individually change the whole society, but I think if each of us is attempting to do the right thing, I think ultimately that makes things better. | ||
| Look, there's a lot of famous ideas. | ||
| So, Viktor Frankl, who was in the concentration camps, his wife was killed, he survives the Nazi concentration camps, and he writes a famous book called Man's Search for Meaning, after he's liberated. | ||
| He writes it ten days after his liberation. | ||
| And he talks about how he came to the recognition that even in this camp, in the most vile possible circumstances, where his life was threatened every day, where people were dying all the time, he was starving to death, he had no shoes, it was in the winter, I mean, he was a slave. | ||
| Even there, he recognized that he was the master of his own internal state. | ||
| You know, that how he saw the world was something that was in his own control. | ||
| So he was able to find a sense of self-discipline and mastery, even in an environment in which the structures around him were engineered to crush him, to kill him. | ||
| So I think that there are many examples of this. | ||
| I mean, another one of my favorite examples is Buddhist monks that were studied at MIT years ago. I think | ||
| I'm gonna get the facts of this were correct so so so they were very interested in how | ||
| meditation changes the structure of your brain and How are these monks so able to be so peaceful in? | ||
| these very stressful circumstances and And they scanned them, they put them in the MRI scanner and they looked at different parts of their brain and which parts were enhanced or diminished compared to other more ordinary mortals. | ||
| And they saw that different parts of the brain in Buddhist monks were different than the rest of us. | ||
| But what interested me was not even the neuroanatomical discoveries that were in that paper, but it was the interviews with the monks. | ||
| And so what the monks would say was that, for example, let's say you and I are in traffic and someone cuts us off. | ||
| A normal response, certainly one that I often have, is, who is that jerk? | ||
| You know, you'd be really pissed off, and your blood pressure would rise, and maybe you'd race that guy, and you know, you would think ill of them. | ||
| That would be your natural go-to thing. | ||
| That's a thoughtless, maybe they're idiotic, or they're inattentive, or you would have all these bad thoughts about this person who, you know, in a road rage kind of way. | ||
| The monks don't do that. | ||
| What the monks do is they train themselves to re-narrate. | ||
| So when that happens to them, they say, Maybe that's a man who's taking his wife to the hospital because she's delivering a baby. | ||
| The baby's being born in the car in front of me. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| There's a new life. | ||
| I should help that man to get to the hospital. | ||
| I mean, and they're doing it not for the sake of that person, but for their own well-being, you see? | ||
| So, I think it's possible to, even though it's difficult, it is very difficult, To exercise some internal self-control. | ||
| I think you're mostly saying that there are no monks on Twitter. | ||
| Yes, very few. | ||
| But Dalai Lama, I think, is on Twitter. | ||
| I think I follow him. | ||
| He is on Twitter. | ||
| I think, I have to check. | ||
| He's on Facebook, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| What else do you think sort of the average person that's watching this can do to help order a good society? | ||
| Because I think people, you know, everything's become so political these days that I think people think that's the only solution to sort of help make a better society. | ||
| I think granting charity to your enemies, I think, is important. | ||
| I think listening to them, cultivating listening, you know, I mean, that's pretty big of you to say after everything that you've been through. | ||
| Well, I was listening. | ||
| In the clip you showed, I was listening. | ||
| I thought that was ridiculous. | ||
| The young woman who said I'm not listening to her, I was really listening. | ||
| I mean, I was listening. | ||
| Then and before and after, I don't agree with what she was saying, but I heard what she was saying. | ||
| I could summarize what she was saying, but even... But what do you do in that case, then? | ||
| It just sort of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We don't have to bring it back to that specific instance, but in general, because I think a lot of people are going through this, you're being berated by somebody, they're saying all the worst things about you, they're impugning your motives, they're attacking you as a person, all of those things. | ||
| Now you can listen, you can absorb. | ||
| You can ignore. | ||
| You can ignore all of those things. | ||
| Which is also good. | ||
| Ruth Bader Ginsburg says survival in life is ignoring a lot of the stupidities, which I also think is good. | ||
| I think that's the answer. | ||
| And what was it we ignore? | ||
| And also, who was that famous actress that found this guy in Texas that had said horrible things to her or him? | ||
| I can't remember if it was an actor or an actress. | ||
| I think it was an actress. | ||
| And made it her business to find out about this guy's life. | ||
| And he had lost his health insurance. | ||
| And then she intervened and raised money for his health care. | ||
| And he felt seen and heard. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know which one this is. | ||
| It's an incredible story. | ||
| And I think that a lot of times people, and I think anonymity is a real, contributes to bad behavior online. | ||
| So I think, sort of as Jordan Peterson says, you know, man up, as it were, woman up, and have the strength of your convictions. | ||
| This is what I think, this is what I'm gonna say. | ||
| But is there a problem there? | ||
| I mean, Jordan and I have done this many times, where then, depending on how that hierarchical structure is operated, if you are saying something that's unpolitically correct, Well, I mean, you have to have the strength, or revise your opinions, or stick to them, or make good arguments, or listen, or don't engage. | ||
| Let's say you're a Trump supporter, you just don't want to lose your job, because you think if you say that, you know, just something as simple as that. | ||
| I'm against people losing their jobs for their opinions. | ||
| So I think there's a thing where I think a little bit of bravery, a little bit of civil discourse, A little bit of commitment to granting charity to our opponents. | ||
| A little bit of like, for example, when I would have an argument with people who are opposed to vaccination. | ||
| I think there is no merit to their ideas. | ||
| I understand they're fierce. | ||
| I understand that there have been either some actual cases of vaccine-induced neurological conditions, one in 100,000, one in 500,000 cases, which is awful. | ||
| And I understand that there are a lot of coincidences where people think that there's a relationship, but no, it's just that you have, you know, you have a lot of vaccines are being administered. | ||
| There are a lot of illnesses occurring. | ||
| There's going to be an overlap in those two sets. | ||
| But, and I also know the data on how that's very, how vaccination is like a 20th and 20th is actually more like even a 19th century triumph. | ||
| I mean, you know, we've, we've mastered these diseases. | ||
| We humans, it's astonishing what we've done through our capacity to teach and learn and engage in science and so forth. | ||
| But I would engage that person. | ||
| I would talk to them. | ||
| I would say, you know, let me talk to you about your beliefs. | ||
| And because I think that that's the only way to get them to revise their beliefs. | ||
| I think telling them they're fools doesn't help. | ||
| You're a true liberal. | ||
| I am a liberal. | ||
| Yes, I am a liberal. | ||
| Yeah, but do you think one side is a little bit easier to do that right now? | ||
| And does that flip over time? | ||
| So for example, right now I find it much easier Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I get invited by conservative groups. | ||
| Libertarians is no problem, but let's say conservatives that have disagreements on abortion, | ||
| sometimes gay marriage and legalizing marijuana and the death penalty, and we could do the list. | ||
| So wait, hold on. | ||
| So I'm for legalization of marijuana. | ||
| Yes, sorry. | ||
| What is your position on death penalty? | ||
| I'm against the death penalty. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| What were the other? | ||
| Yeah, legalizing weed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I hate to tell you, I'm guessing that you only would get invited by conservative groups, too, basically, to colleges. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, I don't get that many. | ||
| I mean, usually my invitations are scientific, like I'm a scientist, like I give talks about my science. | ||
| So I have not historically been very politically... Right, but what I'm getting at really is that at the moment it seems very obvious to me I don't know that I can be clear or anything. | ||
| On the center right, there is an ability and actually a desire to discuss ideas, agree to disagree, and that just isn't happening. | ||
| Right now, and I would suspect or argue, and I'm sure you can give me examples where that Yes, I mean, during McCarthyism, for example, I think, you know, it was very difficult to be a communist, for sure, and even, you know, left wing in the 50s. | ||
| So they weren't inviting communists. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so I think, I honestly don't know the answer to that question. | ||
| I think there are subgroups on campus which are still committed to debate. | ||
| They get the political unions. | ||
| These guys love to argue, these young people. | ||
| I think there are other vocal minorities on campus that don't want to hear opinions that they don't agree with. | ||
| And they think that even the hearing of it, there's this very sloppy conflation of speech with violence, which I think is ridiculous. | ||
| Which seems to really be ramping up. | ||
| Yes, I would agree with that. | ||
| And you also see it, for instance, in Pakistan. | ||
| They will kill apostates. | ||
| That's answering speech with violence. | ||
| If you actually think that someone believing in a different god and expressing that belief is violence, then the country justifies killing that person. | ||
| Or in Brunei recently, they had the same kind of situation. | ||
| I strongly reject that belief. | ||
| We have different words and there's a totally different meaning between speech and violence. | ||
| So I think there are groups of people on campus who do conflate speech and violence. | ||
| I think that's a problem. | ||
| But there are also many groups that are very, very vigorous political debates. | ||
| I think one thing that is different So, I'm in my 50s. | ||
| When I was in college in the 80s, we would stay up late and argue about politics with our friends. | ||
| With our friends, notice I said. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| My friends. | ||
| I would argue with my friends about politics. | ||
| And they were my friends. | ||
| I don't think that happens very much anymore. | ||
| It does in the political unions, in the debate societies. | ||
| But in the broader college, I think if you have a different opinion about abortion, for example, you really can't express that. | ||
| But the weird thing is that it is happening with conservatives. | ||
| Well, I think because they do believe, I mean, I go to these things and I have these debates with these kids overall. | ||
| And they're better debaters because they have more experience, yes, arguing with people they disagree with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| They get a better education in some ways because they have to constantly defend their opinions. | ||
| It's a weird thing, being a liberal, having to say that. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| I think, well, I mean, if you, this is the thing, why in the martial arts, for example, why do we bow to our opponent? | ||
| You learn more from the people you disagree with than from the people you agree with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| And J.S. | ||
| Mill's famous saying, you know, he who knows only his side of the case knows little of it. | ||
| So, you know, I think I think that's where your ideas get better when they are tested. | ||
| When you argue with someone you disagree with. | ||
| And I think cultivating those kinds of conversations, disciplining yourself to be able to have arguments with people you disagree with, improves your ideas. | ||
| And actually, you should be grateful to that person. | ||
| They're a more interesting person in some ways. | ||
| Now, you don't have to be best friends with that person necessarily, although you can be. | ||
| But I think it makes you smarter. | ||
| That, my friend, is a nice closing statement. | ||
| And you've lived through it. | ||
| I mean, that's the point. | ||
| You lived through the forces that so many of us see now as such dangerous forces in society. | ||
| And now that you've lived through it, you've flourished, and you've got another book out and all of those things. | ||
| Well, I would say, I mean, yeah, what I would close with saying, you know, I really believe that the arc of our evolution is long, but it bends towards goodness. | ||
| Sounds good to me. |
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