April 26, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| He's the kind of person we should listen to. | ||
| There's a reason he rose in such popularity, because people are resonating with his ideas. | ||
| Now, even if I don't, I can at least recognize, well, here's a voice maybe I should pay attention to. | ||
| I might learn something from him. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, everybody, you can get all our videos and audio podcasts absolutely ad-free and early at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And joining me today is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, host of the Science Salon podcast, and author of the new book, Giving the Devil His Due, Michael Shermer. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be back. | ||
| The tournament of champions continues. | ||
| We've had a couple of technical difficulties today to make this thing happen, but here we are. | ||
| I know that as a man of faith, you're going to pray that our connection does... I'm praying away. | ||
| I'm not going to try to pray away the gay for you, but I'm going to try to pray away the coronavirus bugs in our computer systems here. | ||
| It's the 5G, you see. | ||
| Oh, it's definitely the 5G. | ||
| It's coming for everybody. | ||
| It's spreading coronavirus and the rest of it. | ||
| All right, there's a ton I wanna get to here because I really love this book. | ||
| And I just said to you right before we started that so much in my book as well, we really cover the topics, but come to slightly different conclusions on a couple things. | ||
| And the way we approach the topics is a little bit different each time. | ||
| But before we get to the book itself, you've written 16 books. | ||
| And as a guy that just wrote one and knows what it takes to write one, how do you possibly not only come up with enough material, but enough sort of personal fortitude and patience and all of it to just be able to sit there and put all of those thoughts out 16 times? | ||
| And quite successfully, by the way. | ||
| It's not like nobody's reading these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Well, first of all, I'm 65, so I've got a couple of decades on your almost. | ||
| Just cumulative time. | ||
| But I also started writing in my 20s when I was in college. | ||
| I actually always wanted to be a writer. | ||
| And then by the time I got to my early 30s, I had written quite a bit that wasn't published. | ||
| Just, you know, just practicing stuff and trying to get things published. | ||
| Such that by my first book, let's see, in 1997, so I was 30, let's see, 33, no, let's see, no, I was 43. | ||
| You know, I had quite a bit of material, so... 43 at my first book! | ||
| I'm with you! | ||
| See? | ||
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See? | |
| That's right. | ||
| So each book kind of ends with a question of sorts, or in my mind anyway. | ||
| That's the next book. | ||
| And it's also a strategy when you're cutting. | ||
| Because I usually write too much material and then I think, oh, I really don't want to give this up. | ||
| And I can talk myself into doing that by saying, I'll put it in the next book. | ||
| And then it shortens that book. | ||
| So you don't feel like you've wasted your time. | ||
| But by temperament, I feel like if I don't write pretty much every day, it's like if I don't go work out, if I don't ride my bike, I feel anxious. | ||
| Like I really need to write. | ||
| I just have a kind of a need for it. | ||
| And I know other people like, you know, Isaac Asimov is like that way. | ||
| Apparently Stephen King's like that. | ||
| They just got to crank out the material because it feels good. | ||
| It's just sort of what I do, you know, like an artist paints, I write, whatever. | ||
| And so I find a lot of, you know, it's not a chore. | ||
| I don't have, you know, writer's block per se. | ||
| I have time block. | ||
| I just, you know, I just need more time because I enjoy it. | ||
| One of the things that I really like that you do, and it's not just in this book, it's in really all of your books, or at least the last few since I've known you, is you give credit to a lot of the other current thinkers that are talking about these things. | ||
| And I think that's actually a kind of unique trait, because a lot of people want to sort of sit there and make it seem like they came up with all of this. | ||
| I was looking at the blurbs in the back of the book, and actually, it's a Rubin Report reunion over here, because you've got Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Nadine Strossen, Nick Christakis, Amy Chua, and Jonathan Haidt. | ||
| And these are the people that you reference. | ||
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They've all been on your show. | |
| No, they've all been on the show, which is nice, but that is one of the things that I like about this book, because you reference a lot of these people and their ideas as sort of the starting point for, starting point or maybe midpoint for how you think about things. | ||
| Were you always that way, that you would sort of hear somebody and kind of mirror what you think against them? | ||
| Yeah, to a certain extent. | ||
| But as a writer and as a consumer of many other books, I can see some authors are more generous about crediting where their ideas came from and sort of tracking for the reader how they came up with their thesis of the book or whatever. | ||
| Others, not so much. | ||
| I'm not going to name any names, but some people do write in a way like, They just came out of this whole cloth. | ||
| It just popped into my brain like the muses, you know, and that no ideas happen like that. | ||
| We all build on each other. | ||
| Everybody does. | ||
| And, you know, in scholarly papers, you have to cite just tons and tons and tons of references, you know, and that's why sometimes the reference sections are as long as the papers themselves. | ||
| You know, so I always felt like, well, I want to be generous and just sort of honest and say that here's where I came up with these ideas because of these three authors or these 16 sources or whatever, anyway. | ||
| So I just got in the habit of doing that just from training as an experimental psychologist initially and then a historian of science. | ||
| You just have to do that. | ||
| But just personally, I feel, you know, when I see that someone like Richard Dawkins is very generous about that. | ||
| He's, as is Steve Pinker. | ||
| You know, deciding where all these ideas come from, quoting other people. | ||
| And it's like, I like that. | ||
| I'm going to, I want to make sure I do that too. | ||
| Yeah, so one other thing before we dive specifically into the topics in the book, because you have now been on the Rubin Report at least six times, which places you at number one, which I'm sure, despite your rather lofty resume, I'm sure that's clearly at the top of the list. | ||
| But for somebody that's watching this right now that just doesn't know anything about you, can you just give me a two or three minute sort of recap on how you kind of became the skeptic skeptic? | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, my day job is publishing Skeptic Magazine and directing the Skeptic Society, which is a 501c3 nonprofit science education organization. | ||
| I got interested in the topics, which is pretty much any of the super interesting topics related to science and religion and spirituality and cults and free will and determinism and God, you know, pretty much all the great topics I'm interested in. | ||
| Really goes back to being in college and I was a born-again Christian. | ||
| I was in 1971 when I was in 11th grade. | ||
| I had two close friends who were interested in converting me. | ||
| I didn't even know what that meant really. | ||
| And George and Frank. | ||
| So George had a really cute sister and invited me to church. | ||
| So I thought, well, okay, here's my chance. | ||
| But then when I got to the church, it was Presbyterian Church in Glendale, California, and the minister was unbelievably dynamic and just really motivating. | ||
| And at the end he said, come on up and you can accept Jesus, the whole thing will happen right here. | ||
| All right, I'm going! | ||
| So I went, I didn't even know what I was doing, really. | ||
| But I did it, and then, you know, took it pretty seriously, and then I went to Pepperdine University, which is a church of Christ school, and very conservative, and, you know, Gerald Ford came to speak, and Edward Teller came and gave his Mutual Assure Destruction speech, and everyone was Ryan Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and all that, you know, pretty much what you'd expect. | ||
| But then when I went to graduate school, I kind of drifted away from Being religious, mainly for two reasons. | ||
| One, you know, studying social psychology, anthropology, sociology, you know, I could see that other people's religious belief systems are very much context-dependent, geographically dependent. | ||
| So had I been born in India, I very likely would not be Christian. | ||
| Had I been born 10,000 years ago, there would be no Christians, right? | ||
| So, you know, it seemed to me that that doesn't make it wrong, but it makes it more likely to to be mythically true, as our friend Jordan Peterson would | ||
| say, not empirically true. | ||
| We're going to get into that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. But then also the problem of evil, the odyssey, why bad things happen to good people. | ||
| I'm not talking about a human volition of homicide or war or something like that, | ||
| but just innocent children dying of leukemia or thousands of children dying from starvation every | ||
| year and so on. | ||
| It's like, why would a good God allow that to happen? | ||
| I know there's tons of books and papers by theists and theologians about this, but to me, they've never squared that circle. | ||
| They've never solved that problem other than like Rabbi Kushner's famous In that book, when bad things happen to good people, his conclusion was God simply can't do anything about it. | ||
| He's just not omniscient. | ||
| I mean, he's not omnipotent. | ||
| He may know everything, but he can't stop evil. | ||
| OK. | ||
| So that's one solution. | ||
| Another one is, well, there just is no God. | ||
| And that's the simpler solution. | ||
| And that explains a lot, because if you understand the laws of physics and, say, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, just shit happens. | ||
| It's mostly just random, and there's very little directionality to why things happen other than just statistical probabilities, and that's it. | ||
| There's nothing to explain. | ||
| Like the coronavirus, what's the cause? | ||
| 500 years ago, it would have been, well, women have been cavorting with demons in the middle of the night, or the Jews poisoned the well. | ||
| you know, some of these crazy supernatural paranormal and racist bigoted targeting of | ||
| peoples to explore. Well, we don't do that anymore except for the 5G craziness, because, | ||
| you know, we live in an age of science and hopefully we've moved past that. So to me, | ||
| once I left the church and really religion, I was still interested in answering the big | ||
| questions like, "Well, then where did the universe came from if there's no God?" | ||
| What's the origins of morality? | ||
| What about consciousness? | ||
| And, you know, why is the universe tuned the way it is? | ||
| Where did all this diversity of life come from? | ||
| And, you know, all the great questions from a secular perspective. | ||
| In trying to answer it myself, I thought, well, I want to write. | ||
| So this is what I'm going to write about from a skeptical perspective. | ||
| So my little niche, my lane, as they say, is, you know, kind of on the margins of science, the pseudoscience and the paranormal, the supernatural, the sort of controversial stuff that most mainstream scientists don't deal with. | ||
| That's my lane. | ||
| And from there, I can tackle the great questions just from my particular perspective. | ||
| You know, so like I have a chapter in the book, you know, Mr. Hume, tear down this wall and the one before it defending scientific humanism. | ||
| The point of that, you know, as I'm trying to get away from this, this kind of Noma, as Steve Gould called it, non-overlapping magisteria, where, you know, Gould argued and most scientists tend to go this way, is that You know, that science and religion are two different things and that you scientists get the empirical world and the religious people, they get the world of morality and meaning and purpose. | ||
| And I'm like, wait a minute. | ||
| Why can't we say something about that? | ||
| I mean, I don't believe in God, but I still believe that there are objective moral values. | ||
| How can that be? | ||
| Because there's no outside source. | ||
| Well, here's how it could be. | ||
| So I try to defend that. | ||
| Now, there is a technical problem called the naturalistic fallacy that my philosopher friends tell me is not, you can't debunk it. | ||
| So I tried to debunk it. | ||
| They tell me, well, you didn't quite do it. | ||
| But I'm not a philosopher. | ||
| I'm not trying to pretend to be one. | ||
| I'm just saying it's not a choice between you either believe in God and you go for the religious morality or you're a relativist and anything goes. | ||
| You can never say something is wrong. | ||
| I don't like slavery, but I can't say it's wrong. | ||
| I don't think the Jews should have been exterminated. | ||
| In the Holocaust, but I can't say it's really wrong to exterminate Jews. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Yes, of course we can say it's wrong. | ||
| So that's kind of where I'm coming from. | ||
| Okay, man, you have teed me up with so much stuff there, and much of what you just described is in the book, and I really do want to spend some time focusing on this sort of mystical truth as you described through the Jordan Peterson lens, and the empirical truth, and the rest of it. | ||
| And we talked about this, I just did your podcast, and we've come to slightly different conclusions on it, and yet we're here and we're still not killing each other. | ||
| So what I want to start with first, though, is just the title, actually, of the book, because that really struck me. | ||
| Giving the Devil His Due seems actually quite reverse of the way that most of us behave these days. | ||
| Perhaps not the two of us right this very moment, but so much much of society seems to be based on not giving the devil | ||
| his due just finding, oh, someone thinks something differently than me, that must mean that everything they | ||
| think and the summation of who they are is somehow evil and wrong. | ||
| So when you came up with the title, was that, did that have a lot to do with just sort of how we seem to behave | ||
| like right now? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, absolutely. | ||
| I'm just finding the page where I want to start on this, how this problem started. | ||
| Because free speech and free thought, that used to be a liberal cause. | ||
| I mean, that was, you know, free speech, UC Berkeley, 1960s. | ||
| We're going to stand up and think and say whatever we want. | ||
| And, you know, the comedians of the 50s and 60s, they're pushing back against the man, you know, the power authority, which was mostly the right and the Christian right and Republicans. | ||
| And it was, remember at the time, Republicans mostly wanting to censor things like burning the flag or Madonna's videos or whatever, because their argument was, well, this could harm society. | ||
| You know, people expressing themselves in a certain way can bring down the moral values of our great God-given, you know, whatever country, and therefore we have to combat that. | ||
| In a way, the left is now doing that, saying, Well, you know, certain speech is harmful, and harmfulness is a form of violence, and we have to prevent violence, and therefore censoring speech is okay. | ||
| That's kind of the thread. | ||
| And it really goes back, I identify in the first page of the book, this goes back to 1919 in the case of Schenck versus the United States. | ||
| So this is the famous decision by the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, where the Shouting fire in a theater and clear and present danger phrases come from. | ||
| So here is his decision. | ||
| The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. | ||
| The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. | ||
| Okay, what was this clear and present danger? | ||
| This guy Schenck was the head of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, and he was printing and handing out flyers to draft-age young men who were being drafted. | ||
| You know, conscription was legal, and they were being drafted and sent to Europe to die for our country. | ||
| And Schenck said, wait a minute, that's a violation of the 14th Amendment, which protects your bodily autonomy and right. | ||
| No one can take away your life. | ||
| But in a way, conscription in the draft, that's a way of the government saying, we're taking over your life for a while, and you may die if we order you to go do that. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| OK, now we can debate that. | ||
| That's a separate issue. | ||
| The thing is, how can that be a clear and present danger? | ||
| That's the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater. | ||
| Well, now by the 1960s, of course, everybody's protesting the draft and burning their draft cards and running up to Canada or whatever. | ||
| And that was a liberal cause to say, you know what? | ||
| That's going too far. | ||
| You know, it has to be OK to have those kinds of debates and discussions and protests. | ||
| That's all protected by the Constitution. | ||
| Here's the U.S. | ||
| Supreme Court saying, no, no. | ||
| We can step in and, okay, so fast forward to, say, the civil rights movement and the push in the 70s and 80s to improve our speech, right? | ||
| Okay, so don't use the n-word, you know, that's really harmful. | ||
| Okay, pretty much everybody would go, yeah, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Okay, and by the way, the c-word for women and calling Jews kikes and Vietnamese gooks and the bin starts getting bigger and bigger, like, yeah, that's hateful, it's so harmful. | ||
| And therefore it should be censored. | ||
| So it starts off with good intentions on the part of the left. | ||
| Like, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And this is how moral progress starts. | ||
| But then by the 90s, you get, you know, the bin is getting larger. | ||
| And then by, you know, a couple of years ago when I reprinted in there the UC system's list of microaggressions that are harmful, hateful things to say. | ||
| Things like, where are you from? | ||
| Or, wow, you speak English so well. | ||
| Or, why aren't you good at math? | ||
| Or, you are good at math. | ||
| Right, you have a whole chart laying this out, yeah. | ||
| So are you surprised though the way the mission creep has affected institutions that were supposed to defend these liberal principles? | ||
| I mean, the easiest one I can give you is Nadine Strossen, who you have the blurb on the back of the book. | ||
| She was the head of the ACLU. | ||
| She is a free speech absolutist. | ||
| She no longer is the head now. | ||
| She's since retired. | ||
| She laid out in this very room the very strong case for why the Nazis should have been allowed to march in Skokie versus Illinois. | ||
| It was a place where there was a tremendous amount of Holocaust survivors, but the ACLU defended the freedom of speech of a group of odious people because that's what we're supposed to do in this country, where now even the ACLU is often suddenly seemingly on the wrong side of these things. | ||
| Are you surprised? | ||
| That it's not just affected individual people, but the way that the mission creep has affected the institutions that were supposed to stand up for this stuff. | ||
| It has, and I'm worried about that. | ||
| I don't know if they actually believe it or if they're just scared that they're going to be canceled and censored themselves or whatever. | ||
| You know, I'm somewhat sympathetic to some university administrators, say, who kind of go along with it because they're scared of losing their jobs or professors are afraid to say something. | ||
| But this is the problem. | ||
| This is the whole reason for tenure in the first place was to protect liberal professors from these right-wing kooks who wanted to shut them down. | ||
| Now it's kind of reversed. | ||
| And so maybe we do need tenure to protect these liberal professors from their fellow leftists or fellow liberals who want to cancel them, shut them down, get them fired. | ||
| This is a perverse reversal of things that, you know, it's just gone haywire. | ||
| I mean, so the devil in the title is whoever you disagree with. | ||
| And whoever disagrees with you, or you don't like, or you don't like what they say. | ||
| I mean, it's easy to grant free speech to people you agree with. | ||
| That's not who it's for. | ||
| It's for the people that don't agree with you. | ||
| Those are the voices we have to hear. | ||
| OK, so to articulate the reason, simply, you know, one person's hate speech is another person's free speech. | ||
| So I got this from Nadine Strassen's book. | ||
| That in the 1850s, Southern politicians argued that abolitionists from the North coming into the South to give sermons and speeches and distribute pamphlets about the evils of slavery, that's a form of hate speech. | ||
| No, they didn't use that word, hate speech, but they basically made the argument | ||
| that Justice Holmes made was that this could lead to slave riots and insurrections, | ||
| and that could lead to the murder of slave owners and the disruption of our peaceful plantation life | ||
| here in the South, and therefore we have to censor that. | ||
| It's like, wow, if they hadn't had this opportunity to champion the abolition of slavery, | ||
| would we ever have gotten there? | ||
| And then in the 1960s, there were arguments in the South, again, made against Malcolm X in particular, and Martin Luther King slightly less, that what they were saying was, again, didn't use the word hate speech, but that this is potentially dangerous to have them coming down here. | ||
| to give these sermons and speeches that rile people up and they go out in the streets to protest. | ||
| Wow, we can't have that. | ||
| Well, wait a minute. | ||
| That's how social change happens. | ||
| That's protected in the Constitution. | ||
| And again, these are liberal causes that by now it's kind of flipped. | ||
| So we have to remind ourselves, what we're trying to do in this book is that, no, no, here are the reasons, okay? | ||
| So I articulate them like Nadine did on your show, you know? | ||
| It's like, even if you're completely right, you can learn something from somebody else's arguments to improve your own arguments. | ||
| As John Stuart Mill said, he who knows only his own side of the case doesn't even know that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, like, I have my students watch Ben Shapiro's videos arguing pro-life. | ||
| Because most of them, they don't know what the pro-life arguments are. | ||
| So even if you end up being pro-choice at the end, you're better off now. | ||
| But maybe Ben's right about some points, or whatever the other side is. | ||
| Maybe you're completely wrong and you can learn something new. | ||
| But mostly, the devil part here is for my safety's sake, also. | ||
| Once I set up the norms or laws or customs or whatever to silence you, Well, what happens if I'm now in the minority position, or I have the voice that goes against the grain, then I've already endorsed the apparatus to shut me down. | ||
| And so that's the best argument, if you want to take it from kind of a selfish perspective, to give the devil his due for your own safety's sake. | ||
| Yeah, and we see a lot of that these days, which is, you know, the people who are running around screaming that Trump is Hitler are the ones that are also saying that the federal government isn't doing enough. | ||
| It's the same sort of idea, like, oh, well, then maybe we should be scaling back if you were right in the first place. | ||
| But putting that aside for a second, so let's, so I think this'll lead us to what I think is really like the most interesting stuff here. | ||
| As you talk about the way liberals have sort of maybe lost the plot along the way, do you think That there is a weakness in liberalism, and I think this will sort of get us also to the Jordan mystical versus imperial truth part of this. | ||
| Do you think that there's a weakness in the ideology of liberalism, of the openness of liberalism, that allows for all of the bad ideas to come in, which sort of leads us to a place right now where liberals, often don't know what they believe, while conservatives at the moment seem to have a better ability to fight off the social justice stuff, the intersectionality stuff, the progressive rot that we sort of see across society right now. | ||
| Is there something that is actually weak in the very system of ideas that I know you and I, you know, mostly subscribe to? | ||
| Yeah, I want liberals to own the First Amendment like conservatives own the Second Amendment, right? | ||
| I mean, it's just sacrosanct. | ||
| We're never giving this up. | ||
| We're drawing the line in the sand. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But they've abandoned that in a way. | ||
| I think an explanation might come from Karl Popper's, the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper's book, The Open Society. | ||
| And so he made the argument that there's something of a paradox of being tolerant of intolerance Yeah. | ||
| and then therefore the intolerant people can rise to power because you've tolerated them, | ||
| and then they shut the whole system down. | ||
| This is kind of the argument. | ||
| In simplicity, it's an issue that we should deal with, but I'm not particularly worried about that. | ||
| I think that's taking the precautionary principle, like just in case the intolerant people come to power, | ||
| we can't have that, so we should start shutting people down. | ||
| Well, who do you shut down? | ||
| You know, the ones that we think are intolerant. | ||
| Who, you? | ||
| That you think? | ||
| What, are we gonna have a committee set up that decides this? | ||
| And again, pretty soon you're shutting down, you know, this person and that person, | ||
| and half the country's shut down, and this is no good, right? | ||
| So. | ||
| But is there something then that liberalism can do? | ||
| Is there something that liberalism can do to defend itself from that because of that paradox, right? | ||
| I mean, I'll grant you that. | ||
| Liberals are sort of, liberals are more open. | ||
| That's the idea of liberalism that comes with a lot of good stuff like individual rights and freedom. | ||
| But then that openness, and this is exactly what Popper was talking about, allows these guys to come in and then liberals seem to scatter when the going gets rough because they don't want to be called bigots and Nazis and the rest of it. | ||
| Well, of course, no one wants to be called that, but the problem is that you have to allow people to say things like that. | ||
| Again, for your own safety's sake, it's a foundational principle of all the other rights. | ||
| It stands below them. | ||
| It's the sort of foundational rock upon, say, the pyramid platform upon which all the other stones are built, those being the other rights. | ||
| If you don't have the freedom to think and say what you want, then all the other rights | ||
| that come from protesting, from writing, speaking, better ideas to replace the bad ideas, which | ||
| is pretty much the history of civilization, is just the improvement of our understanding | ||
| of the cause of things in the world. | ||
| That's the only way to do it. | ||
| So to me, the liberals have to just remind themselves of that foundational principle, | ||
| but also just sort of own that as like, "This is where we draw the line in the sand." | ||
| And just sort of this idea of diversity. | ||
| So it's a small step to say you're in favor of diversity. | ||
| Oh, yeah, totally. | ||
| How about diversity of viewpoints? | ||
| This is called viewpoint diversity, you know. | ||
| You have to put that in the same bin. | ||
| And that's where, of course, as you know, they get a little crazy about that. | ||
| So this is a good segue for us, because what I'm finding right now is that line in the sand that we both want drawn, it seems impossible for liberals to do at a systemic level, meaning the individuals, we've talked about this many times, that I believe individuals can do it, but it seems like systems based on that seem unable to unable to stand up to it. | ||
| So I thought this would be a great segue to talk about the differences | ||
| that you have with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I thought I have to read actually the blurb that Jordan wrote on the back of the book | ||
| because I've literally never seen a statement like this written on the back of someone's book before | ||
| and that'll be a good launch point for us. | ||
| So Jordan wrote, "This is a rather difficult book for me to blurb | ||
| "given that an entire chapter "is devoted to criticizing my claims | ||
| about pragmatic truth vis-a-vis scientific truth. | ||
| However, Dr. Michael Shermer is a very clear thinker and the kind of skeptic that is always necessary to ensure that public thought Scientific and otherwise, maintains a certain clarity. | ||
| He's a passionate advocate of free speech, for this and many other reasons, to the point of entitling his new book, Giving the Devil His Due, which is devoted to many worthwhile topics, but to free speech above all. | ||
| Despite our disagreements, this is a necessary book for our times. | ||
| Read it, and thank God and the powers that be that you have the right to do so. | ||
| So I think it's sort of perfect because it's a summation of what we all know about Jordan. | ||
| But the fact that you asked him to do it despite having a chapter in here which grapples with all of his ideas. | ||
| And I do think this is sort of linked to the question that I'm asking you about liberalism. | ||
| So can you sort of unpack what your similarities and differences are with Jordan? | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, when I first saw Jordan on your show and Joe's show and said, who is this guy? | ||
| You know, like everybody else, like, who is this guy? | ||
| To me, I was dying to know what it is he thought about things. | ||
| Although at the same time, I could see mostly liberals, again, trying to shut him down or call him Hitler. | ||
| I mean, a bigot and a misogynist and whatnot. | ||
| And then when I met him, I thought, this guy is a super good guy. | ||
| I mean, I could see why I don't agree with him on this and that. | ||
| But, you know, he's the kind of person we should listen to. | ||
| There's a reason he rose in such popularity, because people are resonating with his ideas. | ||
| Now, even if I don't, I can at least recognize, well, here's a voice maybe I should pay attention to. | ||
| I might learn something from him. | ||
| And so the two chapters at the end of the book, the chapter on Jordan and the chapter on Graham Hancock, who I was on Joe Rogan's podcast with, and then I got to know, it's like, OK, this guy's an alternative archaeologist. | ||
| He has some ideas that most archaeologists think are crazy or way out there, not substantiated. | ||
| And yet he makes some pretty good arguments. | ||
| He's a great writer. | ||
| And, you know, from there, I think, you know, this is the kind of people we got to give a voice to and acknowledge that, you know, maybe we don't have time to listen to every single person out there, but, you know, pick and choose the ones that are very popular because they must be saying something that resonates with people. | ||
| Now, Jordan's theory of truth, you know, it's sort of a blend of Charles Darwin and William James, sort of a evolutionary pragmatism. | ||
| And I don't want to, you know, misquote his theory. | ||
| You can listen to four hours of him and say, I'm kind of hashing this out. | ||
| It goes on for that long. | ||
| And his books kind of deconstruct all that. | ||
| But near as I could tell, it would be something like, you know, if you believe it's true and it works, pragmatically speaking, then you can use the word truth to it. | ||
| And I think it comes down to what do you mean by that? | ||
| Like, so was Jesus resurrected from the dead? | ||
| Now, you know, most Christians today say yes, you know, absolutely. | ||
| You know, someone named Jesus existed. | ||
| He was crucified and he rose from the dead. | ||
| And, you know, a hundred billion people have lived and died before the seven and a half billion people alive now. | ||
| Not one of them has come back from the dead except this one, maybe. | ||
| Okay, so that's the argument. | ||
| Now, from a skeptic's perspective, I would say, well, that is an extraordinary claim. | ||
| How extraordinary? | ||
| A hundred billion to one extraordinary, right? | ||
| Is the evidence for it corresponding or in proportion to that hundred billion to one odds? | ||
| And the answer is no, and so I write about that. | ||
| But to Jordan, I think, he would say whether it happened or not is irrelevant. | ||
| It's mythically true or psychologically true. | ||
| That is, you have a cross to bear, you might say, a burden to carry of the suffering of yourself and your family and friends or humanity or whatever. | ||
| It's a kind of a born-again story. | ||
| you know, starting over, this kind of resurrection of your own life to rebuild. | ||
| It's like the Noachian flood story. | ||
| It's a story of sort of destruction and redemption. | ||
| It's a kind of a born again story. | ||
| So I think what Jordan is arguing is that has mythic power that is a kind of truth about the reality-- | ||
| That's sort of like an eternal truth underneath the empirical truth, something like that, right? | ||
| Right, that's right. | ||
| So it could be that people like me and Jordan, or someone like maybe Richard Dawkins and Jordan, or whoever that's kind of an empiricist, they're just talking at two different levels, I think. | ||
| You know, Jordan's not always super clear about this, so you have to kind of read what he said here or there or whatever, but I think that's what's going on. And so to the extent that, you know, he | ||
| likes to quote Jung and Freud and Nietzsche and Tolstoy and so on. | ||
| It's like, you know, Shakespeare, Jane Austen. The reason this is great literature is because it's tapping | ||
| something about the reality of human nature, human relationships, societies, conflict, power struggles, sex, | ||
| and gossip, and, you know, conflict and violence, war. | ||
| Those are all realities that everybody knows and these great novelists can tap into that. There's a whole study | ||
| now of evolutionary literature, sort of evolutionary psychology of literature, where they kind of, they do | ||
| a content analysis of great works to see which kind of themes come up over and over and over. And they're the | ||
| deepest themes that we all care about. Again, the sort of hierarchy, social status, power, deception, honesty, | ||
| love, sex, all that. And so there I think what Jordan is arguing that I would agree with, that there are truths | ||
| there. Now that's a good point. | ||
| But that's different than an empirical truth. | ||
| So the analogy I make is like people will often send me as the editor of Skeptic Magazine articles explaining what really happened with the flood. | ||
| You know, a meteor striker, it was a volcano eruption. | ||
| Not the flood, but the parting of the Red Sea, say. | ||
| But the flood also or the Jesus was on the cross and then somebody gave him this chemical through the rag and that put him into a coma and then They put him in the tomb, and then he woke up, and then his disciples whisked him off to France, and he married Mary Magdalene, and they had kids, and the bloodline is still around. | ||
| This was, of course, Dan Brown's novel. | ||
| That was a real book, actually. | ||
| Before Dan Brown was a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. | ||
| And actually, those guys sued Dan Brown for stealing their idea. | ||
| He's like, it's a novel, dudes. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He sold so many books. | ||
| If you don't sell any books, no one's going to sue you because there's no money. | ||
| But there you saw the difference. | ||
| Dan Brown's novel resonated because it's just a story. | ||
| He's not claiming it's empirically true. | ||
| But these guys, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors, they were saying, no, no, this really happened. | ||
| OK, so those are two different ways of saying really happened or truth. | ||
| So do you think it's possible that we need both of those? | ||
| I think maybe that's the position that I've come around to, that we need empirical truths. | ||
| We need scientific truths, absolutely. | ||
| But when you talk about that other layer that Jordan's talking about, the sort of time-tested things about purpose, And happiness and individualism and the drive to accomplish what humans are sort of here to do, that for me I've come to, and this is one of the spots, and when I was just on your show you were asking about because I write about this in my book, I've come to the place where for a society to organize itself properly it does need some other ethos beneath it. | ||
| And what I think is something like when you talk about Shakespeare and all the authors that write about these themes too, that in and of themselves those stories aren't enough to organize a society around. | ||
| Not that, again, that individuals can't do it, but for actually for a society to function properly. | ||
| Do you think there's some truth to that? | ||
| Yeah, I do, for sure. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason why drama films and television sells or has much bigger viewerships than documentary films. | ||
| I mean, it's very rare any documentary film gets, you know, millions of views. | ||
| There's a few, but not many. | ||
| And the reason is because we're storytelling animals and we're moved emotionally, deeply, psychologically moved by a story, you know, about some person. | ||
| Now, like when Spielberg made Schindler's List, You know, it's not a story of the Holocaust, because that's too big a subject. | ||
| I mean, you could have like a Ken Burns 13-part series on the Holocaust. | ||
| People have done this, because there's so many stories. | ||
| Instead, he just took one little story. | ||
| Okay, this guy, Oskar Schindler. | ||
| Who was this guy? | ||
| And, you know, Keneally wrote that novel about him, sort of a semi-true novel, okay? | ||
| So if you really look at it, it's not that interesting a story, | ||
| but when you bring it on the big screen and then you build in the Holocaust around that story, | ||
| but it's the narrative thread that goes throughout. | ||
| So all filmmakers know this. | ||
| Most of us nonfiction writers, we don't understand. | ||
| You got to have a narrative story. | ||
| You know, you got to have an arc to it that pulls readers along. | ||
| Good writers do that. | ||
| And good filmmakers do this. | ||
| So there is something in the human mind about sort of grasping ideas and holding them. | ||
| In a way that, you know, yammering away at a blackboard, giving a lecture, which I do for a living, that's not nearly as powerful as somebody who could just tell one story about this one person who had this happen to him, and then you embed in there some ethical principle or some conflict. | ||
| Essentially, you could tell the story of the trolley problem in some drama. | ||
| And that would be far more effective than me giving an explanation with a PowerPoint slide showing the guy on the track and the five workers and the one worker. | ||
| So are you yammering on about categorically? | ||
| Yeah, so basically if you could spend five years, you know, studying at Cambridge with the greatest biblical scholars of all time, and you could get them to sort of, if you could find a scholar who would basically remove all of the stuff that can't be empirically true, empirically proved, sorry, but that the lessons were lessons that you believe to be mystically true, You could come around to those stories, basically. | ||
| You don't think those things are mutually exclusive. | ||
| That's, I think, really what I'm trying to get at. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I just had Bart Ehrman on my podcast and asked him this very thing. | ||
| Because he was a Christian for a long time. | ||
| And now he's an atheist. | ||
| But I said, could you be a Christian and not believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus? | ||
| He says, I think it's mythically true, psychologically true, whatever. | ||
| He goes, yeah, lots of Christians used to believe that. | ||
| That was kind of the main thing until really just the last century and a half or so with the rise of science and the power of science. | ||
| Believers feel like, well, I can't just say it's true for me. | ||
| Or it's, you know, it's my faith tradition, I can't prove it. | ||
| There's a sense that now you actually have to make an argument. | ||
| Like, this is why it's really true. | ||
| Not just psychologically true, true for me, my faith tradition. | ||
| So creationists went down this road in the early 20th century. | ||
| We have to argue that the flood really happened. | ||
| Okay, that means we got to study geology, we got to figure out how floods do this to that, and rocks, and blah, you know, and they're still doing that to a certain extent, and it never gets them anywhere because they don't have very, A, they don't have very good arguments, B, science has better arguments for the flood or whatever, and in any case, once you go down that road, you go, well, what happens if science fills that gap? | ||
| Are you going to abandon your Christian faith? | ||
| Well, no, no, because that's not why I believe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Have you found some people like that, though, that that, you know, they get to that place and science fills the hole and then they suddenly walk? | ||
| Or do you find that more people walk from religion because of some other inconsistency or some other personal acts to grind or something like that? | ||
| For personal reasons is the main reason people leave. | ||
| I mean, there's this meme saying you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason their way to in the first place. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| We do this all the time, skeptics and scientists or whatever. | ||
| And the research from Hugo Mercier and other cognitive psychologists that study this show that you can talk people out of beliefs. | ||
| You can reason them out. | ||
| But just collectively, on average, I think most people come to religion or they leave religion for personal reasons. | ||
| They come there, they were raised that way, or their spouse is that way, or their peer group in high school, like my case, and they leave for other personal reasons. | ||
| You know, like after the Holocaust, a lot of Jews became atheists. | ||
| Like, where was God? | ||
| You know, the problem with the Odyssey again. | ||
| And so, in my case, when I finally gave it up, after seven years in graduate school, you know, I didn't tell anybody. | ||
| I just quit talking about it. | ||
| And I think my family was kind of relieved because I was always, you know, yammering away about, you know, Jesus and, you know, witnessing is what it's called, witnessing. | ||
| And I think they were sick of it. | ||
| So they were like, thank God Michael stopped talking about that. | ||
| And I think that's usually what happens. | ||
| Yeah, so as a guy that now talks about some other stuff, the subtitle of the book is Reflections of a Scientific Humanist, and you mentioned that phrase earlier. | ||
| Can you explain exactly what that is? | ||
| Yeah, so humanism has been around really for a long time. | ||
| Secular humanism as a movement kind of rose in the 30s and 40s, very left-wing liberal. | ||
| Again, free speech, free thought, women's rights, civil rights, African-American rights, and on and on. | ||
| And so that was great. | ||
| But then by the 90s and early 2000s, it kind of shifted, not just further to the left, but also this kind of tribal ticking of the boxes. | ||
| Like, here are the 12 things secular humanists believe. | ||
| Well, I could tick like eight of the 12 boxes. | ||
| Can I still be a humanist? | ||
| And it became, no, you're out. | ||
| If you don't tick all 12 boxes, you're out! | ||
| I forget what you called it, but the narcissism of small differences. | ||
|
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Yeah, I love that phrase. | |
| It's a great phrase. | ||
| That's not mine originally. | ||
| I don't know who came up with it. | ||
| So then Pinker started calling it Enlightenment Humanism. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Sometimes I use that phrase. | ||
| But really in those chapters I'm arguing that science has something to say about human values and morals and ethical theories and so on. | ||
| Even if you can't perfectly debunk the naturalistic fallacy and go from is to ought, the way things are to the way things ought to be, Maybe technically that's not possible, but again, I don't care about that. | ||
| I'm just saying this binary choice between divine command theory, that is, God said it and that makes it right or wrong, versus relativism. | ||
| Anything goes. | ||
| There are no real moral values. | ||
| I just don't believe that. | ||
| I quote Abraham Lincoln, if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. | ||
| And I say, if the Holocaust is not wrong, nothing is wrong. | ||
| Show me a society where people say, I really want to be enslaved. | ||
| Or where most people in a group say, yeah, I really think we should be exterminated. | ||
| I mean, this is insane. | ||
| Nobody thinks that. | ||
| We all know why that's wrong. | ||
| We're born knowing that that's wrong. | ||
| Set aside crazy psychopaths that just like murdering people or most of us have a sense of right and wrong that comes from our nature So I have long arguments about the evolutionary origins of morality and so forth But but the idea again is just to counter this binary choice, you know that there's more of that So I call it scientific humanism or call it enlightenment humanism, but but let's not let's not Make the tent so small that only a few people can tick all 12 boxes. | ||
| That's a That's a bad road to go down. | ||
| And for some reason, a lot of social movements do that. | ||
| I remember when objectivism was on the rise, when I was at Pepperdine, I mentioned everybody read Atlas Shrugged, right? | ||
| And then she died in 82, and then, you know, so it was this big movement. | ||
| But then the biographies about her came out that showed the movement was shrinking as they were kicking people out. | ||
| Like, you watch the wrong films, you listen to the wrong music. | ||
| That's not objectivist music. | ||
| What? | ||
| Even smoking the wrong brand of cigarettes became the non-objectivist form of cigarette smoking. | ||
| Pretty soon, there's like six people at her funeral. | ||
| There's nobody left. | ||
| You know, it's so interesting, because as you know, I do some speaking events with the Ayn Rand Institute, and I think we've done at least one together, didn't we? | ||
| I think we did something with Ayn Rand together, maybe at USC or something. | ||
| And I think actually, the top brass there, I don't want to speak for them, but I think they really do regret some of exactly what you're talking about, making it so sort of... | ||
| But, you know, when you mentioned Ayn Rand before and being at Pepperdine, it is sort of interesting because you have all these people that come from a religious background reading a book about, you know, really from the ultimate individualist capitalist who truly was a secularist, too, because she did a mass dissection of religion and really was completely anti-religion, yet somehow these people were able to read these things, and I guess it didn't work out that well in the end, but they were able, they were trying to put these pieces together, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| The new generation of Ayn Rand supporters are much more ecumenical about that. | ||
| I mean, I think in the earlier generation, when Rand was alive, I think they said Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman were basically socialists. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| I mean, these guys are like hardcore libertarian. | ||
| They're not libertarian at all! | ||
| Although, according to the Yeah, well, according to the New York Times, Milton Friedman's leading people to the alt-right. | ||
| Didn't you know that? | ||
| I mean, that's how it works. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| But again, I think all social movements do that. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to move on to, we only have a little bit of time left, I want to move on to some of the ways that you tackle the issues of the day through this lens. | ||
| So let's talk about guns a little bit, because basically you talk about, it's sort of just the lens that liberals and conservatives are using to look at the issue that is sort of the problem in the first place. | ||
| Yeah, guns. | ||
| I have a couple chapters in the book on guns because I did these debates with John Lott, the author of that book, More Guns, Less Crime. | ||
| OK, so he's pretty hardcore. | ||
| You see him a lot on TV defending the Second Amendment and so on. | ||
| OK, fine. | ||
| I'm not a critic of the Second Amendment. | ||
| I'm concerned about the levels of gun violence. | ||
| You know, 35,000 to 40,000 a year die of guns. | ||
| You know, shouldn't we do something about this? | ||
| Like the automobile industry did this, you know, let's put seatbelts in and airbags and so on. | ||
| And why doesn't the gun manufacturers do this? | ||
| The NRA used to do that. | ||
| The NRA was a gun safety club that insisted on training people on the use of guns. | ||
| Okay, I'm fine with guns as long as you have training and you keep it locked in a lockbox and so on. | ||
| But the problem is is that I think the right now has fetishized the Second Amendment such that guns are a proxy for something else. | ||
| It's not the guns they're defending. | ||
| It's that guns represent freedom, autonomy, liberty, the right for me to protect myself and my family and my home. | ||
| Well, isn't that what law enforcement is for? | ||
| Yeah, but they can't be there on time and they're not always reliable. | ||
| Therefore, it's up to me. | ||
| It's a very American way of thinking about this issue. | ||
| And so I kind of look at some of those issues in the book, too. | ||
| It's a hard one, I know, because I have no solution to this, Dave. | ||
| There's 350 million guns in America. | ||
| We're not going to confiscate them all. | ||
| The Second Amendment's not going to be tossed out. | ||
| It's never going to happen. | ||
| But the idea, like, well, shouldn't we just have background checks and close the gun show loophole and just little things? | ||
| But the moment you go down that path, The people on the far end of that spectrum, they go, oh no, that's a slippery slope. | ||
| And pretty soon, it's Hitler's marching in the streets, taking away everybody's guns. | ||
|
unidentified
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Come on, we should at least be able to talk about it. | |
| Yeah, there's so much there. | ||
| I mean, 350 million guns, as you say, that's more than people in the United States. | ||
| I mean, that's one thing. | ||
| But do you think in a time like we're in right now, where the reason we're not doing this in studio is obviously because of coronavirus, and it's pretty miraculous we've talked for 50 minutes and not even mentioned it, which is nice. | ||
| But that in a time like right now where we see stories where, you know, New York City's letting out a certain amount of prisoners and we're closing gun shops in LA and the government seems to be taking these, what I would say are strange, somewhat radical measures, that it actually feeds that sort of very American idea, even if you're not thrilled with that idea, that you could see why someone would think the way they think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, well, a couple of gun rights groups sued Newsom and the state of California, insisting that gun shops are an essential commodity, like pharmacies and supermarkets should stay open, so should gun shops. | ||
| Wow, okay, really? | ||
| I mean, you know, do you really believe even the great America is on the precipice of collapsing at any moment? | ||
| You know, the currency is going to be useless and within a matter of weeks there'll be mobs in the street. | ||
| I better pack a backpack in heat and have my home fully loaded up, ready to shoot people. | ||
| I mean, come on, don't you have more confidence in the American system of law and order and civil society than that? | ||
| And apparently some people don't. | ||
| I think it's shaking, I really do. | ||
| Listen, I wish we could go longer, but we're crunched over here. | ||
| But we will do this in person the second we can, and we'll pick it up, because there's so much more in here. | ||
| It's a dense, thoughtful book, and I really enjoyed it. | ||
| And this is now at least your seventh appearance on the Rubin Report. | ||
|
unidentified
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So I suspect it will continue. | |
| No, you're one of the people I think of with giving the devil. | ||
| You do give the devil their due and you get hammered for it. | ||
| But, you know, you got to absorb it because that's the only way. | ||
| I listen to your show all the time. | ||
| There's people I never even heard of. | ||
| It's like, wow, that's an incredibly interesting idea. | ||
| That's the only way we can learn and make progress. | ||
| Indeed, my friend. | ||
| Well, I look forward to seeing you in person and it'll be better done than through these pipes that Al Gore developed. | ||
| So good seeing you, Michael. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| And we'll link to the book right down below. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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