Feb. 5, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[outro music] | |
| Alright creatures of the internet! | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, this is The Rubin Report, and we are live for another Friday panel show, and this is a good one. | ||
| You guys know I don't overreach when I say that. | ||
| This is a good one. | ||
| Joining me today are Christian Thinker and author of the new book, Fish Out of Water, Eric Metaxas. | ||
| Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, author and columnist Rabbi David Wolpe, and author and assistant professor at Portland State University and atheist Peter Boghossian. | ||
| Guys, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| I was really looking forward to this when we decided to do this a couple of weeks ago because it seems to me that sort of everyone is in some state of craziness. | ||
| I include myself in that. | ||
| We're seeing sort of the truths that we all could agree on are sort of disintegrating right in front of us. | ||
| And I thought you three from a different, from a Christian, a Jewish, and an atheist perspective would be a nice little way to take us into the weekend. | ||
| But it hit me right before we started That, Rabbi, you and I are in crazy Los Angeles, Pete is in completely bananas Portland, and Eric, you're in psychotic New York City. | ||
| So what are we doing wrong with our lives? | ||
| What are we doing wrong with our lives? | ||
| Eric, you go first. | ||
| What happened here? | ||
| Well, since I'm a Christian, I can think of myself as a missionary. | ||
| New York needs the truth, and God planted me here. | ||
| Listen, I was born in New York, and we never got very far. | ||
| My folks are in Connecticut, my wife's folks are in Jersey, so we're equidistant. | ||
| And up until about a year ago, it made a lot of sense to live in New York. | ||
| But right now, we're beginning to wonder. | ||
| Yeah, I bet. | ||
| My sister was the last Rubin clan to be there, and she fled. | ||
| Pete, you're in Portland, which is probably the craziest of all of them. | ||
| What in the world are you doing? | ||
| Yeah, I'm plotting and it's either I'm gonna escape and move or run, and I'm totally serious about this, or run for mayor next time. | ||
| The DA, Mike Schmidt, doesn't prosecute people, so they just, it's a revolving carcel. | ||
| The mayor is an absolute disgrace, and I don't know It's hard to believe at this point that what's happening is mere incompetence. | ||
| We've seen the complete, there's no plan to bring the business back. | ||
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He's preoccupied with pronouns. | |
| I mean, it's almost like you've fallen into a different universe. | ||
| But I think escape, either escape or office are the only two choices. | ||
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I don't think it can be fixed with the current infrastructure. | |
| What a world, you might run for mayor of Portland, and I've told people that if Newsom gets recalled, which I do think will happen, I will at least consider running for governor. | ||
| And truly, my platform would be everything Newsom said, I'll do the reverse. | ||
| That's the whole platform. | ||
| That's it, that's it. | ||
| Rabbi, your- My platform, sorry, my platform is gonna be even simpler. | ||
| If you riot, independent of the reasons you riot, you will be arrested. | ||
| It's literally, I'm running on just that. | ||
| You got my vote and I don't even live there. | ||
| Rabbi, you're here in LA. | ||
| So I'm here in Los Angeles. | ||
| Yeah, we're still in semi-lockdown and let's start there. | ||
| What's that been like for you as someone that heads a congregation to be in this state of not knowing when people can get together? | ||
| It's actually, more than anything else, it's been very painful because funerals, hospital visits, Which are the most important, if not the flashiest things that rabbis, ministers, priests do. | ||
| We can't do that. | ||
| And so that's been painful. | ||
| And I do, you know, I think Los Angeles suffers, as you know, as a fellow somewhat Angeleno, it has this spiritual malady to start with. | ||
| So my own diagnosis is the thing that's really wrong with Los Angeles is we don't have autumn. | ||
| The problem is you don't see the beauty of things aging. | ||
| So in Los Angeles, you're supposed to have spring, spring, spring, and then die. | ||
| And the idea that things actually get older and therefore maturity is something to be admired and even coveted, that doesn't exist so much here. | ||
| But maybe the pandemic will be something of a reset for people. | ||
| I'm not sure, but hope springs eternal. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting to me because, you know, I moved here seven or eight years ago. | ||
| I lived in New York my whole life where we had the Four Seasons. | ||
| I moved here. | ||
| One of the reasons that I am still here is because of that perpetual spring. | ||
| But I guess, yeah, maybe you do lose something. | ||
| So I thought an interesting place to start, guys, would be within your view of the world. | ||
| During this crazy time, have you had to challenge any of the beliefs that you had beforehand? | ||
| Eric, I'll start with you. | ||
| Has this caused me to challenge any of the beliefs I've had? | ||
| On the contrary, I think it has made me more explicit about what I believe. | ||
| I'm less, I mean, listen, things have become, It's clearer and clearer and clearer. | ||
| The horror, you know, that was there under the surface has now come out. | ||
| I mean, I'll give you a strange example of the looniness that we're living in. | ||
| Some of you know Mike Lindell, right? | ||
| He has been on this whole election fraud thing and finally put together a documentary of what he sees as the evidence, right? | ||
| Now, it doesn't matter what you think of it. | ||
| I really I think it's important for us to have transparency in the election, and when people are trying to do that, I honor that. | ||
| So I posted this documentary, I sent it out to my email list and said, what do you think of this? | ||
| Here you go, right? | ||
| Today, because I did that, Google shut down My email. | ||
| I can't email anyone because I had the temerity to share a documentary in which mild-mannered people share what they think is evidence of something bad in America. | ||
| And I thought, can you imagine that they would be so heavy-handed? | ||
| It's the heavy-handedness that tells you something's wrong, right? | ||
| Are you saying you literally can't get into your own Gmail account right now because of that? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
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And do you know that's the reason? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I do know it's the reason. | ||
| It's never happened before. | ||
| But we sent out an email blast to my list, which is not a monumental list. | ||
| But I kind of thought, this is important. | ||
| Mike Lindell has put a lot of work and a lot of his own money into this. | ||
| People should look at this. | ||
| So I sent it out. | ||
| And within a couple of hours, my assistant told me, we can't send out emails from the EricMetaxas.com account, which is Gmail. | ||
| And I thought, you're kidding. | ||
| And then suddenly I realized, oh, OK, they have decided to shut us down. | ||
| Because we shared a documentary. | ||
| Now, that's what has happened to me in this last year. | ||
| In other words, every week that goes by, the absurdity ratchets up. | ||
| And you think, even if I weren't convinced that something fishy was going on, I would be convinced by the way people are behaving. | ||
| When you shut somebody down, I mean, I was knocked off YouTube, I was knocked off Twitter, but I'm thinking, for sharing something like this, for Gmail to shut down our account It makes you more vocal. | ||
| And I've written about this in some biographies. | ||
| Luther, I was saying when he was rebelling against the Catholic Church, it was because they treated him so poorly that he became increasingly outspoken. | ||
| If they had played nice with him, he never wanted a revolution or a reformation. | ||
| And I feel like that's what happens when you treat people poorly. | ||
| It happened, listen, it happened to the colonists in the 13 colonies, you know, King George could have played it differently, but by trying to crush them, he made them angrier and angrier. | ||
| So I have become much more open about my views than I was a year or so ago, just because I've been truly disgusted. | ||
| to see this kind of fundamentally anti-American thing happening in the greatest country in the world. | ||
| It's unacceptable, and I will not shut up about it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| I feel the same way. | ||
| And by the way, on the Mike Lindell part of this, not only was he booted personally from Twitter, but they also took out the MyPillow account. | ||
| So in essence saying, we're not even gonna let you sell pillows. | ||
| Pete, as an atheist in this time, you know that, I've been saying for quite some time, it was a weird realization for me, but that the purely secular worldview works at the micro level, but it seems like it's not working at the macro level anymore. | ||
| That wokeism is sort of the end of the purely secular view. | ||
| What's your take on that at this point? | ||
| Well, certainly it's an Achilles heel. | ||
| I'm kind of still caught up in what Eric just said. | ||
| I just find that astonishing. | ||
| I'll answer your question directly, but I don't know if I would jump to assume that Google is out to get me, necessarily. | ||
| I mean, did you press them? | ||
| Did you call them and ask for why this is happening? | ||
| This has never happened before. | ||
| It happened to all the Eric Metaxas accounts. | ||
| Now, there's my whole staff, their emails shut down. | ||
| And we posted this, you know, today, and I knew it was hot stuff, but I thought, In America, that they would do this? | ||
| Doesn't it tell you? | ||
| And there was no... When you asked them, there was no response? | ||
| They didn't tell you why your emails were shut down? | ||
| No, they absolutely did not. | ||
| And my staff is looking into it right now. | ||
| But I am... It's just mind-blowing to me. | ||
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I have to say. | |
| Pete, there's nobody to call at Google. | ||
| There's no Google phone number. | ||
| There's no customer service. | ||
| I mean, that's the irony about how big they've become. | ||
| But go ahead. | ||
| Well, okay, I'd like to linger on that, but that's okay. | ||
| So, it's very interesting to me having this conversation and being on with folks, and I'm familiar with everyone's work here, the Rabbi's work and Eric's work, and what's interesting to me is what's so important now wasn't important before, and this is interesting how the culture has shifted and the times have shifted. | ||
| Now, metaphysics is really unimportant, whether there was a talking snake, whether someone walked on water. | ||
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It just seems like those seems like such quaint questions. | |
| And having debates about these things seems so rather silly. | ||
| I think what's important now is that we all share a mutual threat. | ||
| And that is we're in the middle of a cultural revolution. | ||
| And we see that the society is under siege by maniacs who've taken control of our institutions. | ||
| And it could very well be that Eric's story is A simple example of that where people try to take away our liberties. | ||
| I can't speak to that. | ||
| But I think that you're right, Dave, that wokeism, it's a universal solvent. | ||
| It is the Achilles heel of not just liberalism, but it destroys absolutely everything it touches, even the Southern Baptist. | ||
| And so what I think is really important in this conversation are some of the things that three people of different backgrounds can agree upon. | ||
| And I'll throw this out possibly as a conversation starter. | ||
| We all agree on the rules of engagement. | ||
| So those rules of engagement are conversation like we're having now, I guess debate if you have to, but they're dialectical, they're speech. | ||
| So we agree on that. | ||
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I'm not going to call David, I was going to say something that I probably shouldn't. | |
| Some bad name. | ||
| Try not to get me booted off YouTube, I've already got my taxes on here. | ||
| So, I'm not going to smear people, we're going to converse in good faith, we're going to have that conversation and we're going to be willing, certainly I would sincerely say I'd be willing to change my mind and my guess is that your guess would too have presented with sufficient evidence. | ||
| So, we agree upon that. | ||
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The other thing is we agree upon a correspondence theory of reality. | |
| So, we think that we can come to truth Not based upon our subjective experiences of, or let me put it this way, we all believe that we can come to truth not based upon one's immutable characteristics, the color of our skin or what have you. | ||
| That doesn't limit us from finding the truth. | ||
| And those two rules, the rules of engagement and the idea that your immutable characteristics don't, particularly race or sexual orientation or gender, don't prevent you from finding the truth means that the three of us have more in common right now. | ||
| than what we see as the reigning moral orthodoxy. | ||
| Can I add, I mean I certainly agree with that, but I'd like to add another characteristic and bring in the other side here, which is that the degree of your indignance or your anger is no indicator of the degree of the correctness of your views. | ||
| And this is a malady, and this is a malady left and right. | ||
| I see it from both sides and I get it as I'm sure you sometimes do on my Twitter and on my Facebook from both sides. | ||
| People who are incapable of containing their rage and they're convinced that their rage proves how just they are and how right they are. | ||
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And that is a It's a poison. | |
| It's a sort of ecumenical toxic poison that is moving through our system and is making it really difficult to talk across the political divide. | ||
| And the last thing that I would also say is my guess is, although I don't know everybody on this call well enough to say this, but I'm going to make the guess nonetheless. | ||
| Unfortunately for much of America, since there is no shared culture anymore, everything is politics. | ||
| You can't be sure that someone else has read the same books or listened to the same music or whatever. | ||
| The one thing you can be sure of is that you share the possibility of talking about politics and the recognition that there is much, much more to life. | ||
| than politics alone is a recognition that would help America a lot because now everything is politicized and it's not good. | ||
| Yeah, so actually, Rabbi, I want to stay with you for a moment on that because the fact that everything has become so politicized I think is directly correlated to why seemingly so many people are so miserable. | ||
| What are you able to do as the leader of a community to inoculate your people from that? | ||
| Well, I would love to be able to say that my people are inoculated, but what I try to do is to put out consistently messages, as you just saw me do this last moment, that are not political. | ||
| Because rather than feeding into the insatiable maw of the political machines, right and left, what I try to remind people is that, you know, that part of life that there's There's so much to life that politics does not intrude on if you don't want it to. | ||
| And most of it, by the way, has to do with how you conduct yourself, your relationship to other human beings, your relationship to God, your relationship to your own soul. | ||
| Those are not essentially political categories. | ||
| And that is most of our life. | ||
| How small the part that men endure, kings or laws can cause or cure, as I think it was Tennyson wrote. | ||
| And that is still true, except that we don't live that way. | ||
| Eric, do you think that that's sort of what's going on here, that we're all now sort of trying to find meaning through politics, because that's the only thing that brings us all together? | ||
| As, you know, we used to have, you know, you could turn on the 630 News and we could all sort of agree that that was the reality, but we just don't have that anymore. | ||
| I'm still stuck on the fact that the rabbi used the phrase insatiable maw, because I think that's a porn film about some hillbillies. | ||
| Let me just say this, please, please, not everything you do, try to be serious. | ||
| I think what the rabbi said is true, except I would say it's really not on both sides. | ||
| I would say that fundamental, I mean, look, people on both sides get angry and scream and there are maniacs on both sides. | ||
| But the fundamental principle at the heart of emotionalism, whatever it is, is a utopianist Strain that you see in revolutions going back to the French Revolution. | ||
| It is an attempt to reduce everything to political categories. | ||
| And it believes that reducing things to political categories and it believes in reductionism in reducing people you're in or you're out, you're good or you're bad, you're woke or you're evil. | ||
| That kind of reductionism is a radical left worldview, and it touches Everything. | ||
| People on the other side of the political spectrum, I think, have a very different view and I think conservative values would lead you to believe in poetry and in art and in all those kinds of things and the nuances of culture and the little platoons and family and church and And I don't think people on the left see it that way. | ||
| They are about a revolution. | ||
| They're about power and reducing things, reductionism in general, demonizing opponents. | ||
| You know, as a Christian, for example, I'm supposed to pray for my enemies. | ||
| I'm supposed to love my enemies. | ||
| It doesn't mean I won't fight them, but I don't demonize them. | ||
| I don't dehumanize them because they're created in the image of God. | ||
| People on the left, I don't think they have that problem. | ||
| I think that they are very happy to reduce people to, you're my enemy and I want to crush you. | ||
| I don't care how I crush you. | ||
| There are no rules. | ||
| So I don't think it's really a bipartisan problem. | ||
| Pete, what do you think about that? | ||
| Because you're a sort of lifelong lefty and an atheist and a secularist, but I think at least partially you agree with that because who's always trying to cancel you? | ||
| It's not the Christian conservatives. | ||
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No, certainly not. | |
| Part of the problem is that this, we have to look at this big picture stuff. | ||
| And historically, I think it's also important. | ||
| This is an invasive value. | ||
| This neo-racism that we're seeing now is an invasive value. | ||
| Critical social justice, whatever name you want to, there's a suite of ideologies that takes place. | ||
| In my first book, I talked about how this has more or less parasitized the liberal mind. | ||
| So, there are Achilles' heels in liberalism, and that's the other thing about this, that underneath all of this, there's a kernel of truth. | ||
| Yes, there has been historical racism. | ||
| Yes, there has been historical, and there still is, racism and sexism. | ||
| Whether or not that's institutionalized, we can talk about that, but I think it's really important to differentiate When we're talking about liberalism, leftism, being on the left, being on the right, first I think that those categories don't have as much significance now. | ||
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They're certainly not demarcated as clearly as they used to be, you know, 2015, certainly when I was growing up. | |
| Excuse me. | ||
| But I think that the way to look at this is, and then I would add one more thing to what Eric said, is that this really is a parasitization of the values that people hold. | ||
| And the other thing is, I think that undergirding all of this is the idea that holding a belief, you know, that's a key component of ideologues. | ||
| They believe that holding a belief makes them a better person. | ||
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Dan Dennett calls that belief and belief. | |
| So that's, you see that both on the left and on the right. | ||
| And I want to echo what the rabbi said, you know, it's This toxin is so dangerous and it's so contagious that it's destroyed friendships. | ||
| I have friends in my, who have been in my home, good friends of mine, guy who came out when my dad died. | ||
| Actually, I saw you right after that, Dave, who no longer speak to me. | ||
| Literally, and it's about a political disagreement. | ||
| Friends I've had my whole life don't speak to me about a political disagreement, and I've approached them repeatedly. | ||
| And yes, I will be forthcoming and say they were on the left, but in no way do I think that this problem is unique to the left, but I will say that it is the guiding or underlying drive of the neo-racist ideology that we see everywhere in society. | ||
| So removing like some of the purely political side of it, Rabbi, have you seen in the last year, is there any other time in your career that you saw more sort of tumult within families because of politics? | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| I know I'm going through it in my own family right now. | ||
| Right, not even close. | ||
| And while I don't want to enter the left-right ideological distinctions, because I think there are distinctions and they are important. | ||
| And I don't want to deny that. | ||
| But my principal concern, especially as a rabbi to people, and knowing that arguing people out of their political ideology is a rarely successful task. | ||
| My read of the level of anger is that it is equal, at least on both sides, and is virulent. | ||
| And I actually also have lost friends, both right and left. | ||
| From this same, one very close, who objected to one thing that I said, and that was it, and won't talk about it. | ||
| He's from the right, but it's... Can I ask what that is? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We had talked about... I said something very similar to what Pete just said, which is that racism does exist in this society. | ||
| And as soon as he heard that, it was... | ||
| BLM, Burning Cities, you're okay with that? | ||
| And I said, no, obviously not. | ||
| I've spoken against it, and I certainly am anti-woke in very serious ways. | ||
| But I try so hard to give everybody a fair hearing. | ||
| And so I'm really, I'm constantly, when you do that, what happens is on the other side, the fair hearing is heard as you're a partisan of the other side. | ||
| And correct. | ||
| That's a function. | ||
| That's a function of an emotional reaction. | ||
| Now, I'm not talking about historically ideological emotionalism. | ||
| That's a that's really a much more theoretical question at the moment to me than the emotional reaction of the individual right or left to hearing someone that they think of as an ally, because they've heard them say things in the past that they agree with, say something now that indicates they're part of the other side. | ||
| Because the last point I want to make is what I've discovered. | ||
| is what makes the current situation so toxic is when you say something that is not in conformity with your ideology as you previously expressed it. | ||
| It isn't that you are starting an argument, it's that you're losing your compatriots and friends. | ||
| There are two teams and you can't break from your team. | ||
| We've seen this politically. | ||
| Look, anybody who broke from the team was tossed out and that's A very bad way to conduct oneself in life because it makes critical engagement impossible. | ||
| You can say anything critical you want of the other side, and I'm hearing a lot of that even on this call, but you can't say anything critical about your own team because you'll be a betrayer. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| And by the way, this isn't something that you're just saying. | ||
| You've lived this because you were one of the first rabbis, maybe the first in Los Angeles, to allow for gay marriage at your synagogue, and I know that caused all sorts of problems from more right-leaning people. | ||
| Yes, it was a huge outcry. | ||
| And it was on the front page of the LA and the New York Times. | ||
| That's how big an outcry it was. | ||
| But I will tell you, I've told this story before, but I have a daughter who is now in her early 20s, but at the time was a young teenager and saw all this and was a little bit alarmed. | ||
| And I told her what Churchill said after combat. | ||
| He said, it's exhilarating to be shot at without result. | ||
| The knowledge that you can come through a controversy and the people who you counted on are still there and you feel okay about yourself, that's a very growthful experience. | ||
| So, Eric, I'm curious if you see that there's some sort of Christian awakening happening, because I sense something happening within the Christian community. | ||
| And I know just from the last couple of years, as I've talked about all of these things and had all sorts of different thinkers and believers and non-believers on, That, to me, I went to Liberty University. | ||
| It's the largest evangelical Christian college in the United States. | ||
| I spoke at their Sunday invocation in front of 14,000 people. | ||
| I mean, it was, it was, it felt like a political rally. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| They know my, they know I'm married to a man. | ||
| They know some of my other beliefs that are not thought of as traditionally Christian beliefs. | ||
| I was welcomed in that campus in an absolutely extraordinary way, and I sense something good sort of happening in the Christian community right now. | ||
| Do you sense that? | ||
| I do, but once again I have to go back to a word that the rabbi used. | ||
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He said, growthful. | |
| Speaking as a writer, somebody who cares about words, I just want to say that's the ugliest word I have heard in weeks. | ||
| Growthful is not a word. | ||
| Please don't ever use that again. | ||
| That's the deal breaker for me, punk. | ||
| No, so look, there is no question that something is happening in the church, among Christians. | ||
| There's a lot of division, too. | ||
| But I see people, I mean, especially those of us who were upset by the election, there's a lot of prayer. | ||
| And as somebody who, you know, literally believes in God, not as an idea, but prayer stuff happens when people pray. | ||
| And I am absolutely convinced that we are going to find ourselves in some ways as a result of the madness that is happening right now. | ||
| And these expressions really of vileness, just anti-American Uh, fascist censorship and that kind of thing. | ||
| I think it's driving people back to the roots and by roots, uh, among other things, I mean, a very, a serious kind of faith that says, what really matters at this point? | ||
| Uh, if, if the government is, is shutting down my email and they, I can't, you know, you, you, you suddenly say, wait a minute, what is really, what is really important and what are the values that are the basis for what I believe in. | ||
| So I think that we're being forced to think about what is freedom? | ||
| How do you get a free society? | ||
| And I would argue, and have argued and written about it, that you cannot have American-style self-government without virtue, and you're not going to have much virtue without expressions of faith and that these things are important. | ||
| But we haven't been able, we haven't been forced to think about this because we've been living in a relatively free society for decades and decades, and we just haven't ever been pushed to think, Well, could we lose that? | ||
| So suddenly when you begin losing it, you think, what is it that sustains that? | ||
| And why did we take our eye off the ball? | ||
| We need to get back to that. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Dave, I want to respond to, first of all, with all due respect to Eric's aesthetic sense of the language, growthful is in fact a word. | ||
| It's right out of the dictionary. | ||
| Excuse me, excuse me, Eric. | ||
| It is out of the dictionary. | ||
| It is a word and it's a far less disgusting word than punk. | ||
| The F word is in the dictionary. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I take back punk. | ||
| I take back punk. | ||
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Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| I'm going to need the atheist to clean this up. | ||
| I'm going to need the atheist to clean this up. | ||
| I'm going to come in and clean this up. | ||
| Pete, let me, let me ask you this, which is that, If there is some sort of renewal happening within the Christian community, the atheist community sort of had that. | ||
| Like about six or eight years ago, there was this New Atheist Movement. | ||
| I spoke at the Reason Rally. | ||
| I mean, there was a feeling of like this purely secular worldview that could really work. | ||
| It seems to have completely collapsed at this point. | ||
| What do you make of the atheist movement, if there is such a thing at this point? | ||
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I think the atheist movement, well, the New Atheist Movement is certainly dead. | |
| Destroyed by the thing that's destroying us all now, it was the precursors, the canary in the coal mine, which was wokeism. | ||
| Back to something that David said, it's really resonating with me. | ||
| Can I ask you, how old was your friend, your former friend? | ||
| He was probably in his mid to late 70s. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| So that's not the answer I was expecting. | ||
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I think one of the problems, I think we have two problems. | |
| One is that there's a whole infrastructure that's currently in place and there's a language, that's why I'm surprised he was 70, they'll call it co-platforming or even speaking to someone makes you an enemy. | ||
| Oh no, he was on the right. | ||
| He was on the right, not on the left. | ||
| No, I know, but that same kind of parallelism in the architecture of how we defend our beliefs and how... Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you would be willing to have a conversation with him again and talk about your friendship, correct? | ||
| I've tried. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, and that's one of the things that's so disturbing to me, is that he probably does not, as I've approached my friends who have not. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so, part of the problem is that, a few things. | ||
| One, we have to value the right things. | ||
| And while I certainly have, again, metaphysical disagreements with the other people on this call, what I value, what we all value, is cognitive liberty. | ||
| I value the rabbi's right to believe. | ||
| I value Eric's right to believe. | ||
| I value They have every right to worship and every right to pray as they want, and I have every right to disagree with the contents of those beliefs, and if I want I'm not so inclined to challenge them to a debate or have a conversation about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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But what we see now is a kind of tyranny. | |
| We see a kind of tyranny among people They don't want certain beliefs to enter the public square. | ||
| They've expanded the umbrella of racism to such a crazy degree that everything is now racist. | ||
| Conversation is racist. | ||
| Public speech acronyms are racist. | ||
| Knitting is racist. | ||
| Dungeons and Dragons is now anti-Semitic. | ||
|
unidentified
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Which was a particular pain to me. | |
| So the question is, how do we help people value the right things, value the cognitive liberty of others, value civilized conversation, value getting beyond politics? | ||
| I mean, it's the polarization is so intense right now. | ||
| I have never in my 54 years of life seen anything like it. | ||
| And I think at some point in this call, we have to talk about solutions to these maladies or else we're just people complaining about. | ||
| Well, you know my philosophy on that. | ||
| It's like, let's actually figure out what we can do. | ||
| So that is where we'll end. | ||
| But I'm curious, Rabbi, going off what Pete just said there, are people, how much of the sort of struggle that you're sensing from people is because they literally cannot get together in Los Angeles even now? | ||
| I'm the pandemic certainly exacerbates all of this. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| And also, as does the and part of this is, there is a status to grievance. | ||
| That makes it really difficult to give someone their due because, you know, Robert Frost said that poetry is made of griefs, not grievances. | ||
| But we've become a society that even though we have real griefs, grievances predominate. | ||
| Things that are not griefs but are grievances. | ||
| And as long as they are acknowledged as giving someone the status that they currently do, It's going to be hard to dig our way out of this. | ||
| The one thing about the pandemic, of course, that will, I hope, get better once the vaccines are widely spread and so on, is to actually see another face, to see another human being, to encounter them, to realize and recognize their humanness. | ||
| And as Eric said, the recognition that they're in the image of God, that is elevating and healing. | ||
| And I really do hope That what can't happen over social media can happen over, you know, restaurant tables. | ||
| That people will start to see one another for their fundamental humanness and not as political entities or racial entities or Or people of different ethnicities as opposed to just people. | ||
| Yeah, and it's just incredible to me how quickly we forget all of this, you know, from living in L.A. | ||
| for the last year where in essence we haven't been able to go out. | ||
| I have people at my house in what I think are highly illegal gatherings, but I was in Texas last week and I went to a restaurant with some friends and even to just interact with the waiter. | ||
| Was just like, oh, that's the stuff we used to do. | ||
| It used to be pretty boring, and now it's like, oh, I'm talking to another human being. | ||
| How exciting. | ||
| Let's get to the solutions part, though. | ||
| Let's spend the last 10 minutes talking about that. | ||
| Eric, what do you think we can do to fix some of this stuff, to get back to something that feels more okay? | ||
| Look, I think you have to be honest about some things here. | ||
| The grievance culture, the idea that if I have a grievance, it elevates me, That is a culturally Marxist worldview. | ||
| It's about us versus them. | ||
| It's about power. | ||
| It's not about truth, goodness, and beauty. | ||
| It's about power. | ||
| And if somebody can get power, cultural power, from being part of a Of a grievance, you know, category. | ||
| Of course they're going to use that. | ||
| I remember when I was at Yale, before I had any kind of faith, buying into that idea that, you know, that those people in power, they're scum. | ||
| I felt completely free to despise them. | ||
| I can only speak from my point of view, but the Bible says to me, it commands me, To look at my enemies as made in the image of God. | ||
| Even if I have to kill them in a fight, I don't do it very joyfully. | ||
| I do it with grief. | ||
| That is a worldview that I don't think, unless you're willing to tell people with this culturally Marxist, woke worldview, that is hurtful. | ||
| That has never worked. | ||
| That has led to bloodbaths in the past. | ||
| You need to understand that. | ||
| You need to understand that this will never lead to a culture where people get blessed. | ||
| I think we have to call it out. | ||
| And also I will say this. | ||
| It's one thing for some 21-year-old maniac to behaving a certain way and to get cultural status from that kind of thing. | ||
| But when corporations worth billions of dollars support this Kind of thinking when they support the cancel culture. | ||
| We don't need to talk about the idiots at Big Tech. | ||
| OK, but when I'm talking about corporations, we had Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl's, H.E.B. | ||
| stores, Wayfair stores all canceled Mike Lindell because they didn't like, you know, they but the real issue and this goes back to, you know, what Al Sharpton would do and Jesse Jackson would do. | ||
| They would shake people down. | ||
| They would say to corporations, unless you do this, We're going to put you on the front page. | ||
| You're a racist corporation. | ||
| So they're all running in fear. | ||
| And if you do not have courage, and most of these folks have no courage, they will throw you under the bus. | ||
| They will do business with China. | ||
| They would do business with Nazi Germany. | ||
| They have no values. | ||
| It's about money. | ||
| It's about staying out of trouble. | ||
| Unless you have moral values and unless you have courage, we are going to get More of the same. | ||
| These corporations have tremendous power, and I'm just telling you right now, they would happily do business with Nazis. | ||
| They do not care. | ||
| If Uighur Muslims are being murdered and tortured, they don't care. | ||
| If they can make money and stay out of the way of the woke mob, if the woke mob doesn't come for them, I wrote a book about Nazi Germany. | ||
| I wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. | ||
| That's what happened in Germany. | ||
| The Germans were not evil people. | ||
| They were just like the Americans today. | ||
| They didn't want trouble and they were willing, cravenly, to do what was necessary to look the other way when bad things were happening. | ||
| That's all it takes. | ||
| That is what's happening in America today. | ||
| And if we don't have some courage, that is the path we're on. | ||
| There's no other way. | ||
| Ideologically, that's where we're going. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| Look, Pete, you know, it's interesting because Eric's talking about how this has infected the corporations. | ||
| You've been, you've been fighting this thing forever. | ||
| I actually remember that one of the real moments that I woke up to all of this was when you invited me to speak at Portland State University and it was me, you, and Christina Hoff Summers and Antifa showed up and they said that you were a white supremacist and I was a homophobe and Christina hated women and police had to escort us. | ||
| And also Andy Noh, who was just a young kid at the time, who now is like one of the prime fighters of this. | ||
| He was there, but you've been doing it on the campus thing. | ||
| And everyone kept saying to us, "Hey, it's staying on the campuses. | ||
| You guys are nuts." | ||
| And to Eric's point, it's everywhere now. | ||
| So what can we do? | ||
| What can we actually do and not just talk about it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, so I'll speak to what we can do about it on the campuses. | |
| And then I'll speak to what we can do about it in our own lives. | ||
| One word that's come up over and over again is grievance. | ||
| And we've gone, our universities and institutions have gone from engines of knowledge production | ||
| to engines of grievance indoctrination. | ||
| And that's what we're seeing now. | ||
| The perennial and perpetual I mean, there was a whole system in place to indoctrinate young people. | ||
| So that is a problem. | ||
| I've talked about the ways to get out of that. | ||
| You basically have a ways to get around ideology or place. | ||
| How do you place truth front and center to that? | ||
| I will be very blunt with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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I used to be Pollyanna about the universities, thinking they would change. | |
| I no longer believe that's possible. | ||
| I think we need new institutions, and the pandemic has expedited that. | ||
| We've already seen the collapse of smaller universities. | ||
|
unidentified
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Tier 1 universities will be fine. | |
| So part of that is that we've created a monoculture in which people don't hear the other side. | ||
| I mentioned before the call started that when I teach my atheism class, I often have people come into the class who don't share my worldview because of what Mill said about It's not good enough that they hear it, they have to hear it from people who believe it. | ||
| In my pseudoscience and pseudoscience class, I have people come in who talk about UFO abductions, or Mark Sargent, who's one of the leaders in the Flat Earth Movement, give the best arguments that he can for why he believes the Earth is flat. | ||
| Those arguments now are different from anything dealing with certain morally taboo issues like protected classes, which is an entirely different A story because we're not allowed, for example, I have been more or less read the Riot Act about in a university and I teach ethics and I teach critical thinking about rendering my views about protected classes, etc. | ||
| So the universities are in crisis right now. | ||
| The second thing is when you were taught your whole life and to find grievance, particularly kids, my daughter's I'm wondering if this is a mistake that I say this, but my daughter's math assignment was to draw, math assignment was, no, my daughter's health assignment was to, in health class, was to draw a picture of a black person. | ||
| My daughter's assignment in math class was to find, uh, African, watch African-American films on TV about how African-Americans have been wiped out of history. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, I think the latter is extremely important, but not in math class. | |
| So that even the traditional structures of this is what you teach in math, this is what you teach, all of those things have been undermined. | ||
| But okay, so back to the point, what do we do about it? | ||
|
unidentified
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There's so much grievance everywhere, and we're teaching people in schools to find grievance. | |
| Here's something that I do. | ||
| As you know, I'm an atheist. | ||
| I don't think there's sufficient evidence to justify belief in God or miracles or any divine intervention. | ||
| And so I don't pray. | ||
|
unidentified
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But what we do is we have a family dinner every night and we go around the table and we say what we are grateful for. | |
| Every person says what they're grateful for. | ||
| And it's amazing how just showing a little gratitude for something in your life washes away so much of that grievance. | ||
| So we have to start adopting practices, not only more broadly to repudiate grievance ideology, but in our own lives to forefront other things, like, you know, truth. | ||
|
unidentified
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If the rabbi in Eric would say faith, that's not my thing. | |
| Find something to push the idea that there are constant perpetual grievances popping up everywhere and replace that with something more productive to help people live more meaningful lives. | ||
| So Rabbi, I'll give you the last word here as Pete's talking about, you know, having a meal with his family and having gratitude and all of that. | ||
| Well, it'll be sundown in a couple hours. | ||
| I know you'll be doing Shabbat. | ||
| I'll be doing it as well, which is not something I was really doing a year or two ago, but I've found meaning in it now. | ||
| Is that really the answer? | ||
| Well, I don't know that Shabbat is the answer. | ||
| Certainly Shabbat is part of an answer. | ||
| The appreciation of the universe, the connection to something greater than oneself, all of that. | ||
| The other two things that I would mention are, in these discussions, I think it's incredibly productive, if you can do it, to start with what your side is doing wrong. | ||
| Because the lobbing of bombs over the wall doesn't advance the discussion. | ||
| Your team will cheer you on. | ||
| And that will feel great, and the other side won't hear what you're saying. | ||
| So I think that part of listening is being willing to be self-critical, and I don't think there's nearly enough of that. | ||
| That's one thing that I would say. | ||
| And then the second is you have to find people of different views on whom you can cooperate on things that are not centrally political. | ||
| You know, putting up a stop sign on your corner, you know, going together with your kids to get to for school or when the time comes. | ||
| But essentially, as I said, it is to understand That the deep humanness of human beings is shared all across cultures, all across time, all across history. | ||
| That's why we read the Bible. | ||
| Everything has changed since the time of the Bible. | ||
| Technology, language, everything, except human nature. | ||
| And so we are still in all of this together, and we still struggle together, and we still face doubts and fears and pandemics. | ||
| The entire world faced it. | ||
| So some of the divisions that seem so important today will crumble in the face of things that are bigger and more important. | ||
| And I wish there was less the tone of a sacred crusade, whether from right or from left, and more the tone of, we will find our way through this together if we can just Listen and let the walls come down a little bit and let the heart open a little more. | ||
| Well, I will take that as the final word as I roll into a weekend that I will not be on Twitter. | ||
| That's one other way that we can add a little something to this. | ||
| Gentlemen, thanks a lot. | ||
| I realize now because the rabbi and I are here in Los Angeles and Eric, you're in New York, Pete, you're in Portland. | ||
| When we do this in person, and I would love to do it in person, perhaps Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would that be the spot? | ||
| That's the spot. | ||
| Gentlemen, thank you so much, and I hope to see you guys in real life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| In the not-too-distant future. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Dave. | |
| Have a graceful weekend. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And don't watch Invisible Maw. | ||
| It's a terrible film. | ||
| One hoax. | ||
| All right, take care, guys. | ||
| I really have nothing to add. | ||
| I hope that that had some value to you. | ||
| It had some value to me, and as I said, I'm going to try to be off the Twitter on the weekend, and I do try to make my weekends not political, and I hope that... | ||
| I hope that some of the stuff there, from a Christian perspective, from a Jewish perspective, from a purely secular atheist perspective, I hope you can see that we all have a lot more in common. | ||
| And I know that most of you that view this show, you know that, right? | ||
| And even when I'm railing on what's going on with the lefties or the crazy thing that AOC said this day or how terrible CNN is or whatever it might be, it's like, The rabbi's right. | ||
| We are all in this together, whether we like it or not. | ||
| And the great challenge of America going forward is can a country that was designed as something that was for everybody, for us all to come here and be better, together. | ||
| Actually, together, the melting pot, do it together. | ||
| Bring all your traditions, bring all your foods, all of the stuff that made your family, whatever it was, can we all bring it here and build something that's better than that? | ||
| And we did a pretty good job of it for a long time. | ||
| It feels like it's a little tenuous right now, and we just gotta get back to it. | ||
| So that's what I'm gonna try to do. | ||
| Have a great weekend, everybody. | ||
| And oh, well, I'll post some pictures on rubenreport.locals.com. | ||
| That'll be some food and some dogs over there, but no politics. |
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