June 13, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I mean, it's okay to change their mind because it's a novel virus and you learn new things. | ||
| What was outrageous about it was to treat the scientific inquiry as this monolithic thing that's written in stone. | ||
| And so if you go, if you run afoul of it, then your voice needs to be censored because frankly, you don't, you're not following the science, Dave. | ||
| Um, that's the attitude. | ||
| And also the fact that questions that were ultimately philosophical questions or policy questions, okay. | ||
| We have this virus. | ||
| What degree of restrictions is appropriate? | ||
| Are there other goods besides just preserving life against the novel coronavirus that we should preserve? | ||
| Those aren't scientific questions. | ||
| And yet kind of expert class by trying to shoehorn it all into. | ||
| They basically tried to push their policy preferences and their philosophical assumptions as scientific claims, which, of course, they're not, you know, a statesman or a stateswoman dealing with something like the virus. | ||
| has to weigh various things, not just one virus, but also other sources of threat to human life, | ||
| like loneliness and depression and joblessness. | ||
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the op-ed editor of the New York Post | ||
| and the author of the unbroken thread, discovering the wisdom of tradition in an age of chaos, | ||
| Sorabamari! | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
| I am really glad to have you, and I read the book this weekend, and I really thought it was fascinating, because in many ways, we come sort of from different worlds, sort of from a different school of thought, but I think that the conclusions that you came to in this book are very similar to the conclusions that I came to in my book, that I think Ben Shapiro has come around to, you actually referenced him at the top of the book, that Jordan Peterson has come to, and, I'm looking forward to chatting with you, but before we do anything, I know you wanted to address the room that you're in right now. | ||
| You're not being held hostage, are you? | ||
| Yes, not being held hostage, not being interrogated by some Eastern European police state. | ||
| It's just that my own apartment is filled with rambunctious kids. | ||
| So therefore, a neighbor of mine who doesn't live in his own apartment, really, so it's a kind of dilapidated place, is kind enough to let me use his place, hence the weird wire in the back. | ||
| It's the best we can do under COVID circumstances, so bear with me. | ||
| That is the story, and you're sticking to it. | ||
| And you are doing this from New York City, so you're in crazy New York, I'm in crazy LA. | ||
| How's life in New York right now? | ||
| I think it's getting a little bit livelier. | ||
| Insanity is you could see people not wearing masks outside anymore, which is a relief. | ||
| But, you know, as you know, in terms of crime and disorder, it's just growing. | ||
| Yeah, so before we get into the specifics of the book, I'm curious, what really made you write the book and really focus on these 12 questions that we're gonna go through each one and discuss each one, but what really brought you to this conclusion that this book had to be written now? | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started that the subtitle, In an Age of Chaos, that was about to be in the subtitle of my next book, and then your book literally came across my desk and we changed it all together, but we are in a time of chaos. | ||
| Yeah, so in my case, it's a book I wrote for my son, Max. | ||
| He's now four years old. | ||
| When I started writing it, he was two. | ||
| And I'm really worried about the kind of man that our contemporary cultural, political arrangements will chisel out of him. | ||
| He's named after a great Catholic saint who is St. | ||
| Maximilian Kolbe, who was canonized and is famous for having chosen to die in place of someone else at Auschwitz. | ||
| And to me, Kolbe's sacrifice exemplified an account of freedom, really an older account of freedom, which defines freedom as being willing to limit yourself even unto death, that accepting limits, accepting sacrifice, accepting duty. | ||
| And my fear is that my max, if just left to our own culture, will inherit a very different account of freedom, one that defines being free as just kind of keeping your options open and getting ahead in life in very materialistic terms. | ||
| And so the book is my attempt to tether my son, and hopefully maybe the reader, to that older, for lack of a better word, traditional account of freedom. | ||
| And the best way I can do that, I'm not a philosopher or a theologian, I'm a journalist and a storyteller, is to try to poke holes in some of our contemporary certainties. | ||
| And so I do that by posing 12 questions that are either unasked or that our age assumes have been supplanted or made unnecessary, that science has basically pushed them aside or what have you, when in fact they're still pertinent to what it means to be fully free, fully human. | ||
| And then I explore each of them through the life of one great thinker. | ||
| Some of them kind of predictable, maybe C.S. | ||
| Lewis, St. | ||
| Augustine, but others will surprise readers because, you know, they're not figures you typically associate with the term tradition. | ||
| It's a genre that I invented in the sense that I pose these questions and then I explore each through the narrative and the drama of one life story so the reader when he or she reads it will just will not be hit thick with philosophy. | ||
| You're drawn into a story and that's what propels each chapter. | ||
| Yeah, and you end it really on a nice note with a very short note to your son and what you hope the book has done. | ||
| So let's talk about those 12 questions. | ||
| And you laid the book out in two parts. | ||
| So part one, which is the first six questions, Part one is the things of God, part two is the things of humankind. | ||
| So the first question is, how do you justify your life? | ||
| And it does seem to me right now, there is a huge amount of people, especially young people, that can't justify their lives. | ||
| So they're acting out in all sorts of crazy ways. | ||
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Right. | |
| At their most extreme, they say that if life is not worth passing on in one way or another, AOC said something like that with respect to climate change, you know, why would you put a child into the world? | ||
| And that question really is a critique of scientism, not of science, which is a perfectly noble endeavor that's unlocked lots of useful things and helped unlock the mysteries of really the cosmos and nature, but the attitude that would apply scientific outlook or the scientific way of looking at the world to the whole of life. | ||
| And so the reason I start with that question is because I think a lot of young people, especially like you said, think that because we know a lot about the Big Bang or cosmology, philosophy and religion have been made superfluous. | ||
| You don't need metaphysics anymore because you know we have the Big Bang or we have evolutionary theory and you know what I argue and that chapter is based on the life of C.S. | ||
| Lewis who was a great critic of scientism in the 20th century is that there are certain questions about you know what's beauty or what is beautiful? | ||
| Why is something beautiful? | ||
| Why is something ugly? | ||
| what it means to be fully human, what it means to, to fall in love and so on and so forth, which don't have, they have right or wrong answers, but those right or wrong answers can't be formulated using facts, which is the product of scientific inquiry. | ||
| And, um, uh, so yeah, I mean, I, I have to get rid of scientism first if I'm writing this book for my son, because he'll be bombarded with the idea that, uh, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson has made Aristotle unnecessary. | ||
| Yeah, so of course you were writing this during at least a portion | ||
| of the lockdown and COVID and everything else that's going on. | ||
| And one of the things that we've seen I think for the last year is just the absolute destruction | ||
| of the elite class when it comes to science. | ||
| That people no longer trust the experts because the experts basically change their mind | ||
| every week for the last year and a half. | ||
| And that's really no way to live. | ||
| I mean, it's okay to change their mind because it's a novel virus and you learn new things. | ||
| What was outrageous about it was to treat the scientific inquiry as this monolithic thing that's written in stone. | ||
| And so if you go, if you run afoul of it, then your voice needs to be censored because frankly, you don't, you're not following the science, Dave. | ||
| That's the attitude. | ||
| And also, the fact that questions that were ultimately philosophical questions or policy questions, okay, we have this virus, what degree of restrictions is appropriate? | ||
| Are there other goods besides just preserving life against the novel coronavirus that we should preserve? | ||
| Those aren't scientific questions. | ||
| And yet, a kind of expert class, by trying to shoehorn it all into, they basically tried to push their policy preferences and their philosophical assumptions as scientific claims, which of course they're not. | ||
| You know, a statesman or a stateswoman dealing with something like the virus | ||
| has to weigh various things, not just one virus, but also other sources of threat to human life, | ||
| like loneliness and depression and joblessness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think we needed sort of a philosopher class that could have been working alongside the scientific class to deal with this? | ||
| So we have a political class that works alongside of them, but that we really needed somebody else to discuss those issues alongside. | ||
| I wouldn't put academic philosophy. | ||
| I majored in philosophy and I obviously I'm a kind of amateur lover of philosophy. | ||
| So as the book, but I wouldn't put philosophers in charge. | ||
| I think ultimately it has to be statesmen and stateswomen and, and, and, uh, you know, elected bodies, which is, that's how our government works. | ||
| But it would, it would have been nice to have had not just Dr. Fauci, but ethicists and, and bioethicists and, and other people who would, who would, and frankly, uh, you know, Pastors and religious figures, because that's an important dimension of human life. | ||
| If they were all in form, and then a statesman chooses from among them, rather than elevating one form of knowing, one form of knowledge, which is perfectly legitimate in its own realm, and making it into this sort of idol. | ||
| And if you cross it, then you're against science. | ||
| So that's actually the perfect segue then for the second question, which is, is God reasonable? | ||
| And as you may know, I made a pro-God argument in my last book as I was defending liberalism. | ||
| And what I found was this is where a lot of liberals sort of get disjointed. | ||
| The Bill Maher liberals, let's say, sort of get completely out of whack when you say anything about belief. | ||
| So I'll let you answer your own question there. | ||
| Well, lots of religious people also get out of whack in response to that, which is that the liberals will say that religion is only a matter of feelings and therefore is sort of irrational. | ||
| And some religious people go along with that. | ||
| And they will say, yes, my faith is just purely based on revelation. | ||
| And it'll be unreasonable. | ||
| And it makes me do unreasonable things. | ||
| At its most extremes, you have radical Islam. | ||
| of that kind of view that says, well, God tells me to kill the infidel, and there's no arguing with that. | ||
| And so the chapter is an argument for, you know, basically the classical proofs for God and for the, specifically the medieval mode of reason, which I argue was a more capacious and generous account of reason that said that not only can you reason about, you know, what you could see through demonstrative knowledge, I see certain changes in the seasons, or I observe regular movements of the heavenly bodies, and that tells me something about them. | ||
| But also, I can then reason further beyond that, and not relying on Revelation at all, or the Bible, or what have you, just using my natural reason. | ||
| I would have to find some way to explain why all this change happens, so what is the ultimate cause behind all of these? | ||
| And that, as St. | ||
| Thomas famously concludes each of his five proofs for the existence of God, that's what people call God, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so it's a case really for what's called natural theology, you know, what you can learn about God not using the Bible, but just using your human reason. | ||
| And the fact that this God would allow you to know Him by your reason suggests that He's also a reasonable God, so a God who doesn't call you to kill the infidels. | ||
| What do you think about the sort of micro versus macro argument when it comes to this, that, you know, I know plenty of non-believers and atheists that are perfectly moral people and decent upstanding citizens, but at a macro level, at a societal level, it just simply cannot work. | ||
| You actually get into this a little bit later in the book, so we'll get there too, but that it just, it doesn't scale basically. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's an argument from just looking at history that some of the worst Regimes in the human history have been the atheistic ones because if you remove Some higher authority that that checks human power and say well man can do anything he wants That's an invitation to Stalinism. | ||
| That's an invitation that has been an invitation to the horrors of North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party or what have you but more fundamentally, I mean look the the people who are making claims about what's good or what's moral. | ||
| In a way, in St. | ||
| Thomas's terms, they're already arguing for God. | ||
| Because if there is, if there's something that's, that's good, then there must be something that is the most good. | ||
| And that thing that you most imagine is the most good is what people call God, because there are these degrees of perfection. | ||
| So I think that when people say that, in a way, it's an invitation to God rather than a refutation. | ||
| Did you happen to see the clip that went viral a couple of weeks ago of Jordan Peterson talking about God and belief with Tucker Carlson? | ||
| Did you see that by any chance? | ||
| It's probably on that show that Tucker calls him tonight. | ||
| I love it, but I haven't seen that episode, no. | ||
| There's a really extraordinary clip, I'll gladly send it to you, where Jordan's basically talking about belief in God, and he said that when he was about 25, he decided to tell the truth. | ||
| Meaning for the truth's sake, that no matter what the outcome of saying the truth, not that everything will be good, but it will be the best possible outcome because you're putting order into the world as opposed to putting lies out there. | ||
| And he said that that was the ultimate expression of faith, believing in truth just for the purpose of truth. | ||
| And I thought that was as well explained as I had heard, basically. | ||
| I agree, I agree. | ||
| And, you know, order is the first law of the, of the cosmos and, um, you know, my own, look, I was an atheist. | ||
| I decided I was an atheist when I was 13 years old. | ||
| And, um, the, the way that I made my own way to belief in first of all, a God, and then ultimately a personal God was because of, because of the conscience, right? | ||
| Like I had this voice inside me that directs me to try to do good and avoid evil. | ||
| And I had to, and it seemed to hint that there was an objective moral order. | ||
| And I sensed when I was, at odds with that objective moral order. | ||
| And then I had to ask, what is the source of that moral order? | ||
| And ultimately became that there's a, there's a God who is the Lord of that order. | ||
| Um, now scientists might say, well, that's, you know, uh, the voice of thousands of years of evolutionary, uh, uh, kind of ingrained behavior. | ||
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Sure. | |
| As a how answer or an answer to a how question or, um, It's your synapses firing in your brain? | ||
| Sure, that's again an answer to a how question, but it doesn't answer those why questions which find the sort of richest, fullest answer in God. | ||
| Right, so basically that thing that sits behind us all the time that sort of is your moral compass, that kind of led you there. | ||
| So that gets us actually to question three quite nicely. | ||
| Why would God want you to take a day off? | ||
| You mean we're allowed to take days off still? | ||
| I don't think many of us are, and I live as harried a life as anyone where I'm constantly, you know, right now I have my phone on airplane mode and it's making me twitch. | ||
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I can't tell what's happening. | |
| But the chapter is really a case for the Sabbath. | ||
| And it's told through the point of view and life of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a great Hasidic figure in the mid-century. | ||
| And he had, obviously, he had escaped Nazi Germany. | ||
| Much of his family had perished in the Holocaust. | ||
| He comes to the United States and he sees some of the same restlessness that had disturbed him about Europe in the first half of the 20th century where, as he saw it, much of life was devoted to making conquest in what he called the realm of space. | ||
| The realm of space is the realm of geopolitical conquest, it's the realm of economic competition. | ||
| It's the realm of doing better than your neighbor. | ||
| And you know, some of that is legitimate. | ||
| Those are important goods that you should try to secure. | ||
| But he argued that you also need to give some due some time for the realm of, well, the realm of time, which was the realm of the Sabbath. | ||
| It's the realm of the eternal where you You actually declare peace on your neighbor for a day. | ||
| You declare peace in the economic competition. | ||
| And in doing that, you find an inner liberty because you're setting aside all these kind of material attachments that define the rest of your life. | ||
| And I argue in the chapter that there's also kind of setting aside all the religious dimensions, there's a kind of temporal secular benefit to that in the sense that Our lives, we were told, getting rid of the Sabbath would be a source of liberation. | ||
| And in practice, what it's meant, it is liberation. | ||
| It's liberation for the market. | ||
| It's liberation for the corporation. | ||
| It's not necessarily liberation for the family. | ||
| It's not liberation for the worker. | ||
| And I should mention, this is a theme throughout the book. | ||
| It's something that tradition proposes and looks like a restriction on our freedom. | ||
| And you're like, oh, I don't want this. | ||
| In fact, once you lose it, you realize that restriction was a source of freedom, and paradoxically, the loss of the restriction makes us less free. | ||
| You're more harrowing. | ||
| You're at the mercy of your boss. | ||
| Well, as you may know, I try not to tweet on the weekends, and I usually tweet a goodbye on Fridays. | ||
| You know, I'll be back on Monday. | ||
| And Ben Shapiro made the point, you'd know that Jews have basically been doing this for a couple thousand years. | ||
| Yes, 3,500 years. | ||
| It's been around for a while, this relaxation. | ||
| Do you find that, especially now, because of social media, that this is of particular importance to take the Sabbath, whether depending, whether you're Jewish or Christian or whoever, whether it's Saturday or Sunday or a whole weekend, do you think that the social media component has really made this more complex? | ||
| Well, I mean, I absolutely think, I mean, again, I see it in my own life. | ||
| I try to take the Sabbath, for Christians, the Sunday Sabbath, I try to take it seriously. | ||
| But there is that twitching, like I said. | ||
| And so there has to be, you have to impose discipline on your own life. | ||
| I mean, I favor certain restrictions, like limiting the, as Senator Hawley has proposed, limiting the infinite scroll or what have you. | ||
| But at the end of the day, look, you know, you've got to take ownership of this. | ||
| And there's so much to be gained from turning everything off. | ||
| and not being a slave to that ghostly blue glow 24/7. | ||
| Soren, you gonna join me for my August Off the Grid this year, what do you think? | ||
| Is that your, okay, I do it for Lent. | ||
| Yeah, I do it for all of August. | ||
| The end of my book tour for this book, as you know, it's a grueling, | ||
| so that might be just the right time. | ||
| I'll think about it. | ||
| I may have to officially challenge you. | ||
| Question four. | ||
| I think this was particularly poignant for my liberal friends who are still struggling with sort of shifting or seeing what I think a new conservatism is. | ||
| Can you be spiritual without being religious? | ||
| Because a lot of liberals say they're spiritual, but they're afraid of saying that they're religious. | ||
| And that's about 20% of Americans now identify as spiritual but non-religious. | ||
| And what I argue in the chapter is that the problem with that isn't the religiosity, it's the spirituality, that a lot of these Americans do all sorts of religious things. | ||
| They do hot yoga, they drink only, I don't know, whatever, hot peppers and juice on Fridays or what have you. | ||
| Those have aspects of liturgical kind of asceticism and self-discipline in the body, but they don't have the shared kind of public account of ultimate meaning that religion brings together. | ||
| Religion is a combination of those kinds of ritualistic actions with some ultimate account of ultimate meaning. | ||
| When you have just the ritualistic aspects, you're doing it just for yourself and it's private. | ||
| And there are all sorts of things that happen in traditional societies that take religious rituals seriously that you don't access from that. | ||
| So I tell the chapter through the life of Victor and Edith Turner, a pair of British anthropologists, completely atheistic, Communist Party members, They go to Africa as anthropologists to study tribal ritual, and they notice that these tribal rituals, as silly as they may have seemed to other anthropologists, actually have this important function in society. | ||
| They help resolve what would have otherwise been intractable conflicts. | ||
| They remind the powerful that they're ultimately powerful only to serve the lower, and generally provide for a kind of humane | ||
| Society as a whole that's what ritual did and they ultimately when they can't came back to Britain | ||
| They were their assignments were done. They they became Catholic themselves because of what they had saw seen | ||
| but You know what they would have looked with if they had seen | ||
| our version of ritual They would have noticed that we have ritual but it doesn't | ||
| it's a very kind of merciless ritual So for example, we have a kind of penitential right right | ||
| if you say something inappropriate on Twitter that's considered offensive and it runs afoul against PC rules, you kind of do what looks like a confession. | ||
| I confess to my friends that I have greatly wronged through my fault, through my fault, through my most egregious fault. | ||
| So we have that, but it doesn't have the other aspects that make a penitential right like that humane and full of mercy and full of forgiveness. | ||
| It only has the right and it's kind of brutal. | ||
| How damaging do you think it was that in the last year and a half that people were locked out of going to church and to temple? | ||
| I mean, the fact that they could do some of the stuff privately, obviously, but could not have that public portion of this. | ||
| I mean, I tried it. | ||
| I personally tried going to Internet Mass, and it just isn't the same. | ||
| I mean, the Mass especially has a kind of embodied element, as Catholics believe that, you know, the Lord makes himself literally present in the form of bread and wine. | ||
| Virtually, it doesn't quite work the same. | ||
| And no, I mean, I think it was a great failure on the part of religious leaders across denominations and faiths, to be honest. | ||
| that they so readily acquiesced to these restrictions, and kept at it long after it became clear | ||
| that there are other risks to be worried about, such as people falling away from faith. | ||
| Yeah, although interestingly, I think that I'm sensing more and more people coming back to faith now, partly because of all of this. | ||
| The endless chaos of all of this, bless you, the endless chaos of all of this, I think, has actually led people back in a way. | ||
| I don't know that it'll be exactly in the way that you would want it to be, or that I would want it to be, but I do sense some sort of spiritual awakening right now. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I mean, I haven't seen the numbers. | ||
| I mean, I'd be curious. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know the numbers. | ||
| Well, if you look at the numbers, they'll always tell you that there's more atheists now than ever before, and organized religion is on the downfall. | ||
| But I do sense something else, because the secular world went so out of control. | ||
| Well, there's nothing like mortality to remind people of the last things, and so I hope so, yeah, sure. | ||
| Question five, does God respect you? | ||
| I think this will... | ||
| This is a question where any number of people will object if they think that, look, my human dignity is just founded in my being human, my being my rights. | ||
| But I argue in the chapter that if you don't think that the human being has some special origin and some special destiny, then why wouldn't you acquiesce to all sorts of political horrors that For example, disfigure the 20th century because human beings are just the product of evolutionary development and no different from other animals. | ||
| So why not have mass atrocities and so forth? | ||
| So I argue that a lot of people today who clamor for social justice reject religion out of hand, because they think it's just a source of oppression. | ||
| But I argue that the biblical faith, because of the emphasis it puts on the human person as uniquely dignified, as made in the image of God, as Genesis tells us, it's a bulwark against all sorts of political injustices. | ||
| And that, I mean, yeah, it seems an obvious point to me, but I know lots of people disagree. | ||
| Yeah, what about how religious, or I guess cult-like would be the better explanation, the social justice warriors have become? | ||
| Do you disconnect that from God, or do you think these things are all tied together? | ||
| Well, it just tells me that if you don't have, and this goes maybe into the sixth question, but if you don't have God in the public square, the true God, let's say, then you'll have other gods. | ||
| So that one way or another, our society will enshrine some orthodoxy, Some God, some authority. | ||
| And the only question is whether it's a merciful and loving God, or a furious one, like the God of Ibrahim Kendi. | ||
| Right, so that is really question six, which is, does God need politics? | ||
| You could have also said, does politics need God, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, God doesn't need anything that theologians would tell us, and they're right, because, you know, he's a supreme being. | ||
| But I argue that the God of the Bible, in entering human history, wants to transfigure not just our private lives, but also our public lives. | ||
| So our cities also want to, he wants to transfigure them. | ||
| And historically, societies have always had, as I said, some altar in the public square. | ||
| And so the only question is, which one? | ||
| And this is my kind of most controversial argument. | ||
| It's what makes me get called a theocrat in the New York Times. | ||
| But it just seems obvious to me, especially in the past two years or so, when it's become so clear that the loss of the Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, whatever you want to call it, hasn't resulted in a neutral public square. | ||
| It's just empowered kind of crazy orthodoxies that demand that you bow before them. | ||
| Well, that's why I thought this chapter was so interesting, because I came at all of this from a different political perspective than you, and yet I've come to the same conclusion, which is that without God or some organizing factor, and we can whittle that down how we may, this is what you get. | ||
| The thing that we have right now where we're debating biological differences between men and women as if they don't exist, That's what you get at the end. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And so I just think there's no situation in which you can say, well, I believe that there are two sexes, a man and woman, as genetics and genesis tell us. | ||
| And someone else thinks there are 135 genders. | ||
| One of those will prevail. | ||
| And so, um, I think that a lot of conservatives, people on my side of the divide, really, but also some liberals too, in fact, a lot of liberals, relinquish the responsibility to say, no, no, no, there is truth about certain things we can be absolutely certain about, and your interior misperception doesn't amount to truth. | ||
| Why do you think so many people folded when it comes to issues like this? | ||
| Just folded so quickly, let's say. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there is a kind of nominalism built into our philosophy. | ||
| Nominalism is this idea that it's very old. | ||
| It comes to us from the medieval age, basically, that certain theologians said, look, the world, what we see is just the things in it are too different to allow any kind of essential classification. | ||
| None of them would have gotten to gender ideology. | ||
| I mean, it would have been bonkers to them. | ||
| You take that idea far enough and you're like, well, what does it really mean to be a man? | ||
| And what does it really mean to be a woman? | ||
| I know what I am, but I can't generalize about that to everyone else. | ||
| Um, so that's the kind of philosophical root of it. | ||
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And then. | |
| I think there's a, um, a more basic level. | ||
| Um, Americans just, just want to be nice. | ||
| And so if someone cries out and says, well, I'm, I'm conflicted about who I am, I might be something other than what nature or my body tells me. | ||
| You want to respect that. | ||
| You kind of want to embrace them. | ||
| But sometimes that yearning to embrace and be nice can actually be really deadly and harmful. | ||
| Part two. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know what you think the origins are, but that's what I see are the two, a kind of philosophical nominalism combined with America's therapeutic culture. | ||
| Like, oh, but that person's hurting. | ||
| I wanna acknowledge. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I fully, especially the latter part of that, I fully get that. | ||
| You know, that's where the liberal side of me, I want people, if someone feels that they are born in the wrong body, that doesn't change the biology to me, but I want to have a society that's as tolerant, an equal for someone like that as possible, which I think in essence is the same thing that you're arguing for here. | ||
| I mean, you want them to be treated with dignity, but what I've found is that the demand for that recognition doesn't stop. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It doesn't stop. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| They'll say, well, but then you have to acknowledge that I've always been Caitlyn Jenner. | ||
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And you're like, well, no. | |
| It leads to totalitarian places, but out of basically good intentions. | ||
| I was once arguing with a friend, although I'm not sure he'd call me a friend anymore, I would call him a friend, about this, and he was sort of big on the left side of this. | ||
| And all I kept saying was, I want these people, of course trans people, to be treated with dignity and respect, and I have sympathy for the whole thing. | ||
| I said, all that I'm saying is that, can we just acknowledge that there are biological differences between males and females? | ||
| And he said, this is exactly what he said, and this is where I knew the conversation was gonna have to end pretty quickly. | ||
| He goes, Dave, you're not thinking about quantum physics. | ||
| And I said, you're right, but either are you. | ||
| To me, that was like the perfect example of nobody knows what they're talking about. | ||
| Okay, quantum physics clearly was the answer. | ||
| But speaking of quantum physics, part two is the things of humankind. | ||
| Question seven is how must you serve your parents? | ||
| I mean, easy enough. | ||
| I had to include that in a book written for my son. | ||
| This is the chapter you want to stick, obviously. | ||
| Again, to go back to the book's themes, is that those restrictions that tradition imposes that look like impediments to freedom, actually, or a source of freedom, filiality norms, which Obviously, I use Confucius because he's the ultimate thinker on filiality, but you can also go to the Bible, you know, the commandment to honor your mother and father, are actually, again, another source of humaneness. | ||
| And what looks like, why do I have to kind of obey my parents? | ||
| You know, Confucius always suggested that you, especially in your most period in your life, your first three years, you were unconditionally loved by your parents. | ||
| And that unconditional love taught you a kind of moral imagination, which you can then say, OK, why would anyone love anyone unconditionally? | ||
| I can begin to love other people beyond my own immediate kin. | ||
| So by honoring your mother and father, you begin to build these circles of filiality where it ripples out into a wider community and you build a humane society. | ||
| That was the basis of Confucian filiality norms, that they cared for you. | ||
| And the difficult part of it is that it's non-negotiable. | ||
| So both the Mosaic Law on filiality, but also the Confucian version of it, they don't say, well, I have to honor my mother and father if they meant my expectations as a child. | ||
| It's kind of absolute. | ||
| But I argue that if you make a condition on whether or not you felt sufficiently loved or loved the right way, then the whole thing collapses. | ||
| But- So how do you account for just people that are terrible parents, or a drug-addicted mother, or an abusive father, or some of that stuff? | ||
| How do you honor that properly and make sense of the world? | ||
| So, you know, Confucius didn't say that you shouldn't correct an errant parent. | ||
| So you should try to correct an errant parent, and even if anyone is, Listening to this and you have a literally abusive parent, you know, you don't have to stay with them, you know, call the police, whatever, but there should be some element of, of, of love, even, um, even in those situations as an element of this, that, that there is this mystery that I, Dave Rubin, literally the face of my, the shape of my face, the shape of my nose. | ||
| I got that from these two people. | ||
| There's no other, you know, and I wouldn't have gotten it, but for these two people and that, that, imposes some obligation on us. | ||
| And luckily, most people aren't insidious like that. | ||
| Most people don't have to deal with bad parents, but the chapter will probably be painful people who have legitimately abusive parents. | ||
| But I argue that the traditional norm should be upheld, even as you make exceptions for individual cases, because there's so much value in a community in which people kind of honor the The hierarchy of genealogy, the hierarchy of who brought you into the world. | ||
| I mean, literally, you wouldn't be here if it weren't for this union of these two people. | ||
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There's something there, one way or another. | |
| There's some mystery that is very difficult to just cast aside and shouldn't be cast aside. | ||
| So chapter eight, I felt this was very important for me. | ||
| Should you think for yourself? | ||
| Now I have to do some shameless self-promotion here. | ||
| The subtitle, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason. | ||
| How did I do? | ||
| Should you think for yourself? | ||
| So I argue you should think for yourself. | ||
| In important moral questions, but that in doing so you shouldn't see authority, true authorities, as an enemy of yourself that thinks. | ||
| A certain kind of liberal ideology, I focus on the 19th century as its origin, always pits conscience and authority against each other. | ||
| So I have my conscience, and for me to fully exercise my conscience means I shouldn't have to listen to Various authorities. | ||
| I mean, the paradigmatic one would be the papacy, right? | ||
| In the 19th century, there was this question because the Pope had been declared to be infallible. | ||
| A lot of liberal reaction in the 19th century was, well, this means that the individual conscience is at the mercy of this external authority in Rome. | ||
| But the question, I mean, that's a kind of Catholic question, but it extends to other realms of life as well and other groups. | ||
| And John Henry Newman, who is the sort of protagonist of that chapter, argued that the idea of the conscience as this sacred, inviolable thing only works and only has power if you think of the conscience as the voice of that objective moral law that all peoples recognize, whether or not they're evangelized or not even, there's this kind of idea of natural law that is sprinkled across whether it's Confucian Chinese civilization, or Muslim civilization, or Judeo-Christian civilization. | ||
| So there's this idea of natural law, and you have this interior voice reflecting it and guiding you to bring your life into coherence with this law. | ||
| If you think of the conscience as a purely private thing, well, one person thinks it's okay to abort a baby at six months pregnancy, and another person thinks it's not okay to do that, and no one can be sure which of the two consciences is in the right, you've really undermined the idea of conscience, because then it rests on no objective supports. | ||
| And in that frame, authority is really not the enemy of the conscience, it's its friend. | ||
| The true authorities, the Bible, the papacy, old proverbs, Classical Greco-Roman tradition. | ||
| All of these are authoritative supports for your conscience, not your enemies of your conscience. | ||
| So if you constantly set them at odds with each other, you're going to get rid of all the sort of authorities that protected your conscience, and then your conscience is going to be at the mercy of corporations, advertisers, political demagogues, and so forth. | ||
| But if you think of your conscience as this special thing that needs authoritative supports, and you ring it with those authoritative supports, then you don't, you know, the next populist demagogue or, you know, fake news meme or whatever it is that you encounter will easily sway you this way and that. | ||
| So it's a different way of thinking about conscience and authority. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think our, our founders really got it right when they set up our founding documents? | ||
| Because it seems like they're, they're respecting both of these, this sort of empirical, you know, these are God-given rights. | ||
| And also we want you to live freely and live in a way that makes sense to you. | ||
| So this is a complicated question. | ||
| I'm more sympathetic to some of the founders than others. | ||
| You would probably guess this, but I'm a big fan of Adams, who said that, you know, our constitution is made for a moral and religious. | ||
| I think you would agree with this, given where you're, I haven't read your new book, but given what you've said about it, that the rights that we cherish need to have a moral substrate. | ||
| And if you chip away at that moral substrate, I worry that you just have kind of an insane rights culture, and that's kind of what we have. | ||
| Yeah, that's sort of where we're at. | ||
| Don't worry, the book's not out yet, but I'm gonna send it to you. | ||
| Chapter nine, or question nine, sorry. | ||
| What is freedom for? | ||
| So all the classical traditions define freedom, both, again, the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition, define freedom as doing what you ought to do. | ||
| Fulfilling your duty, becoming who you are as a human being, as a rational animal, a political animal, and not merely just having choice to maximal autonomy and maximal choice. | ||
| The chapters focus on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who famously disappointed a lot of Western audiences. | ||
| He escaped from the Gulag. | ||
| He had written about the horrors of the Soviet regime. | ||
| When he came to the United States and was asked to give a commencement address at Harvard in 1978, He focused most of his criticism, most of his polemical fire, at the West. | ||
| He felt that, obviously, communism was a horror, and he knew that, and he denounced those horrors as much as anyone, and helped open the world's eyes to it. | ||
| But he also saw a kind of diffused tyranny in the West, but it wasn't tyranny of a central government, but the tyranny of private actors, each just kind of pursuing a base account of freedom. | ||
| Which I think if you now move forward, you know, roughly 40 years, he was kind of right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, especially, I mean, I think big tech censorship to me is just a really good example of this. | ||
| There's this, in our tradition, a wonderful right, like journalism holds power to account. | ||
| And now you have big tech censoring, you know, the newspaper I work for, New York Post, Repeatedly last year for stories where we booked on both accounts. | ||
| We've been vindicated both the Wuhan lab leak theory and the hunter Biden story and a certain kind of libertarian Autonomy maximizing person would say well, it's private actors doing it who cares, you know build your own internet but a Humane person would say look if these rights mean anything then it's possible for a private actor as much as of the government to violate them Yeah, I mean, the founders could have never imagined a powerful entity so much that it would dwarf the entire government, and here we are. | ||
| That's why I've moved on this. | ||
| I don't make the purely libertarian argument anymore. | ||
| Michael Anton makes this point beautifully in the June issue of First Things, that they just didn't foresee this degree of private power. | ||
| They just couldn't have. | ||
| I mean, I don't think there's any way that they could have possibly imagined it. | ||
| Question 10, I thought this was interesting because now everything's public all the time. | ||
| Is sex a private matter? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I think we live in a sexually schizophrenic age. | ||
| In the one hand, you know, we're told to pursue whatever we want sexually as long as we seek our partner's consent Protect ourselves against disease. | ||
| And that's the kind of sex is just private fun. | ||
| On the other hand, we live in the age of me too, where it seems like that sexual liberationism in some cases has empowered some truly horrible men. | ||
| And the focal point of the chapter is someone who a lot of people will be surprised is in a book written by a conservative, but it's Andrea Dworkin, who was a radical feminist, really seventies, eighties and nineties. | ||
| And she was a critic of the sexual revolution. | ||
| I mean, she came at it from the left and she just saw that, you know, the sexual liberationism has had in many ways led to especially degradation for women. | ||
| And I argue that in some sense, she was a traditionalist, even though she would hate to be in this book. | ||
| If she were still alive, she would not want to be in a book next to Augustine and St. | ||
| Thomas. | ||
| Right, now she definitely sounds like a traditionalist, but then not so much. | ||
| No, no, but I argue that, so look, the traditionalism of the 80s where it was like, ah, all these feminists talking about, well, you were celebrating a sexual ethic that was only 20 years old. | ||
| And it was, it was boorish and horrible. | ||
| And, and there's nothing kind of Christian about it. | ||
| And there's nothing, It's only of relatively recent vintage. | ||
| And so the problem with Dworkin was that she accepted this diagnosis of what had gone wrong, or she proposed this diagnosis of what had gone wrong with sexuality in the West and what was wrong with sex liberationism. | ||
| But because she was such a hard leftist, she couldn't look at the older tradition of sexual restraint. | ||
| Because that was just the right, and it was bad. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I get this from a lot of my liberal friends. | ||
| They get to the end of the road, and then the end of the road goes, oh, you know, some of the conservative stuff was right, and that's where they suddenly get very quiet, you know? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, they don't want to make that final, uh-oh, maybe I really was wrong about some bigger stuff. | ||
| That was her precise, I mean, all the chapters are fairly uncritical of the figure profile. | ||
| The Dworkin chapter, I'm pretty critical of her, and where I'm critical is that she didn't see the shortcomings of her own worldview ultimately, and stopped short of going all the way to look, well, maybe sexual restraint was right. | ||
| Do you sense that that right there, that inability to get that last step, that that's more of a condition of a liberal mind? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Well, I mean, I want to be fair. | ||
| I think it's a, it's a shortcoming for all of us where, where your worldview takes you. | ||
| You may stop short of going all the way because it's uncomfortable. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's worthwhile to try to sort of avoid that, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Question 11, what do you owe your body? | ||
| Which I thought was really interesting because we talk a lot about, you know, your body, your choice, and now it's everybody's got to get jabbed and everybody's body's everybody, or we're going to kill grandma, et cetera. | ||
| I mean, the chapter is really a critique of modern Gnosticism. | ||
| In the ancient world, two or three hundred years after the advent of Christianity, a whole bunch of religions popped up that were unique in the sense that they said that the human person is not the bodily. | ||
| You are this kind of immaterial spirit that happens to be trapped in this fleshly apparatus and you can do whatever you want with it. | ||
| The body itself doesn't have a norm. | ||
| What you should try to do is to liberate this divine spark that's trapped within you. | ||
| And that might sound familiar to some moderns because many modern movements have the same tendency. | ||
| Transgenderism, which we've already talked about, is premised on the idea that there's this dramatic rupture between who we feel we are interiorly and the bodies that we receive from nature, which are sexed and you're either male or female. | ||
| Transhumanism is another example of this. | ||
| You know, these movements that think, look, the human being is just the mind. | ||
| And so if I can download the mind into some kind of software form and untethered what it means to be human from this, again, this body that's prone to decrepitude and disease and ultimately death, then that's liberation. | ||
| But the problem with all these kind of movements is that they're an invitation to Not only on reality, because our bodies are just so ultimately a part of us, but also an invitation to irresponsibility. | ||
| If me, I'm not the person including this body, then I don't have all these inherited obligations. | ||
| To family, to the people who bore me and gave me the shape of my body, to my larger community, because I'm the sort of spirit creature and I can go, you know, I can use Bitcoin, I can use virtual reality, and I don't need physical contact. | ||
| I don't need to shake anyone's hand. | ||
| And actually, I think the lockdowns kind of have a Gnostic tendency, by the way. | ||
| People just say, well, just the universities should just be an online phenomenon. | ||
| We should always wear masks because, you know what, we don't need to see their faces. | ||
| Even if we've conquered COVID, there are other, there's the flu. | ||
| We could always conquer the flu too. | ||
| And that, I mean, all these tendencies, I argue, Trace back to this ancient heresy of Gnosticism. | ||
| Yeah, well, they're deeply human needs. | ||
| You know, a couple of times during the lockdowns, I've done meet and greets here in LA, which now I guess they're semi-legal, I'm not sure. | ||
| But when I've met people, people literally crying because they haven't seen humans for that long. | ||
| They haven't seen someone just stand there and smile and have a beer. | ||
| And it's like, that's deep. | ||
| We need that. | ||
| It's so sad, but so human, yeah. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| The final question, this is the final question, I suppose. | ||
| What's good about death? | ||
| Look, I wrote that chapter at the height of the pandemic, and it's focused on Seneca, the great Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, who argued that life, becomes kind of meaningless if you live forever. | ||
| And that, um, it's not that he was said, be a full hearty jackass and like jump down 10 floors and expect to live, but to live in always in fear of, of death, um, prevents you from having the right perspective on your life. | ||
| You, you hoard your possessions. | ||
| You are fearful of new experiences. | ||
| You, There's all sorts of things that you do if you sort of are just absolutely fearful of death, whereas if you keep it in a rational perspective and say, look, I'm going to die, it actually liberates you to act, you know, boldly in life and as he did in his life. | ||
| But ultimately also that a life in which you don't have an end point is kind of meandering. | ||
| It's like a novel that doesn't have a beginning, middle and an end. | ||
| And those kinds of novels or movies are terrible. | ||
| All the things we value in life, heroism, sacrifice, true beauty, they all find their meaning in relation to an endpoint. | ||
| If you can live forever, they're all kind of cheapened. | ||
| And now, obviously, a Christian or a faithful Jew or Muslim wouldn't agree with him because he would say there's an eternal life, but they would agree with him insofar as saying, with Seneca that is, That this version of life, of trying to biotechnologically enhance life forever, that's not eternal life. | ||
| That's a kind of fake substitute. | ||
| And I think that chapter resonates with a lot of people because of, frankly, the COVID restrictions again. | ||
| Yeah, it must've been fascinating just writing that in the midst of COVID, where it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve, to now we're locking down for a year, to then rolling lockdowns, and then suddenly it's like, oh, we can't open up until there's zero chance for anybody to get it, which is actually statistically impossible. | ||
| And double masking, which is my least favorite. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing that's not in this. | ||
| You did not pose the question, but are you hopeful? | ||
| That seems to be coming up a lot with a lot of my guests. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out who's hopeful for the future. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Are you hopeful that we can turn this thing around? | ||
| Because a lot of the questions that you pose here are not things that we're grappling with in a public sense in any real way. | ||
| I mean, obviously certain people are. | ||
| The book's doing well and we talk about these things here. | ||
| But at a public sense, when you listen to our politicians and everything else and just sort of the trends of the world, are you hopeful that we can fix this? | ||
| I'm theologically hopeful in the sense that hope is a theological virtue. | ||
| And I think, um, you know, God's in charge. | ||
| So, you know, in the very long term, everything's going to be okay. | ||
| Um, in the short term, no, I mean, the leadership class in this country is such, I mean, I mean, Biden has senility, his senescence is so kind of emblematic of this, but so no, I mean, in the immediate sense, But I do think the depths that we're in, and you have an audience of people who you talk to, I have an audience, you sense that everyone thinks there's something wrong. | ||
| Something's gone wrong with the West. | ||
| We can't quite put our finger on it all the time. | ||
| I think that yearning, that sense that something's gone wrong, can be the beginning of an awakening, of a political transformation, of something. | ||
| So, in the long term, I do have some hope. | ||
| Even more than hope, I have optimism in the very long term. | ||
| We went from hope to optimism. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| The book is The Unbroken Thread. | ||
| The link is right down below. | ||
| Sorab, I appreciate your time. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. |
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