Parenting, Faith, and the Future with Ex-Muslim Activist Sarah Haider
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, Sarah Hader joins us to talk about her new podcast, Hold That Thought, and her thoughts on secularism and parenting in the modern era. We talk about what it means to be a "rationalist" in the 21st century, and why we should all be looking for alternatives to traditional parenting models.
Transcript
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I think that all the ways in which we have allowed women, especially young women, greater
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autonomy and control over their life choices, there has been a negative consequence for
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those same women, I think, when they become mothers, because it's the same forces that
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give you more autonomy as an individual, weaken the social ties that are very, they're important
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I'm really excited because after listening to Sarah Hader on podcasts for months, maybe
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years at this point, she is here on our podcast, and we're so excited to have her on.
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And on Twitter, she's Sarah the Hader, as in H-A-I-D-E-R, which is a great, it's a great
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As she also does with Megan Dahm, who we also love, a podcast called A Special Place
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So we're very glad to have you here bantering with us.
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And let's jump right into the tweet that got us connected, because I think it's good framing
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The other day, Sarah asked if there were any group slash resources out there, for lack
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of a better word, that offer traditional parenting, but with a secular or rationalist approach.
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And someone from probably like a follower of this podcast followed us and followed Sarah
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and connected us saying, hey, you should probably talk with Simone and Malcolm.
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Let's start with whatever motivated this tweet.
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Yeah, it's been in the works for a while, but I am a new mom, new-ish.
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So I was looking to connect with other parents.
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I have been for some time now that it's like a play date age and just thinking about how
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Now we're at a point where we're thinking about school, preschool, homeschool, Montessori.
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And I'm not the kind of person who trusts establishment.
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Like the kind of normie options make me nervous sometimes.
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And I actually have good reason to feel that way about our education system.
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The prison metaphor is a good one, but I think it really killed my love of learning,
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Actually, in the Bay Area, when I went to school, the same architectural firm did design
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I think they had the same parent company that was creating the cafeteria food.
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No, I imagine that's true in a lot of areas because it makes sense if you're winning
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And it's a state school to pipeline ecosystem in a lot of these districts, right?
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Luckily, I was not in one of those places, but I was definitely in a like testing, get
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good grades and compete in incessantly, have like 10 hours of homework a night school
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And my background is actually in new atheism, which we were touching on a little bit.
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Yeah, we were touching on before this, so for context, for our viewers, this is, I think,
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germane for the topic of this podcast, somebody who rose to fame in the new atheist community.
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Simone and I really rose, like we were mostly affiliated with like EA rationalist, less wrong
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So obviously a bit of a different community, but very aligned culturally speaking.
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Yeah, and the pronatalist movement in many ways within those communities represents a
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group that's, hey, we threw out a lot of stuff that maybe we shouldn't have thrown out.
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And it's hard to find people willing to engage with any aspect of the traditionalist idea.
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Like we often use the term neotrad to mean when I'm explaining it to reporters, I'm like,
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what it means is we look through various older traditions for social technology that we can
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re-implement and that still makes sense within our social and technological context right now.
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And a lot of people, they think when you're looking to the past for social technology, they
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And it's now like, there's a lot of cultures in the past.
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I can look to things that was practiced in Egypt in various time periods.
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There are lots of social technologies that have evolved and can be re-screwed together
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Another thing that I was talking to somebody about recently that really colored this idea
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for me is for a long time, I've actually speaking to a reporter at The Economist about
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this today, like societal progress has been tearing down fences and we didn't know why
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It's been very much, okay, there's this random rule here.
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And up until today, we're now finally at a part where we have torn out so much of the
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base infrastructure that people are now realizing, oh, a lot of that infrastructure had a purpose
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and we get the opportunity to, we can either rebuild things exactly the way it used to be,
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or we can intentionally build the social infrastructure to really optimize it going into the future
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in a way that humanity never really has, which is really interesting to me.
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So those could be, I've always been like rationalist curious.
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Like I've always been like poking around in the blogs and not participating, but lurking.
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So I'm familiar, just broadly speaking, with some of the kind of movements and tendencies
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And I definitely feel that I align with that in a personality sense.
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It's harder when we get to policies that it can get trickier there because then that requires
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So I don't know how much, maybe we'll fork a little bit when it comes to that.
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But I definitely, I like that approach, the kind of optimistic yet grounded in like a real
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reality, let's engineer something like, I like that.
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And I wanted to be able to talk to people who could, I like the way you, you put it, I like
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that you put that you can look back into the past as also, also something that we can look
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towards, not just, we don't just have to come up with new ideas, but we can look back and think
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about the wisdom of our forefathers or whatever.
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But that's a weird word, isn't it, wisdom, because I don't know if they knew what they
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were doing, but nevertheless, it came together in a useful way for them.
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And I've come around to appreciating that as well.
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I think a lot of people have walked that path in the past like 10 years or so.
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In the atheist, like new atheist kind of community, not so much.
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Like there definitely was a big woke pilling that happened and like atheism.
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I feel like I know, but it seems like the parts of it that survived actually became like
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It's like dedicated skeptics of whatever the dominant cultural group is.
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And I think that we see, I want to say they're true colors, but what they are, and I suspect
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this is a genetic proclivity, somewhat hard-coded in some people that they get off most on just
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criticizing the dominant culture in our society and the dominant cultural perception from
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me growing up transitioned from theocratic perception of the dominant culture, which
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is what I believed was the dominant culture when I was a kid.
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And I think it was accurate to a woke theology, which is, it gives them something new to criticize.
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Maybe that, maybe there's definitely something to that about the public figures, because
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certainly if you get popular in the new atheism movement, you are known to be like this big
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And I don't think the average atheist necessarily is that way, even if they like lurk around in
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So there's a misrepresentation of the kinds of person who rises to the top in that space.
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I was trying more to fight for the right to criticize religion because I come from a Muslim
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backgrounds in many Muslim majority countries, there's like nothing resembling freedom of
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And that sort of carries over into Muslim majority or just Muslim communities here in Western
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context as well, because there's so many of them for multiple reasons and they're becoming
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And so you have this like mini nation and there's a, I think of a culture that is not open to
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So that's the kind of thing that I was talking about and I found that it was really hard to
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talk about Islam openly because for some things you're not supposed to say, and that was one
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And so that was my entryway into pushing back against the normal dominant like political paradigm.
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And my instinct, because I came in from that background was to look away from religion when
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I'm looking or even religious communities or anything resembling religious communities or
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Like it was just, I don't think that I'm a person that's easy to bias.
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So traditional is a bad word in the way religion is a bad word.
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It's the way that people think about it is definitely tied strongly with women's disempowerment.
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All these like social ills that now we can talk about in a kind of a different way, but it's
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impossible to move that conversation forward in some circles.
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So I was, when I was tweeting that I was actually wanting something else.
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I don't want to, I don't want to be a part of the atheist parenting communities.
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I feel like they are, when they're not looking at traditional cultures or even religious practices
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associated with the religious, we don't have to accept it for the religious reason.
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I feel like in an abandoning all of that or refusing to take a good look at it, they were
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abandoning a huge and important source of knowledge.
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So yeah, I'll elevate a, well, a misconception here, but I think a misconception that also
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delineates probably where some of the negative parenting practices come from.
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So if you're talking about the rationalist community as 99% atheist, they just don't primarily
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And one thing that we often elevate on this show is that when a community identifies in
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a specific way, status hierarchies within that community can often begin to form with how
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far you other yourself along the metric of identification within the community.
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So an example here would be, if I'm a goth and I meet another goth, how much that person
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has othered themselves from mainstream society, whether it's through piercings or a weird way
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of dressing, that is my immediate assumption of their goth status.
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And so when a community has identified primarily, primary mechanism of identification is atheist,
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you get, how do you be more atheist than other people can become a bit of a part of the status
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hierarchy, which can make it really hard to pull from these older social technologies.
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Oh, but I also think that a big problem with people looking at older social technologies and
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traditionalism, like you say, is they often look at, oh, so the traditionalism equals female
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And they often do, but I think that often people look at the worst devices or the worst
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aspects of these traditional cultures and think of those as the defining aspects of those
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When really, what we talk about a lot in the book that Malcolm wrote, The Pragmatist Guide
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to Crafting Religion, is that really the key is it has to be a hard culture.
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And by hard, we mean a culture where you make serious sacrifices, you other yourself to a
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certain extent, like you look funny or you dress funny, you have a weird name, you live
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differently, and you really lean into and invest in that tradition and religion in a way that
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It's hard to adopt a sense of identity if you're not making those kinds of daily sacrifices
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And many of those sacrifices also are the things that do impart strength.
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So while female disempowerment does not impart strength as far as I'm concerned, things like
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fasting do because they help you develop stronger inhibitory controls.
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I might even push back in the female disempowerment thing because I think there's push and pulls
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with all the different choices that we make in terms of, okay, we're going to allow more
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There is, sometimes there is a loss on the other side.
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But I think that all the ways in which we have allowed women, especially young women,
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greater autonomy and control over their life choices, there has been a negative consequence
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for those same women, I think, when they become mothers, because it's the same forces that
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give you more autonomy as an individual, weaken the social ties that are very, they're important
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Or when they try to get married, for example, if you have a super sexually free leave and
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Or a society with equal wages being harder for women to get partners if they always want
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I mean, there's so many ways that I think that there, I wish that there was a more open
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discussion about some of these things, but it is hard to do.
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So I think, and I definitely agree with you in terms of hierarchies within communities.
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This is why I, when I said rationalist, I wasn't even sure, do I want to be a part of a community
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where everybody considers themselves a rationalist?
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Because yes, I found like within those communities, I think the rationalists really enjoy contradicting
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I've written long things about how that community, it fell apart because it was a community where
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status hierarchy was determined by knowledge, like scientifically backed knowledge.
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The problem is that if you try to front with a scientific study that everyone knows, then
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that actually hurts your position because it shows that you thought that something that
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So you can only really front with either scientific studies that go against what anyone would think
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is true or scientific studies that are fringe or rare findings, which leads to the communities
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becoming what I call as a slur for them, butter eaters, because they'd have these things where
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they'd eat full sticks of butter every day, because there was like one study that said
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And because it was an obscure study, they looked good or like extra special for doing the weird
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thing, the obscure thing that people didn't know about.
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That's a community that discourages true followers, which you do need in a healthy community,
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If we're restructuring culture, right, we've got to think about how do we prevent these
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sort of downstream effects that you're easy to miss.
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You say something like, I often think of culture crafting as being like a monkey's paw.
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Like you don't, if you're not really careful in how you word things, like I want rationalism.
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And then the monkey's paw does its horrible rish.
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And then the monkey paw does its horrible wish.
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And so it's, if you're building something, especially for your kids, for your family,
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So I would love to ask you three questions I want to go through.
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One has almost become like a mainstay on this show that I think will make a mainstay on
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the show every time we have somebody who's deconverted from a religious tradition.
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What did you like about your birth religious tradition?
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What social technologies do you think Islam does well?
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Or, and before we go further, it's useful if you talk about the branch of Islamic culture
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you came from, because one of the things we're always talking about in this podcast is, is
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one, the difference in Muslim and Western marriage strategies.
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One of the ones that we say is very interesting is Andrew Tate has taken like some Muslim strategies
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around marriage structure and tried to almost secularize it into a new family structure.
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And I'm like, that's interesting, but I don't know if that's something that Western men
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But anyway, yeah, so I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on like, what do you think
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Islam gets right, especially that you think Western culture doesn't?
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Okay, so let me start from the first question, which was, how did I grow up?
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I was raised Shia Muslim, which is like a minority, but it's the Iran people in Iraq.
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But I was schooled in the Sunni tradition, because that was the local community where I grew up.
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And that's, those are the like religious like competitions I was involved in.
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So it was, in my mind, actually, the two traditions are very mixed up.
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And it's only because I've been doing this kind of activism for a long time.
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And this topic has come up that it has, I've been able to pull them apart in my mind.
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It's, but it's like saying that I was Catholic and also Protestant from evangelical
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on one side of my family and Catholic from my mom's side.
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But I think there's a lot that I like about Islam.
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And there's a lot that I think is unique and interesting.
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So it's actually not a hard question for me to answer at all.
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It's just that I think that on the whole, it is like deeply harmful.
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So I don't have any trouble talking about all the things that are great about it.
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But I think that what's fundamental to understand is that the internal logic of Islam is so alien.
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And it's not, I didn't even appreciate how different, like how fundamentally different
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I couldn't possibly, I couldn't, I'm not actually, we don't have the, we don't have the time.
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We don't have the, I don't have the intelligence.
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But I think that it's just something I'm coming to fully understand.
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If anybody wants to read up on this, Ernest Gelmer is a scholar that I would recommend.
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He is so interesting that he wrote several books that are, he also, he wrote about like
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philosophy, words, linguistics, but also Muslim society and civil society in particular.
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What are the kinds of conditions that foster healthy civil society?
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So he took a look at Muslim societies, Asian societies and the West and compared the ways
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that they structured power in the kinds of conditions that that brewed.
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Anything you remember from this, just any specifics.
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I would have to, because there were so many ideas about it.
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So what other specific things would you borrow from Islam for your kids?
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Back to that question as to what's good about it.
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Um, one of the things I always liked about Islam is the way that it encouraged charitability
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So there's a requirement to give a certain percentage of your income to the ummah, the
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And that, is that through any religious organization or just directly to, is it direct giving or through
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I think it could be, I don't know if it's specified, but it could be anything.
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You can, if you look at the words of the text, because I was looking at this, it is implied
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I'm sure some people have, or any tradition is going to, over time, have a lot of branches
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But it is actually pretty unique in that you do not get this in most Christian traditions
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where the expectation is that it goes through church infrastructure before reaching the
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I like that it was an expectation, almost like a text.
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But Islam thinks of itself as very much a state religion and not, not even something
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that you can pull apart and say, this is the state and this is the church.
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I think even that conception, it real is a kind of Western approach to politics and religion.
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And so that, that whole infrastructure is not something I support.
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But it is worth elevating this concept because it's one that I would definitely talk about
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when you're trying to understand Islam as different from the other major religious traditions.
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Whereas I think Judaism is also pretty unique in this regard.
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And then Judaism is really structured to be an ethno group slash state slash religion.
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If we're talking especially about a second temple period Judaism, it was structured ground
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And what happened to Judaism was how a culture evolves when a religious system that is really
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meant to be operating a state no longer has a state to operate.
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That's why the destruction of the second temple was so existential for the Jewish people.
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And every exodus period was so existential for the Jewish people.
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And then it has obviously heavily modified itself since that period.
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But I think it's re-pulling on now with the state of Israel.
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It's restructuring itself in that older fashion.
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With Islam, as you pointed out, but it is worth elevating here,
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is it is a religion that is designed to be the state religion.
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And it doesn't function as effectively when it is not the state religion.
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And when it is not the state religion, it's always searching to become
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eventually a state religion, which can have positive and negative consequences,
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You might think only negative consequences, but...
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I think it's just, as somebody who grew up now, I was raised primarily in the...
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And I remember coming here, but I was quite young, still seven.
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But as being raised in that religion that has all these instincts of a majority religion,
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And that is part and parcel of even some of the celebrations.
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Like Eid is supposed to be this public thing that you all do together.
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The whole community is involved and it is happening publicly.
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And for Eid to be something like in the West, where it's very private now,
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it's like you visit somebody's house and then you take a drive
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And then, and Baqar Eid, which is the one where they sacrifice the animals,
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Part of the thing, the celebration that this is public.
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To be driven into kind of a private, the private sphere,
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And that's part of the reason I think diaspora communities that are Muslim
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feel a sense of like disorientation, because I think that they're,
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the instincts of the religious tradition that they have been brought up in
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do not fully and easily comport to being a minority in a country that has very different
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Judaism, I think it's, they don't struggle in the same way.
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I think that just because their history has for so long been in that position,
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I think they tend to take it a little bit more.
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They thrive as subcultural groups with separated, often like legal systems and stuff like that,
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It's so interesting, the idea of a religion and culture that's optimized on a societal level
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rather than on an individual level, because I'm so used to growing up with the extreme
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Not that I was, my parents were, they called themselves born again, Buddhist.
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I really, they were like the most non-religious people in the entire world, but they came from
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basically a Calvinist kind of background or Protestant background, which is just, it's so
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individualistic that of course they would end up calling themselves born again, Buddhists
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after a certain number of generations, like just doing their own thing.
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And their metaphysical beliefs were like a mixture of inspired by Scientology and other
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science fiction books and Buddhism and like whatever they saw on TV recently.
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And that that was all just so on the local level.
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Whereas here you're looking with Islam at holidays.
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They don't really make sense if it's not literally on a community, not just a block party, but
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And that makes it really hard, I think, for you to try to replicate some of those things
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that worked well for your own kids, because they're not going to have that community.
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Which holidays did you find the most utility in?
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If you were going to practice them for your kids and you could have them practice at a
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society-wide level, which ones would you be like, this particular good value or is a useful
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I didn't think either was spectacularly interesting.
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Unless you went outside and then you kind of had a blast.
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The one where you kill all the animals, that one was actually traumatizing.
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I remember when I was young, I was taken to a slaughter of a cow and I saw it happen.
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And I don't even have a fantastic memory, but I remember everything about that.
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I remember the butcher's son playing in the blood because he was just like, for him, it
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I remember just all these animals on the street.
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It was not, maybe it's something you come around to as you grow, if you grow up in it
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and then you're an adult and then you have all these great memories associated with it.
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But just as a child, it wasn't, it wasn't my friend.
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The other one is it's like Christmas, but you get money at the end of it.
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But I like presents better because I think it's personal.
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Like I like that somebody's thinking of me rather than just handing me a $20 bill.
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We'll have to have a separate conversation about that at some point.
00:26:07.780
But I was going to say Christmas, it's a great thing because it's like people are always
00:26:10.920
telling us, oh, a constructed religion that's meant just for the best interest of your
00:26:14.060
kids with unique holidays, that would never catch on.
00:26:21.500
Yeah, but Christmas is also one of those holidays that works when it's done publicly, when it's
00:26:27.820
a season, when it's the colors and it's the warmth and everyone's making those cookies
00:26:32.100
and the smells that are associated with Christmas.
00:26:34.660
Although our kids talk about the future police, which is like the Santa of our weird holiday,
00:26:40.720
our flagship holiday, more than they talk about Santa.
00:26:43.440
Yeah, we've had more success with our holiday than Santa.
00:26:47.680
So like the babysitter will come over and they'll be like, the future police got this
00:26:52.860
And like the future police might do this or that.
00:26:54.620
And they keep our babysitters are giving us the side eye.
00:27:00.400
Another question I wanted to ask, which is one, or I've actually wanted to talk to a
00:27:07.040
You're probably the wrong person, but you might be just the right person because you
00:27:10.260
have lived in both cultures and you're from outside the community, is I have never fully
00:27:14.620
gotten the animosity affiliated with the Sunni-Shia split.
00:27:19.220
When I look at something like the Catholic-Protestant split, for example, I can understand why there's
00:27:25.320
There's two completely different systems for how to determine what's true.
00:27:28.900
When I look at splits within Jewish communities, I can understand where that animosity comes from.
00:27:32.920
But the Sunni-Shia split doesn't seem to be a theological split.
00:27:36.960
It seems to be a purely governance system split.
00:27:40.120
And so my thesis is that the, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, is the animosity
00:27:44.280
is actually because Islam is designed to be a state system.
00:27:48.600
So the governance split matters so much more than it would in another religion.
00:27:59.400
And the two sects are, they do practice differently.
00:28:01.700
And I mean, it differs a little bit from country to country.
00:28:05.380
Like I was talking to this ex-Shia from, ex-Muslim from Saudi who was Shia, but in her experience
00:28:14.240
My experience with Shiism was as a minority religion within a majority Sunni population.
00:28:20.420
That's how Shiism has developed as well, actually.
00:28:24.660
But getting back a little bit to the local and individualistic aspect of Christianity,
00:28:31.180
I think that's key to, it's key to how well it has functioned in this specific modern liberal
00:28:41.940
And why it has just worked in tandem with developing so many interesting and innovative, like not
00:28:50.300
just technologies, but social systems and ideologies and ways of thinking about the world.
00:28:57.820
And without it, you end up in a completely different space.
00:29:01.120
But I will add that it's not the case that Islam is just like centrally controlled.
00:29:06.600
It's actually not really centrally controlled at all.
00:29:10.060
Yet there is this high culture, like this high Islam that matters.
00:29:15.620
There are folk traditions, but those tend to be the remnants of whatever that region used
00:29:23.340
to believe in before it was conquered by Muslim army.
00:29:26.760
So that those sort of folk religion of Bangladesh looks very different than the folk religion
00:29:33.600
Having said that, I feel as if that those are disappearing.
00:29:37.020
And that's, that is what you would expect over time as literacy increases everywhere.
00:29:41.720
And then you're able to look at the book and determine that, okay, this is the originalist
00:29:46.840
interpretation of Islam is actually the true one.
00:29:49.360
What I've been practicing or what my grandmother has tattoos on her face.
00:29:54.680
I didn't know that was a local Tunisian tradition.
00:30:00.400
So there is a kind of a coming together, flattening almost of Islam as it looks and as it's practiced
00:30:08.480
worldwide, which is a little troubling and a little sad, I think.
00:30:12.780
Yeah, I definitely say that's sad, losing that, that cultural diversity.
00:30:16.400
So another question I have for you, because you're talking about like the Christian system,
00:30:20.180
which I will admit has led to a tremendous amount of technological and economic growth.
00:30:25.440
But there was a period where a form of Islam caused one of the greatest technological leaps
00:30:31.680
in human history during the Islamic golden age.
00:30:34.360
Do you think that was, so a lot of people will say that was just serendipity.
00:30:43.900
Or do you think that there was a shift in the theology of Islam that made it harder for
00:30:48.300
modern Islam to match the technological greatness of its ancestors or a shift in underlying technological
00:30:55.200
I think there's a lot of historical reasons that are just like, that is how it played out.
00:31:00.860
And it is also the case that the, this is the benefit of having kind of a religion in which
00:31:07.100
the political rulers do have spiritual power and spiritual leadership positions, because
00:31:13.300
if they happen to be liberal, and if they happen to be tolerant and interested in, you
00:31:18.780
know, technology and innovation, which is what, that is what I would put as the central factor
00:31:24.400
in why the golden age looks so different than other times.
00:31:31.800
I have a thesis on this and you can tell me if it sounds wrong to you or right.
00:31:37.600
One is I think that Islam pushes a drive towards a form of academic study of stuff like math
00:31:47.420
And so long as math and chemistry didn't directly contradict Islamic scripture, it could be seen
00:31:57.680
And that is why during the period where before technology got so hard that it started contradicting
00:32:12.300
I mean, it, you know, but I mean, in the sense of the, that's how they approached the study
00:32:16.360
of the natural world as a study of God, because you were studying his creation.
00:32:19.860
So it was all part and parcel of the same thing, this science as an oppositional group.
00:32:26.420
You've got all the like Gregor Mendel and everything like that and all the study out
00:32:31.320
So yeah, it's basically closer to God until it doesn't, and then it's not okay.
00:32:35.300
The secondary thesis that I had, which could also be wrong, but it's one that informs
00:32:39.280
my thinking a lot, is it was the spread of Sufism that ended up collapsing the culture
00:32:44.180
among the elite circles that allowed them to look for sources of knowledge in what we would
00:32:48.720
argue is corrupted mental states, i.e. emotions and visions are a better source of truth than
00:33:00.500
I would have to give that one a little bit of thought.
00:33:05.920
And then the way the first theory makes me think.
00:33:08.140
But I do think it's worse at studying these things.
00:33:11.240
If a culture was productive at one time and not productive at another time, and you can
00:33:15.580
isolate what elements changed, then I can know what elements are useful to build into
00:33:22.880
In a world where fertility is collapsing, those of us with high fertility could end up
00:33:32.200
So let me, I think that at least in modern times, this is not a deeper going back to
00:33:38.240
the core of what Islam might be a point, but I think that it, what it is in the modern
00:33:44.320
world, at least the example of the West definitely played a part in how Muslims viewed science
00:33:52.880
and technology in general, because they were able to hook across the pond and see where
00:33:59.420
science took all these guys who thought that they were going closer to God, but now we know
00:34:05.360
And yeah, so there's that example that they can always point to and they can say, no,
00:34:09.700
they looked at, they approached the world in this fashion.
00:34:14.160
They abandoned revelation and instead started using their reason to make out all kinds of
00:34:22.320
This is, it was just this explicit example of, you didn't really have to think through
00:34:28.180
You didn't really have to, you just see it play out.
00:34:30.980
And I think that that has a huge impact on how Muslims think of even modernity, right?
00:34:39.480
Capitalism, like all this consumerism, like that all just goes together really.
00:34:49.260
And they're not, if you're looking at it from the perspective of evolved cultural traits
00:34:54.420
designed to increase fertility rate of cultural members, it is a successful memetic package.
00:35:01.640
But to be good enough to reproduce on a societal level in long periods of time, hey, I could
00:35:10.880
And I think the apostasy taboo really does help there.
00:35:14.760
Easy in, easy in, but it really difficult to get out even if you want it.
00:35:20.680
So there's lots of Islam and the taboos and the traditions, like there's so many ways in
00:35:26.220
which it really is a, it's a great mean if just living, just surviving is your most important,
00:35:36.120
However, I would also add that I don't know if what has worked for the Muslim world up
00:35:46.820
I don't think that we talk about all these things with social media is creating social
00:35:53.020
But if you look at the research for in Muslim places where you think they would have a healthy
00:35:59.260
In fact, the same kind of erosions are happening, but they also don't have running water.
00:36:03.520
So like it's the combination of two horrible things that are coming together.
00:36:08.460
I am not sure it might be, they might be finding a way through it with their strong social networks.
00:36:13.800
I think that maybe they won't, like maybe they'll get the wrong end of the sticks in both ways.
00:36:20.080
I am, at least I'm concerned about that in any case.
00:36:27.820
Generally, cultures that have had some cultural hack that has acted as a bulwark to fertility collapse,
00:36:34.000
when the dam breaks, it breaks very fast and all at once.
00:36:38.260
But then, of course, that leads to downstream especially negative consequences
00:36:42.200
because within, for example, these already conservative Muslim cultures,
00:36:46.880
if everyone who is open to using a cell phone is memetically sterilized,
00:36:50.120
that means only the most extremist iterations are going to get through, as we call it in,
00:36:55.780
because we do some like pseudo-religious stuff.
00:36:57.640
We say you've got to walk through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters.
00:37:00.080
That's what our civilization is doing right now.
00:37:02.160
I mean, that is so much harder to do given the way that they're,
00:37:08.220
It is actually, it's easier to procure a smartphone than it is to have a laptop or a computer.
00:37:13.240
From a literal functioning perspective, cell phones have become a really important part of the way that their world works.
00:37:21.340
I would say we're just used to them for a longer period of time.
00:37:25.120
But I actually think because we have the, our foundations are quite strong, our institutions are quite strong,
00:37:29.680
we can get away from technology and survive in a way that is becoming increasingly harder for them to do
00:37:37.380
because they're in this crucial, like mid, like bizarre stage of development.
00:37:41.420
And so that's just something that, it's something to think about.
00:37:44.560
And I think that the way that cell phones in particular, smart phones in particular,
00:37:49.360
and their connectivity to the internet, the way that has pierced through the social fabric,
00:37:56.760
because you have, okay, you have these, you have societies,
00:38:00.020
you have a lot of this metacontrol over people and what they're thinking and what they're thinking truly,
00:38:05.240
because you're talking to each other and all of that is very control and bounded.
00:38:13.220
I think the world does this and this is how it works and this is what truth is.
00:38:16.100
But now I have something in my pocket where, in, in which once I join that place,
00:38:20.500
I can be as individualistic as any American and I can access all of that information that they have.
00:38:26.900
I can see what they're doing and it will impact my brain too.
00:38:29.980
So that social, the social control that you have,
00:38:32.360
just it's hard to maintain in that kind of environment.
00:38:35.680
They're watching a lot of porn there too, right? And they're virgins.
00:38:38.960
And a lot of people are aware of how significantly Muslim fertility rates have fallen.
00:38:44.000
In even non-wealthy Muslim countries, it has been...
00:38:47.160
And when you think about the fact that they don't have regular access to birth control in the same way that we do,
00:38:51.940
that is, it's also, it's more striking when you think about it.
00:38:57.280
is one path that some groups will take to get through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters is blinding themselves.
00:39:01.920
By that, what I mean is completely like we will kill our kid if we catch them with a cell phone.
00:39:06.620
And you're going to find this in some communities,
00:39:08.540
but if you blind yourself to get through, at the other end,
00:39:11.640
if you're then coming out and telling everyone else you're going to kill them
00:39:14.360
and they have to follow your system, you're still blind, okay?
00:39:19.580
You don't have the same amount of cultural power that you would have
00:39:22.580
if you got through using power of will that was reinforced culturally.
00:39:29.160
It sounds like Simone really wanted to tell you about our future holidays.
00:39:32.080
So why don't you do that and get her reaction to it?
00:39:34.880
We, the very gist of our attempt at this is we practice descendant worship.
00:39:39.080
So we tell our children that essentially our God, our family's God,
00:39:42.220
is their descendants, thousands, millions of years in the future,
00:39:46.100
who plausibly even have the ability to travel through time and intervene
00:39:51.060
Because we also have this sort of weird deterministic,
00:39:53.320
but you still have free will view of how the world works, very mechanical.
00:39:56.160
And so for Future Day, for example, we steal toys.
00:40:02.780
The future police steal through us, of course, toys or things from their lives
00:40:08.000
that cause bad behaviors, addictive devices, games, things like that, iPads, whatever.
00:40:14.640
We just, yeah, all their toys disappeared because we're like, oh,
00:40:19.320
And then, but they loved it because in their place,
00:40:22.460
we left like sort of scorch marks with a bunch of different things
00:40:29.400
And then they have to make a pledge in this family book
00:40:32.420
that we're using as a time capsule slash heirloom
00:40:34.800
to how they're going to make the world a better place
00:40:37.100
and how they're going to become a better person
00:40:43.800
then the future police will see it and receive it.
00:40:45.900
They receive their toys back plus some additional toys.
00:40:49.340
And if they achieve those things that they committed to
00:40:51.660
at some point in this year, they'll get an even bigger gift as a reward.
00:40:57.060
There's photo opportunities involved and the kids just freaking love it.
00:41:02.720
And we started to, though, this wasn't part of the plan for the holiday
00:41:05.400
is throughout the year as they are moving closer to their goals,
00:41:08.740
they do get not just one future police gift, but like a couple of things
00:41:11.920
because their goals weren't like, oh, I'm going to start a business
00:41:13.980
or I'm going to graduate high school or I'm going to ace algebra.
00:41:17.720
They're the oldest of four, so not exactly cognitive processing.
00:41:20.640
Yeah, they're very young, so it's more like I'm going to be nice
00:41:25.220
So they are getting things from the future police as reinforcement
00:41:28.080
and they just love it and they know that the future police are watching.
00:41:31.460
So it's affecting their behavior, but it's also a fun, cute thing.
00:41:34.720
But the idea here was this in most of our holidays
00:41:37.100
is we had a specific value we wanted to convey,
00:41:44.680
So I think that's great and remarkable and very inventive of you.
00:41:51.600
I've been thinking myself about what to do and what to adopt
00:42:00.020
do you think about there's one, the problem of does this take away the magic
00:42:08.760
Like you're telling them the purpose of the thing that they're doing
00:42:12.100
in a kind of in an explicit way that people don't, people normally don't.
00:42:17.380
And do you think that will take away from the experience
00:42:24.500
So even within the theology of the future police,
00:42:30.320
In the same way that like God changes the conception.
00:42:35.320
And when they're older, they're like, oh, it's like some incorporeal.
00:42:38.060
We would say they're changing like small probabilistic quantum fluctuations,
00:42:42.340
which have a butterfly effect, which has changed larger behavior.
00:42:45.060
And if they were going to create this holiday and convince us to do it,
00:42:50.400
they would have had it appear in a way where we thought it was our idea
00:42:55.520
So in a way, unlike Santa Claus or something like that, even to an adult,
00:43:00.160
the future police really plausibly did create the holiday
00:43:11.540
Do you think it, do you need converts now though?
00:43:17.160
Because it's a, it's not going to be a community thing though.
00:43:19.900
And the thing is, it doesn't need converts, but what we really,
00:43:26.400
What we really want to fight for and why we're so excited to see your tweet.
00:43:29.740
And this brings it all back, which is good because the kids just got back
00:43:31.940
home from a park, Malcolm, and they're about to storm the castle.
00:43:35.720
But so what we really want people to do is what you're doing,
00:43:40.020
which is I want to culturally innovate from a very thoughtful perspective.
00:43:45.420
And maybe it's a little religious and maybe it's not a little religious.
00:43:49.000
And we want as many people to take a whack at this as possible because there
00:43:52.920
will always be people who choose to go with the traditional religion.
00:43:56.940
So it's not an experiment that I'm concerned about.
00:43:58.840
What I'd love to see more of is essentially that startup seed investment where 99% are
00:44:06.140
But a couple are going to become unicorns and become additional viable religious
00:44:10.040
traditions that may create additional thriving alternatives to people because we need thriving
00:44:16.460
alternative religions that can make sense in a post-globalization, post-internet,
00:44:22.560
And so I'm happier if someone chooses to do their own thing like what you're doing.
00:44:28.820
So we should elevate the larger theological structure of this system is if God is communicating
00:44:33.160
with us through which cultural systems succeed and don't succeed, then he can only talk if
00:44:37.520
there is a diversity of cultural systems to compete against each other.
00:44:42.620
The logical framing to it is to say, if we're entering this period of mass cultural die-off,
00:44:48.020
we're going to need as large a diversity of people to make it through the Valley of the
00:44:52.160
Lotus Eaters unblinded for human civilization to survive and not become some sort of like
00:45:00.780
And so the more cultural experimentation we have, the better off we're going to be because
00:45:05.700
the more robust our species is going to be on the other side of this, where robustness
00:45:09.700
is correlated with a diverse group of cultural systems surviving to the end of it.
00:45:15.420
They might not be necessarily diverse by the end of it.
00:45:19.020
Like it might be that there's one, it took a long time for religious systems to get to
00:45:23.760
where they are and to be as robust as they are, and they're still not that robust.
00:45:27.220
So if we're just inventing them on the fly or like trying to reason our way into them,
00:45:31.260
which is, I think, I wonder about that as a method regardless, which is crazy to say as
00:45:39.100
This is what, this is the thing that I, I don't even know how else to go about in the
00:45:43.260
world, but it, a certain amount of serendipity and just like chance encounters formed some
00:45:50.660
Cause I think that might've been like throughout history, because I think they, the reason
00:45:56.080
Reason might've said, this is never going to work.
00:45:58.940
This is not, we shouldn't do this, but for whatever reason, it just so happened that they
00:46:06.420
Jesus was not the first apocalyptic Jew, right?
00:46:12.240
And there's an underlying logic that you didn't understand right at the moment, but it worked.
00:46:20.760
And I, I actually, we need so much more diversity than is maybe possible, but we'll fight for
00:46:30.680
No, we'll have to, we'll have to brainstorm more about this, but I, yeah.
00:46:33.600
Anyway, I'm so glad you're thinking about these things.
00:46:35.560
You're taking such a thoughtful approach and I'm in a boring, I'm in DC, which is boring.
00:46:40.400
I was just talking to, you're not born from us.
00:46:45.700
I'll have to stop by and say hello at some point.
00:46:50.840
I was actually thinking I need to be in like California or New York in order to meet like
00:46:58.280
You're in a really good, like in the, actually some of the most thoughtful parents, like from a
00:47:05.540
So you're in a very good zone and yeah, but okay.
00:47:11.780
It just like basically everything I've encountered that you've written or done in terms of like
00:47:17.540
So Sarah, the hater on Twitter and check out Sarah hater on sub stack as well.
00:47:33.400
But it's harder to keep good consistency when you're doing guests as you probably know.
00:47:44.740
When we don't post them, it's typically because the people have never been on podcasts before
00:48:04.360
Indy's being pretty good today, so I'm not worried.
00:48:09.980
But look, I mean, look, so the doors behind you, they're pretty thick.
00:48:12.500
If we just shoved two bookshelves in there that are suspended from, it's like a barn door
00:48:23.760
So there are two suspended bookshelves and like they can part to create a small doorway.
00:48:28.700
And they're probably too much of a hassle, but.
00:49:38.200
At least that one haunted house that we looked at.
00:49:41.140
That had like these super old house attached to it.