2810 Feminists vs. Atheists: The Death of Rational Discourse - Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux
Recently an untold number of individuals have come under attack within the atheist community. Claims of misogyny and sexism have been thrown around - and Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer and many many more have been criticized in recent months. Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux discuss the growing rift within the atheist/skeptic community and the value of rational discourse. Recorded: September 19th, 2014
Peter Boghossian, the esteemed man with the doctor in front of his name who puts my back wall to shame.
You really should be putting up all these plaques of intellectual achievement at the back.
My intellectual achievement back wall is looking like the inside of a ping pong ball.
Professor of philosophy at Portland University and author of fantastic books on atheism and agnosticism and a great lecturer.
If you get a chance to catch this lecture live, of course, or on YouTube, I strongly advise you to do so.
We'll put you a link to some of his best videos below, which is pretty much all of them.
Thanks again, Peter.
Great to have you on the show.
Thanks.
Thanks, Stefan.
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
It's a conversation that's long overdue.
So...
What has the atheist community been doing to these poor women?
I must know.
This does seem to be quite a protracted feud, escalation, Hanfields and McCoys.
I wonder if you can give us the lowdown.
I'm not particularly close to the atheist community, although I do write and podcast a lot about atheism.
But you, of course, have been quite in there.
I've done shows.
You've done panels with Richard Dawkins and What's going on?
My take is that it's extremely disturbing.
We need to model the behavior of those who value reason and override our valuing of evidence.
I think what we've seen is some nastiness, invectives, name calling, slurs, slander.
You know, I want to look at this thematically as opposed to looking at or talking about any specifics.
And then I want to talk about it in terms of a broader movement that I see in contemporary leftism, which is extremely problematic.
By the way, with the recent controversy with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and not being allowed to speak at various universities and speakers who, if the left decides the atrocious behavior of the left, if they decide that they don't like the content of a speaker's talk, then they have them uninvited or they literally, they actually bring bullhorns in and blow the bullhorns during the speakers.
I'm aware of that.
Up here in Canada, Ann Coulter, an American lawyer and right-wing commentator, was not allowed to speak after those eruptions of violence.
And recently when I gave a talk in Detroit, we did so under the threat of radical feminists' bomb threats, death threats to the entire venue had to be changed.
So yeah, operating under the shadow of this kind of abuse and direct threats of violence.
I spoke right after a Canadian senator and, you know, sort of setting up bomb threats to a sitting Canadian senator is not always the wisest move.
So yes, certainly that is definitely out there and those of us who are speaking in the public sphere do run up against these kinds of monsters.
Yeah, and that's exactly what it is, that it's extraordinarily problematic and it's ubiquitous on college campuses.
In fact, it happened right here at Portland State University.
Not with a commencement speaker, but there's a really interesting video.
We can post a link to it for your audience later on.
How did we come to the point where we don't have adult conversations?
How do we come to a point where we're incapable of listening to people who have different views than we have?
Well, I think, I mean, certainly from the left, a lot of it comes out of sort of rules for radicals, Saul Alinsky's work, where it's quite a lot of work to research facts and learn how to rationally deconstruct.
You can often coat people with enough slurs and slander and libel and invective that people simply stop listening to what they have to say.
And I think that's the plan.
To me, it's people without good arguments.
If you don't have good arguments, then you switch to verbal abuse.
that tirades are the mark of the loser.
It happens in religion.
They don't have good reasons to believe in God, so they have to damn you with hell as a substitute for reason and evidence.
And so, to me, when you get these kinds of threats, it is simply people who are heavily emotionally invested in an outcome but lack the intellectual tools to make a convincing case.
So we've acquiesced to this culture.
I'm offended.
It's a culture of – you ought not to say that.
It's a culture of radical political correctness which shuts down discourse.
And I'd highly recommend the work of Greg Lekanoff from FIRE, F-I-R-E, who's written two wonderful books about this.
What chance – this is what I have to say for the atheists who are doing these things, P.C. Myers, Ophelia Benson, Rebecca Watson, Greta Christina.
What chance do we have to speaking to people who are suffering from serious religious delusions if we can't even have a conversation among ourselves?
One of the things that you see happens when we create these cultures of being offended and we defer to people who are offended is that people become increasingly intolerant of listening to new ideas.
When we just throw up our hands and say, well, we don't want to offend people.
We shouldn't have Stefan on campus or we shouldn't have Anne Couture.
And let me be crystal clear.
I am completely opposed to virtually anything Anne Couture would come out of her mouth.
But that's not what this conversation is about.
It's not about the content of one's speech.
It's about one's ability to express oneself.
And the moment that you deny an individual that opportunity, then you're on the wrong side.
I'll give you a quick example.
Before I do that, I want to say this is not about being a liberal or being a conservative.
I'm not arguing from an ideological perspective.
I'm arguing from an adult way that we can communicate with each other.
Using facts and reason without name-calling.
There are secular blasphemies in the atheist community, and the left in general.
If you commit one of these blasphemies, for example, if you say that there may be biological differences between the sexes, then the response to that...
Instead of attempting to shut that person down.
If I may say something, hopefully to bring this home to you, you've been adamant, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure you will, that you're against corporal punishment.
Yeah, corporal punishment is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It's the initiation of the use of force, not in self-defense.
And I've got pretty sophisticated and rigorous arguments out there and subject matter experts.
The scientific evidence is very clear, the destructive nature of it.
So from a moral and consequentialist standpoint, from a pragmatic standpoint, the case seems to me fairly ironclad.
But of course, you know, new information can always come out.
I agree.
I agree with you.
I agree with the content of that.
But let's say that there was a speaker, for example, and then we can situate this in an atheist context later.
Let's say there was a speaker who wanted to come to a university who wanted to present her own evidence for why corporal punishment was a good thing.
And she wanted to make a case.
You can protest all you want outside the venue, but if you bring a bullhorn in or if you attempt to get that person uninvited from speaking, then you've crossed the line.
Then you're on the wrong side of the discussion.
You've let your ideology overwhelm what the evidence is.
And that's what we need to be particularly mindful of.
And frankly, it's ironic for a community that provides – not provides, but it's – I'm
not the pig you're looking for.
I'm not the sexist pig you're looking for.
Thank you.
I'm not the sexist pig you're looking for.
The woman in that wasn't capable of having an adult conversation.
She was so vested in being offended.
Frankly, I had a hard time differentiating what she was saying from someone who was suffering from religious delusions.
Yeah, certainly offense is no intellectual argument.
And as you know, if you're a philosopher and you're not offending anyone, you're not doing your job.
I mean, everything that is reason and evidence-based is bound to cause offense to people who are raised in traditions that are highly opposed to reason and evidence.
I mean, if you're an oncologist, then you want the cancer cells to be highly uncomfortable with what you're doing.
That's your job.
And offense as a result.
But with Sam Harris, I thought what was interesting was that this came about because he was asked why so many of his readers are male.
And I think 83% of his Twitter...
Thank you.
Obviously, he doesn't know.
There's some skepticism about having certain answers, but he said that it may be more comfortable being out front and vocal in disagreeing.
He didn't know why, but there could be some biological factors and so on, which is obviously a very conservative and cautious answer, because, of course, nobody knows for sure.
But what I find frustrating is when cries of things like sexism, patriarchy, racism, and so on are just fired at people.
Say, God did it.
You know, where do we come from?
God did it.
You know, what's ethics?
What's in the Bible?
It's just, it's a non-answer that prevents further exploration.
You know, there's nothing more dangerous to the growth of knowledge than the illusion of an answer.
And so, why are there more male vocal atheists out there in the world?
I don't know.
I mean, it's a fascinating question.
You know, it would be great if there were more women out there.
Is it Do we just get to say sexism and then think we've answered something?
I don't know.
I don't think we have enough information yet.
And I think a lot of avenues of exploration to exploring that very important question tend to be closed off because people don't even want to go there because of these airstrikes of calumny that are thrown at people.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that People have – many people, particularly in the atheist movement, have lost the ability to have an adult conversation and they instantly assume the worst about people and the role that evidence plays in those beliefs.
But here's what I want to say.
Those who are harmed the most are not the real sexist or the real racist.
The women who suffer the most are those whose battles we minimize when we take offense and we shut down the discourse.
Look, if someone accuses Sam Harris of sexism, the people who suffer are the women who are actually suffering.
They're the real victims of sexism and that's what's so ironic and shameful about it.
When you've attacked the wrong target, then by definition, you haven't gone after the right target.
Dawkins isn't the right target.
Harris isn't the right target.
The women who were beaten by their husbands...
Or who's testimony is not worth that of a man in court.
And those are the more egregious examples.
But the rampant sexism and racism in society, we can include racism as well.
And every time you take these soft targets, it'd be interesting to talk about why they go after Dawkins and Harris.
I have my own speculation for why that is.
Well, it's because they're white males and white males are the group that everyone can unleash their pent-up frustrations with the world on and it'd be a safe target because we apparently, speaking collectively, we are apparently responsible for about most of the ills in society.
And so I think that there is a kind of...
You know, white privilege and so on.
I mean, gosh.
I mean, I saw the social justice warriors going after Richard Dawkins when he pointed out the musicians and classical composers that he liked.
And people were saying, well, they're all old white men.
Like, so what?
And also, one of them died when he was 27 or something like that.
So I think that we are, like, the white males as a category are a group that people feel fairly safe in attacking.
And again, I think that's just unfair and unjust and irrational.
What's interesting to me about that is that the left are the new racists.
The left, not only have they co-opted this narrative, which is particularly interesting, but they're the ones who think about things in terms of race.
Diversity to them doesn't mean ideological or intellectual diversity.
It means racial diversity.
It's a strict conversation.
Thinking about or considering people in terms of the color of their skin and their gender.
And that, I think, not only must that overlook those people who have seriously suffered.
And that's, by the way, you know, we could talk about that in relation to Islam and criticism of this crazy idea that Islam is a race and you ought not to criticize it.
But it really is true that the left are the new racists.
Well, and yet, of course, the left generally say that the concept of race does not exist biologically, that it's merely a social construct, and so on.
And so there is this paradox, which is obviously frustrating when dealing with people who sort of embody these paradoxes.
There are so many questions that...
Are essential, I think, to the peaceful and productive functioning of society that people simply can't talk about for fear of these kinds of insults and assaults and going after your source of income and letter bombing people around you and all that kind of stuff.
And to be fair, of course, I mean, if what the women report is true, and I'm sure that it is, then the amount of hatred and hostility that women in the atheist community, and it's not limited to the atheist community, but women online, I mean, the amount of threats and harassment and stalking and abusive emails that they receive.
It's absolutely horrendous.
And that's why we need outpouring of hatred for differing viewpoints is medieval.
I thought that we'd see, you know, post enlightenment, you'd think we'd be able to move past that kind of stuff and engage people where it counts with reason and evidence.
But it seems that there's just a lot of pent up vitriol that people hurl to the detriment of the progress of thought.
That's the thing.
People have lost the ability to have an adult conversation about things.
Look, I'm sure that there are...
Here's what I'm sure of.
I'm sure that if you got the wrong target by definition, you don't have the right target, as I said.
I'm sure that there are egregious and non-egregious instances of this.
And I'm sure that by every time someone takes a pot shot at Harris or Dawkins, these substantive issues aren't being addressed and they need to be addressed.
But what's worse than that is that This radical element has worked against the interest of women.
I now read things on my Facebook page or posts, oh, I'm not a feminist or I'm not a – I mean, why?
Because there's a small band of underaccomplished people who are outraged.
I don't even know really – it's hard to really – that's the thing.
It's hard to really discern what it is that people are outraged about when their tone is so – The way that they articulate themselves is not the way to move the conversation forward and we really do need to have a look at women's issues and we do need to have a look at instances in society where women aren't treated equally to men.
In that case, I'm certainly a gender egalitarian but again, this isn't about Any conclusion that one comes to.
It's about the process that people use.
I'm not committed at all to any ideology, but I'm completely committed to civil discourse and I'm completely committed to epistemology.
The types of conversations that we have now, they're just not benefiting anybody.
Nobody is winning from this.
And the faithful are looking at this community and they're – I don't even know what they're doing.
Are they laughing?
Are they mocking it?
Are they – aha, these are the people who value reason and evidence and they can't even talk to each other in a rational way.
They can't even present the evidence.
And again, getting back to the question I asked you about somebody in corporal punishment, you don't think that they should be shut out of the system and be allowed to – I would love to book one of those people every night.
I really would.
Because if people are making bad arguments, give them a megaphone.
Bring the spotlight on them.
Help broadcast all their stuff.
And if you disagree with them, then show up with Reason and evidence and tear them apart in a nice positive Socratic way during the Q&A period.
I mean, there's nothing more dramatic than seeing people confront elemental differences in ethics, in my opinion.
So let them speak.
I mean, the best disinfected is sunlight and the best way to expose a bad idea is to give it as much amplitude as possible.
Absolutely.
So you and I are on the same page.
Christopher Hitchens also said he defended David Irving, who was a Holocaust denier.
The idea that bad ideas need to be subject to the marketplace of ideas.
We need to expose these things.
It could be that I walked into a conversation and I thought I had governance, but geez, I was wrong.
I didn't really think I knew what I thought I knew and I'm now willing to reconsider my belief.
But when we create these cultures of being offended, when we create these cultures of silencing people, then we start to have very serious problems.
When the willingness to engage opposing points of view is more important than the view you currently hold.
And that's what ideologues don't understand.
It's the moment you let any particular opinion you hold overwhelm your willingness to hear an argument.
That's the moment you lose.
What's so frustrating, Peter, is that thought crime is supposed to be the province of two places.
Totalitarian dictatorships, like 1984, And religion.
These are where thoughts can be crimes, right?
So as Jesus said, to look at another woman in lust is the same as having had sex with her.
It's the same.
So thought crime, in other words, the mere act of having an idea or presenting an argument, for that to be immoral has always been the province of dictatorships, whether they're secular or religious.
And this is what is so frustrating at a time when we have this incredible connection of human communication called the Internet.
This should be a time where thought crime is banished from the human conversation and people can really engage based on reason and evidence.
And this idea that in the atheist community, and I think it does come from the left because the right already have their thought crime because they're generally more religious.
This idea that in the atheist community, there's such a thing as a thought crime is to me to take the very worst aspects of religion and bring them into the atheist community.
It really is disturbing that many elements of this fringe have.
Or maybe they won't even characterize themselves as a fringe.
I don't know.
It's a numerical question one could answer by survey data.
But that not only have they hijacked a narrative and not only have they said that there are certain things, certain kind of conclusions that one holds, but two things happen, two things occur.
One, they've created these cultures of offense.
So they've made it – definitively engaged ideas because every time an idea comes up that they find offensive, they just label the idea or the person, they smear the person or they conflate disagreement with harassment.
You can disagree with someone in a polite and civil way and that doesn't mean that you're harassing them.
The other thing that it does is that it creates people who are less tolerant.
Every time you demonstrate an unwillingness to let someone speak or hear an idea, it's a very – that is precisely the problem.
You then become less tolerant than you were before precisely because you've habituated yourself to not substantively engaging the content of someone's speech.
So I would argue again that it's about the process that we use to have conversations and people are not having adult conversations.
They're not sitting down calmly and dispassionately and looking at the evidence and moving forward without name calling and really taking a look at the substantive issue of the problem.
I think we have to admit that we're just human beings and whether you're an atheist or whether you don't believe in Thor or not, that doesn't make you more rational.
You're just as subject to ideology.
You're just as subject to – and that's kind of the problem I have with the whole concept of an atheist movement.
My friend James Lindsay is writing a wonderful book about that now.
Now I just read an early manuscript.
But we need to help people have these sorts of conversations that are more productive because certainly that is not happening right now.
And the people who we could be helping are not helping.
The people who are – women who are suffering are not helping.
The people who are – the people we're trying to talk out of their faith-based delusions, nobody is being helped by.
It's not anybody.
Well, and I think what is necessary is to – I think we have to strongly criticize and reject people who hurl evidence, right?
right?
So, and we'll put the link to the Sam Harris, but the conversation he has with the woman, basically, she said, you're sexist.
And he's like, man, I was raised by a single mom.
I'm happily married.
I've got two daughters.
Most of my editors are women.
You know, and he says, look, I know that some of my best friends are black kind of defense, but that he's providing evidence as to how he's not sexist.
And he actually says that he has a higher opinion of women than most men, which I guess you could say is a little sexist, but not in the way the woman is thinking.
He puts these evidence, you know, this is empirical evidence against the charge of sexism.
And the woman rushes right past it and says, that just proves you don't even know how sexist you are.
And then it's like, oh, okay.
So basically, we're in this Monty Python world where people say to the guy, Brian, they say, you're the messiah.
And he says, I'm not the messiah.
Only the true messiah would deny his divinity.
Oh, okay.
So we're in this place where if I bring evidence about not being sexist, then it doesn't matter because that only proves how unconscious my sexism is.
And then you're just in this situation where, okay, so I have to not have a conversation with you because you're a crazy ideologue and I'm not going to insult the concept of rational discourse by talking to an offense robot.
I've been thinking about Sam's post, and I've been thinking about...
I didn't really follow this atheist politics until fairly recently, but it really makes me wonder, like, maybe I'm really fundamentally misunderstanding the experiences that brought people, women in particular, to this place.
You know, I have a friend of mine, she said when she walks down the street and People give catcalls to her and how disgusting it makes her feel.
We spoke about that.
Maybe I really am trying to extend a hermeneutic of charity and trying to say right now I'm positive right now that there are experiences that women have and minorities and transgender and homosexuals that I don't have.
And I'm trying to take a look at...
I mean, I'm just doing this as a thought experiment.
I'm talking to my female friends about it.
I'm trying to take a look at where does all this vitriol and bile and anger come from?
And...
What is the next move that we can make to advance the conversation so that it's less caustic, less acerbic, less name?
How can we make this conversation more civil?
How can we help people talk as adults?
Because that's not what's happening right now.
And if you look at, again, the Sam Harris piece is so interesting because Her response – she could have said any one of a number of things.
Well, just because you were raised by a single mother, that doesn't mean you don't hate women or what is your evidence for that?
Again, going back to the idea of evidence.
But the problem – that's part of the problem with an ideology is that it over – You start cherry-picking what your evidence is and then you start tossing evidence out.
I have to be consciously mindful that I don't do that myself.
We all have to be mindful.
But in that conversation, It clearly came off, assuming that, and I'm assuming that it was closer verbatim, it clearly came off as she had some issue that I've seen so many individuals have that prevented her from any kind of adult conversation.
Well, I mean, that's a big topic and I'll give you a brief tirade as to why I think it might be occurring.
In order to expand authority over human beings, one of the best ways to do it, Peter, is to convince a human being that he or she is a victim.
That there's a system run by those people over there that is oppressing you.
And then you want people to get into power to fix the system that is oppressing you.
And of course, the Marxists did it with the proletariat.
And some radical feminists are doing it with women.
And there's race baiters who do it with races and so on.
You're a victim.
The system is stacked against you.
The deck is stacked against you.
You can't get anywhere without my help.
And it goes all the way back to religion.
You can't get into heaven without my help.
You can't get to the grace of Jesus without doing these rituals and giving me this amount of money.
You're a victim of Satan.
You're a victim of the white guys.
You're a victim of men.
You're a victim, victim, victim.
And if you drum that into enough people's heads, and I do find it's more on the left, because again, the right generally as more religious has the victimization of Satan and temptation and original sin and so on.
If you can convince people that they're victims, it uncorks a lot of anger.
Like, I'll just give you one brief example, right?
So, one of the things that's generally talked about, which has been debunked so many times, it's ridiculous.
You know, women only earn 77 cents on the dollar for every dollar that men earn.
And it's not true.
I mean, it's true in a general sense, but women with the same amount of education as men, who are in the same field, and who've been in the workforce for the same amount of time as men, well, they actually earn slightly more than men do.
I thought that was correct about, well, maybe, I don't know the data well enough, but I thought that was true.
Well, it's true if you look at the aggregate of men and women.
The big difference is that women choose to have children, and to have children, because there's been such a strong movement towards breastfeeding, because World Health Organizations come out with the recommended 18 months, women take time off from the workplace in general to have babies.
The standard pattern is the man works and the woman stays home, at least for some period of time.
And so when you normalize by all of that, women actually come out slightly ahead.
And so, and you can look up, we'll put a link to the debunking of this.
Dr.
Warren Farrell, who's been on my show, has written a whole book about this.
Christina Hoff Summers has blog posts about this.
It's just one of these things that everybody, oh, women are just underpaid and so on.
But if you normalize by various choices that men and women make, it works.
It sort of works out.
But if you can convince women that there's this whole system of male oppression and patriarchy, that means they're just going to get underpaid and exploited, then they run to the government and they say, oh, Mr.
Politician, you've got to save me from these terrible men.
And then the government puts in pay equity and they get commissioners on gender equality and they get huge amounts of grants and money and so on, right?
And the same thing happens with race and so on, right?
So if you can convince a lot of people that they're victims and that there's this group, whether it's men or whites or white men from the perfect storm, then they feel like they're hard done by it.
And that legitimizes a lot of what Nietzsche used to call resentment, right?
The resentment, the anger at having been put down.
And this provoking of victimhood and this establishing of an oppressive class goes, you know, all the way back to religion, goes through Marxism, goes through the left.
And I think that's one of the main reasons why it occurs.
It's a power grab.
Because if you're a victim who can't fight a system because it's too big and widespread and powerful, you need an ally to go into that system and fight on your behalf.
And those people tend to get more political power.
That's my very sort of brief, not proven, right?
But it's a framework that may be of value in examining the information.
Okay, so two things.
The first thing is – so this would be a good idea about belief revision and the importance of belief revision.
I had it in my mind and from things that I had read about the disparity in salaries that that was factually accurate.
So – So just as a basic critical thinking tool, I would then look at the counter example or evidence you provide me and then I would go back to see if that had been debunked, the debunking of the debunking.
And that's how I would go.
But what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't hold firm to my ideology and not even want to look at any evidence that was presented.
say, Steph, only a sexist male middle-aged white bastard would possibly have that opinion, you sexist, misogynistic, whatever, right?
And just to be clear, the 70 cents on the dollar is true.
It is a fact that women in aggregate earn 77 cents on the dollar relative to men, but that's the result of being out of the workforce to have kids and working part-time because of kids, because we've got this ridiculously inefficient school system where everyone works till five, but kids get out at 3.15 or 3.30.
So it's true, but it's just not the complete story.
It's like when they talk about the number of gun deaths in the U.S., they include suicides in that, which is not exactly the same as what most people are thinking.
So this idea of victims is interesting because there are legitimate victims of oppression.
Absolutely.
I mean I gave a whole bunch of examples and it would seem that you need some kind of a conceptual triage, that that should absolutely, positively be the priority.
And that doesn't mean that you can't talk about wage inequality or wage disparities, but I don't think we need to manufacture – we have legitimate victims.
Why would we want to manufacture victims?
I want to say something briefly.
You've been to my house.
You've met my family.
You've met my wife.
I said to my wife, I had mentioned that I was going to come on the podcast and talk to you about this.
She said to say hello, by the way.
She was telling me some really interesting things.
She's the medical director at a hospital here.
And she would be in a room, she's obviously a woman, she'd be in a room in her office, sitting at her chair, and men would come in, and women, but mostly men would come in, and they would say, where's the medical director?
Because they think she's like a nurse or something like that, right?
They think she's a nurse and she would tell me story after story about her being in a meeting and people don't think – and she attributes to gender.
She's probably right.
The problem is when you ask people that say, oh, no, no, no, it's not true.
So I want to stress, you have a daughter.
I have a daughter.
We have wives.
We have a mother.
My mom passed away, but we have – This idea that somehow I wouldn't want...
My daughter to grow up in a world in which she was judged on the content of her speech rather than her gender is just preposterous.
In the case of my daughter as well, she's a different race than I am.
These are complicated issues and I think that the best way to address these issues is in an adult manner and we're just not doing that.
that.
We're just not looking at the evidence and we're just not being civil towards each other.
The lack of civility in the atheist community is just staggering.
And it's really unfortunate because we are, it's not only as unfortunate as I said before, it's also ironic.
It's unfortunate because we couldn't possibly help people overcome their delusions when we've created these cultures of being offended constantly.
When we've created these cultures of, you know, I can't talk about that.
This person is a bad person.
I can't speak to him.
I can't be at a...
I mean, sometimes it really...
And just by the way, I didn't go to TAM last year because of the amazing meeting.
It's the largest gathering of skeptics in the world.
But the year before that, I brought my son.
And I brought my son because I thought it'd be a good experience for him.
But I also brought my son because I just didn't want any accusations.
You know, there's Peter Boghossian.
I was at the salad bar and, you know, who knows what he did.
Oh, right.
So, sorry to interrupt.
For those who don't know, I think Schirmer has been the guy that some accusations have been made.
And I don't know if the accusations can be verified in any objective way about inappropriate behavior at these events.
That's what you're referring to?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, this was actually before that happened to Shermer and those accusations have absolutely not been – that's a whole other story in and of itself.
So I brought my son to this conference because this had been going on for a while precisely because I thought it would minimize the risk that I would be accused of something.
What happened is now that there are evidently ways that people can go online anonymously and accuse people of things.
I've never heard of that.
Of course, I've never experienced anything like that, but I hear it's tough for others.
I'm just kidding.
Go ahead.
Oh, no.
Have you been accused of sexually harassing people or even worse?
No.
Unfortunately, my right hand can't type.
But no, I've not been accused of sexually harassing people, but I've been accused of other nefarious things.
And it's...
It's the coward's way of attempting to frame a debate to have you lose credibility.
I actually find it quite useful because what I find is that people who get sucked into that kind of black hole of calumny are not people who would have benefited much from a philosophical discourse anyway.
So it's like this giant sewage siphon that keeps crap out of my swimming pool.
So from my standpoint, it actually can be very, very helpful.
Yeah, I guess it can be helpful in a certain sense, but how tragic, right?
How tragic that they lost an opportunity to revise a belief that they had or that you lost an opportunity to have a conversation partner or how tragic if you're really trying to look at this as a goal to help disabuse people of some radical silliness that's very harmful to other people.
They're modeling behaviors which really are – to say that it's inappropriate doesn't even begin to paint it with the brush.
So it's difficult again and I think what we all need to do is we all need to be more mindful about the words we use and how we frame ourselves and we need to be – we need to take a big step back.
I think that there are some things – I was thinking about this the other day.
It's not just that we're not ready to have an honest conversation about things.
We're not ready to have an honest conversation obviously about Islam, gender, race.
But we're not even ready to have an honest conversation about why we're not ready to have an honest conversation about these things.
Right.
Right?
And until we start speaking honestly, we will never be able to solve these problems.
And the way to solve these problems is through rational civil discourse where you look at evidence and we're just not doing that.
We're just not behaving.
And there are certain members of our community that are not behaving in adult ways.
Well, and I think one of the things that happens with this oppressor victimhood mentality is that if you believe you're a victim, you no longer, I think, genuinely feel the need for empathy, right?
Because you're just being victimized.
You know, like, if I'm grabbed and thrown into the back of a windowless van, I'm not really concerned about the emotions of the people.
I'm a victim.
I've got to fight my way free.
So, I mean, I regularly hear, well, Steph, you're a white male, and you have a nice accent, and you're, you know, what do you know about oppression?
And, you know, you've never experienced any prejudice and so on.
And, like, I'm an atheist.
I'm a voluntarist, sometimes known as an anarchist.
I went through an incredibly lefty academic program up here in Canada at three different universities where every single day, fight it though I may, I was barraged with, you know, white males are the worst curse on humanity kind of thing, you know, the British Empire and the capitalists and, I mean, oh, it's just nonstop, patriarchy.
It was just nonstop.
So, But nobody, almost nobody ever actually asks me, Steph, have you ever experienced any discrimination for your beliefs?
It's like atheists experience more discrimination legally than minorities do.
There are places in America where atheists cannot legally hold office, for heaven's sakes.
But nobody asks.
They simply look at the color of my skin and my gender and make all of these assumptions about me and never actually ask any questions about my experience of prejudice in the world.
And...
That kind of thinking seems to me we've all faced it.
We've all had to deal with it.
We really should be asking each other more questions about each other's common experience rather than dividing this Manichean worldview into oppressors and victims and good guys and sexists and misogynists and racists.
I mean, my God, we're taking the common human experience and shattering it in a way that I'm not sure we can put back together without some cataclysm.
Yeah, that's right.
And again, we really do need to be mindful that there are legitimate sexists and there are people who are racists.
And again, I think we've had the wrong target.
I don't want to be repetitive, but there is a consequence for this behavior.
And the consequence is that this sexism that is actually...
We're metastasizing our communities.
This sexism doesn't go away.
In fact, this sexism and the racism gets worse.
And so, again, it's time that – it's a funny thing to say, but it really is time that we stop looking at people in terms of the color of their skin or in terms of their gender and we start really taking people's arguments – Seriously, and we start listening to people, and we start asking people more questions.
We need to ask more questions, and we're just not doing that.
I think that really is the way out of it.
I think that the way out of it is, and I don't really know.
I don't know what's going to happen to the atheist movement as a consequence of this.
In one sense, I don't really think it's that important, ultimately.
But I don't know what's going to happen.
Well, the arguments will hold no matter what invective is hurled.
But I do have concerns about the degree to which atheism is going to be taken seriously, not as a particular cyst or bubble of rational thought in human personality, but...
It is the consequence of a rational approach to the world.
To self-identify as an atheist is, in a sense, to say that the conclusion is the methodology.
Atheism is a conclusion based upon a strict methodology of reason and evidence.
That's absolutely right.
We all have our sacred cows within us.
We all have stuff where it's like, well, this is what I believe, and my day is basically bouncing around like a pinball between all my sacred cows, having them regularly knocked over and so on.
And I do think that we have to commit to reason and evidence no matter what.
And the other thing I wanted to mention as well is that The real sexists and racists are the ones who benefit the most when the discussion gets shut down.
That's exactly right.
It's sort of like Islam, right?
Are shutting down debates because now nobody wants to talk about it, right?
And so if Sam Harris gets blasted for being sexist, for making an off-the-cuff comment without stating any fundamental conclusions, but merely as a hypothesis, if that level of whatever...
Gets blasted.
Nobody is going to want to talk about gender.
Nobody's going to want to talk about sexism.
Nobody wants to talk about racism.
Well, who does that benefit?
It benefits the real sexist and the real racist because it's shut down the discussion wherein they might be further flushed out.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
And I'm going to add one point, one thing to that.
The other thing that happens when the discussion is shut down is that people don't learn how to rationally derive their values.
They become more entrenched in the ideologies and the beliefs that you hold.
So if you were to ask someone, why do you think that or why do you believe that?
Oh, you can't ask...
So there are certain questions that become taboo.
There should be no questions that are taboo.
No questions should be taboo.
And so as long as we have this culture that protects people from really listening to different points of view, and as long as we have this culture that makes these secular blasphemies We won't be able to solve our problems.
Our epistemic situation will be getting worse.
And again, this is not about an ideology.
We need to get beyond ideologies and do exactly what we've talked about.
You need to look at the reason and evidence so that we can have an adult conversation.
Intellectual curiosity is the greatest natural resource, and it seems to me we're just poisoning and squandering it in reprehensible ways.
And the future will look back upon this time as a kind of McCarthyist hysteria and a kind of Galileo persecution of people who have genuine curiosity about how the world works.
And I think they'll wonder what the hell was in our water that made us so hysterical.
Again, I think that the real victims, when you have the wrong targets, are the women who do suffer.
And I think that would be my final remark to people, to really think about what you're doing.
Because you're not benefiting the women who are really suffering from sexism.
Yeah, and the only people who win are the bullies, and when the bullies win, humanity loses, catastrophically.
Jean Caziz, I actually met her when I was on a tour in Texas.
She has a great phrase that I love.
I picked it up from Russell.
My friend Russell Blackford is an Australian philosopher, and that is, bullying ideas off the table.
No idea should be bullied off the table.
Ideas should be shown to be under evidenced, good ideas, bad ideas.
We should look at ideas under a microscope, but we ought not to bully ideas off the table.
We ought to give, even if those ideas don't comport with our pre-existing conclusions.
And again, that's the problem when people think in terms of conclusions and not in terms of processes.
If you, again, you and I are on this, we might have a different agreement.
We actually don't, but about corporal punishment or the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
But as long as we don't shut off the discourse, we're fine.
You and I are cool.
The moment that you start saying that somebody shouldn't say that or they shouldn't speak or they're a bad person because they hold that idea and we ought to stifle them, then you've crossed the line.
You're on the wrong side.
Then we have a real problem.
Let me just end with one thing for the bullies too.
The bullies only do what they do because people listen and because people change their behavior.
If you listen to bullies, if you listen to slander, if you listen to hysterical, emotional, negative diatribes, all you're doing is you're creating and fostering and feeding the bullies.
Look, there are people out there Infinitely smarter than I am.
Maybe even slightly smarter than Peter Boghossian.
We don't know.
No, but there are people out there with incredible capacities for thought and reasoning and communication.
And the more we fill The interconnected network of human communication with slurs and slanders and insults and hysteria, the more we are keeping those people out of the public discourse, who may have the capacity to radically move forward our capacity to communicate and reason and understand.
It's like how many people don't run for public office because they know if they run for public office, the amount of crap that they're going to have to eat, the amount of scrutiny they're going to be under, the amount of dirt digging missions that people are going to go on about everything they ever did or said in their life, whether their emails are going to get hacked like what happened to Sarah Palin.
How many people stay out of public life who could actually be quite valuable in public life because of...
Of this culture of bullying and hysteria and escalation that we seem to have got ourselves caught into.
I mean, if we did the same thing to cancer researchers, oh, you want to research cancer, do you?
piece of crap I can and put it all over the internet and you're going to get death threats and this and that.
How many people would not end up being cancer researchers because they're like, man, I just do something where I don't end up with this level of hostility and hatred and craziness in my life.
So we're driving necessary, maybe even world-saving people out of the public discourse because it's not a welcoming place to be.
And I don't mean like disagreements and so on, but just hysteria.
It's such a waste of potential.
The anger, the – I'm just thinking of the word in Spanish for anger.
It's not a nice word.
But the extreme anger, it was the most appropriate word in that context.
It doesn't – It doesn't facilitate my belief revision.
It doesn't make me understand.
I want to understand the problem.
I want to understand the perspective.
I want to see.
I want to fix it.
I want to do something about it.
I want to ameliorate human suffering.
But with the extreme behavior and the anger, it makes it very difficult to listen to those claims.
Which I guess is the point of you get enough static, you can't hear the melody anymore, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Well, I do think that just as the internet has enabled the bullies, so it has also enabled people who have something of value to bring to the human conversation.
And, you know, I think just persistence, you know, I believe that the most consistent position in the long run will always will out if you hold the course.
And so for those out there, like, I'm sorry that there's this amount of vitriol In the world, when you go out and propose ideas, particularly ideas around ethics and religion, You threaten a lot of people's interests.
You threaten a lot of money.
You threaten a lot of people who have ill intent, particularly those in authority.
And they, you know, everybody forgets about the backlash.
And I'm sorry that it isn't like that out there.
I'm sorry it's like that for you.
I'm sorry it's like that for me.
But, you know, at least it's people typing.
It's not hemlock.
You know, this is how far philosophy has come in 2,500 years, that now it's typing.
It's not the bitter poison plant anymore.
So just stay the course and truth and reason prevail if you simply keep your hand on the tiller no matter how bad the storm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks, Stefan.
Thanks, Peter.
Got any gigs coming up that you want the Gen Pop to know about?
Yeah, I do.
I have a game that's going to come out that fosters, it's called Jux, J-U-X. It fosters critical thinking and creative thinking through storytelling.
It's super fun.
We playtested it.
It's a great game.
I have an app coming out that teaches users how to talk people out of faith and superstition and into reason.
And no one's ever done anything like it.
We've spent the whole summer about a team of 12 people working on it, developing the content.
It's a Pretty good, and I talked to Dennis about maybe having a contest where we give away a few beta keys if people are interested in checking that out.
I have a chapter in a book called John W. Loftus' book, Christianity is Not Great, Why Faith Fails.
I have a chapter in that coming out.
I have another piece that's under review about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and critical thinking, about how we should use the same process, the same pedagogy in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that adjudicates beliefs and critical thinking.
Then I'm working on one right now.
I'm currently writing it.
It's how to transform university systems into reason and rationality incubation chambers so that we can put out graduates who promote the public understanding of reason and science.
So that's what I've got going on.
Fantastic.
And remember, a manual for creating atheists.
We'll put a link below.
Highly, highly recommended.
You open it up, you won't put it down until the sun comes up.
And it will be a night well spent.
Thank you.
Thanks, Peter.
It's always great to chat with you.
I hope we can do it again soon.
Every now and then, in my mind's eye, I cast my eye left and right to see who's in the trenches, and it's good to see your profile.
