#100 — Facing the Crowd
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician who directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is appointed as the Saul Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science, and is the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His research focuses on the relationship between social networks and well-being, and his research engages two types of phenomena: connection and contagion. In his work, he investigates the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. His lab also does experiments in how to change population-level behavior related to health and cooperation, and cooperation and economic development. In this conversation, we discuss the dynamics of mob behavior and moral panic, and related issues, and how they relate to the recent events that have come to be known as the "Mealday" at Berkeley and the attack on Charles Murray at Middlebury, as well as the protests against Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, and the protests at Evergreen University in response to his appearance at the UC-Berkeley speech. I think you'll find an interesting and useful and certainly timely conversation. I am here to bring you the first part of a conversation I had with Dr. Christakis on the podcast, and I hope you do the same with the second part of the conversation, which will be posted on my blog post on the Making Sense Podcast. -Sam Harris. Make sense of it! Thanks for listening to Making Sense: A.K.A. by Sam Harris and the rest of the podcast by Making Sense, and for supporting the podcast? Subscribe to the podcast on the making sense Podcast by becoming a patron of Making Sense by becoming one of our sponsors, and contributing to our podcast, Sam Harris . Sam Harris, the podcast that makes sense of things that make sense of the world. and making sense of what we're doing here and what we re doing here, and what s going on in the world and everywhere else we do in the culture and everywhere we do it. Sam and I are making sense, and we hope you enjoy what we are doing here. Thank you, too, and thank you, friend you're listening to this podcast and listening to us, and please consider becoming a supporter of us, too... -Your support is so much more! - Sam and the podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
Transcript
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He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is appointed as the Saul Goldman Family
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Professor of Social and Natural Science, and he's the co-director of the Yale Institute
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His lab focuses on the relationship between social networks and well-being, and his research
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The social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form.
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This is referred to as connection in his work, and the biological and social implications
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of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and this is often referred
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His lab also does experiments in how to change population-level behavior related to health
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And I would have wanted to speak with Nicholas anyway about his work, but another thing that
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reminded me of the need to speak with him was his experience at Yale, which you may have
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seen on YouTube, and you should watch it now if you haven't.
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But he was the professor a while back who was standing before a howling mob of students
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and stood there with the imperturbability of a saint, really, as he was castigated by young
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men and women who were properly unhinged by their identity politics and some of the crazy
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ideas about speech that are rattling around in their heads.
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There are many, but I'll have one there where this podcast is embedded.
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And you will enjoy the first hour of this conversation much more if you've seen five minutes, at
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least, of that encounter, because you will see Nicholas's patience.
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You will see the untenability of the situation he was in.
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You will see a hostility to dialogue among Yale students that one could scarcely imagine possible.
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And this was, I believe, the first incident like this to come to national attention.
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This preceded the riots at Berkeley preventing Milo's speech, and it preceded Brett Weinstein's
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ordeal at Evergreen, and it preceded the attack upon Charles Murray at Middlebury.
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So this was, if not the first moment like this, the first that became very prominent in recent
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So Nicholas and I talk about all that, and then we get into the dynamics of mob behavior
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And I think you'll find it an interesting and useful and certainly timely conversation.
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So now, without further delay, I give you Nicholas Christakis.
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So we met at the TED conference, if I'm not mistaken.
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I think that was in 2010, and if I recall, you gave the talk right after mine, or maybe
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it was just we were rehearsing together or something, but that's the moment I have in
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my memory where we shook hands and said hi was at TED just before or after one of us got
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Yeah, we were in the same session, and my memory is that you were sitting next to me
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Sarah Silverman spoke, I don't know if you remember, and the woman from 10,000 Maniacs
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who's singing I Adore, whose name I'm spacing on, and you spoke.
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And what I remember of your talk was that remarkable slide, maybe that was the first time you used
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it, where you showed side-by-side photographs of a bunch of women wearing the chador, and
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The full burqa, and then a bunch of women, you know, on...
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Yeah, on a pornography or whatever, and you said these are, you know, very different moral
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I remember visually thinking, you know, there were these undulating heads in the way it was
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rendered, your image, and it really got me to thinking.
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And, you know, the topic of moral relativism and moral universalism is an old one, but I don't
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think the sophistication of thought that we've been bringing to that topic lately has been
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So we're going to talk about your science and some of the science you presented there
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at TED and some of the stuff you've done in the intervening years.
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But first, just tell people, what is your background generally, academically and scientifically?
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Well, I am trained in the natural and the social sciences.
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I'm a physician, trained as a hospice doctor, so I spent 15 years taking care of people who
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My first appointment was at the University of Chicago, and I worked on the south side
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of Chicago, taking care of primarily indigent patients, although I had a few faculty and,
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And then when I moved to Harvard from Chicago in 2001, I was a palliative...
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Clinically, I was a palliative medicine doctor.
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So I was trained as a physician, but then also I was trained as a sociologist, and I have
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And most of my career has been devoted to research.
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So I'm primarily a research scientist and doing work in public health.
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And I stopped seeing patients about 10 years ago now.
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And increasingly, we do a lot of computational science as well in my lab.
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We'll talk about the science, because obviously, what can be known about social networks and
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group psychology and many of the other topics you touch, you're now touching AI or human
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But I want to start with your immediate background here, because this is one reason why many people
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know of you and were eager for you to come on the podcast.
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You and your wife, Erica, were really the canaries in the coal mine for some recent moral panic
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is the appropriate name we've witnessed on college campuses.
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You are the man that many of us have seen standing in the quad at Yale, or I assume that was the
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quad, surrounded by a fairly large crowd of increasingly unhinged students.
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I can't imagine it felt the same to be in the middle of it.
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And I must say, you handled yourself as well as I could possibly imagine.
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And you have been much praised for the way you conducted yourself in that situation.
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And many professors have since found themselves in similar situations.
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There was Brett Weinstein at Evergreen recently.
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So I just want to talk a little bit about your experience at Yale, and then move on generically
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to the problem on college campuses in general, as described by people like Jonathan Haidt and
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others who are focusing on the way in which there's a kind of authoritarianism emerging on
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the left, really exclusively, that is preventing free speech.
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And I want to get your sense of what's happening there and how big the problem is, and then
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we'll move on to what we can understand scientifically about crowds and social trends.
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But insofar as you are comfortable talking about it, can you tell me about what happened
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I think I have been devoted to, you know, in some ways I'm a little naive in the sense that
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I'm also skeptical of institutions, and I am worried about institutions, but I also believe
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And so I've devoted my life to academia and to what I take to be their core commitments
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of modern American universities, which are envied the world over.
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And these commitments center around, if you look at the motto of Yale, it's lux et veritas.
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I mean, that's an extraordinary commitment, light and truth.
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And these institutions are committed to the preservation, production, and dissemination of
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And they are guided ostensibly by principles of open expression and reason and debate and
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sort of liberal commitments to the quality of human beings, their capacity to perfect the
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world, the knowability of the world, or in my view, committed to a kind of belief in the
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And I would strongly defend those principles and have devoted my life to them.
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And in fact, even in the narrow issue of free expression, have been defending free expression
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often for disenfranchised populations for a very long time.
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So I, you know, even before I came to Yale four years ago, I was at Harvard.
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I, my wife and I had taken some unpopular stands defending the free expression of individuals
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who, you know, were on the side of Black Lives Matter, who were protesting.
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There was a high school student who, who had worn a t-shirt that says, Jesus was not a homophobe.
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There were some minority students at Harvard who had some concerns about the, the final clubs
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at that institution, the sort of, sort of, they're kind of like elite fraternities.
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And, and they had posted a satirical flyer and, and some people were unhappy about that flyer and
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wanted to squelch the free expression of those students.
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And so we, you know, I am committed to this, I sort of maybe naively bought in hook, line and sinker
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to this belief that these institutions of higher learning in our society are, are important,
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that they are worthy of protection and respect.
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And, and so this is why when they fail us, I get very sad.
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I get sad for the students and I get sad for the, the, the institutions.
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And I mean, I don't, I don't want to just keep talking endlessly, but I mean, there's a,
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there's a parallel set and I'll come back, I think, to your question.
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And there's a parallel set of ideas about, about, about universities in our society.
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If you think about these universities, they are supported by tax dollars and the bequests
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And the reason this money is given to these institutions is to further the mission of the
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preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, not to provide faculty with easy
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I mean, it's a wonderful thing to be a professor.
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I see it as a calling, but that's not the purpose, right?
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I mean, the, the point is that we are supposed to be that place, which, which, which discovers
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things, which preserves Sanskrit, which preserves Shakespeare, which preserves antiquities, which
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preserves mathematical knowledge and, and, and scientific knowledge, which produces discoveries.
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We're supposed to be the place that transmits this to new young people.
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And, and, and that's the role we're supposed to play in, in society.
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And, and we have a deep commitment to light and truth.
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So I get very upset when fields of inquiry or ideas are proscribed.
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And I think that we, if our ideas are strong, they should win the battle of ideas.
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If, if you're so confident in what you have to say, you should be able to defend it.
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And your approach should not be to silence your opponents.
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Your approach should be to win the battle of ideas.
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I'm just going to interrupt you by, by reminding you of something you wrote, which appeared in
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the New York Times, which I think is the only thing you wrote in the aftermath of, of what
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You wrote here, quoting you, the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are
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Words, even provocative or repugnant ones, are not violence.
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The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.
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And that's, it's amazing to me that this even needs to be said and said as frequently as
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we now have to say it, how is it that the left, and again, I do want to come back to
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specifically what happened at Yale because many people just might not be aware of it or
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have forgotten the details, but how do you think it is that the left primarily has lost
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sight of this principle that the antidote to bad ideas is good ideas and the criticism
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Yeah, I think the right and the left take turns in this regard.
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I mean, let's not forget the history of McCarthyism on campus and...
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Yeah, but we sort of expect the right to get this wrong at the extreme, right?
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Again, I should say politically, I'm left of center.
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I have some conservative ideas, but mostly my, if I have done these surveys, I am, you
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know, significantly left of center politically overall.
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Anyway, I was talking to some of these conservative students and I was about to say, you know,
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you know, it's the left wing that marches in the streets, but that's actually not true.
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The right wing also marches in the streets at different points in history in different
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I think lately it has been, it has been the left which has abandoned these principles.
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And for me, I should say that there are things like free speech or a non-corrupt judiciary
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or a strong defense, you know, which really should be apolitical.
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And I also think it's tactically idiotic of the left to surrender this free speech.
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I mean, after all, let's not forget the Berkeley free...
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That's where the modern free speech movement was born at Berkeley.
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And that's where you cannot give a talk now without police protection at every moment.
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You know, I don't agree with many of the things that Ben Shapiro espouses, but the idea that
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$600,000 of police protection would be required for Ben Shapiro to speak on a university campus
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I mean, I think this is the other thing that I think is astonishing to me is that if we
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could preserve and cultivate and recommit as a society to principles of open discourse
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I believe that many of the most important movements, the civil rights movement, the gay
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marriage movement, many of these movements, which I wholly endorse, have been...
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The lead has been taken by young people and people protesting in the streets.
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This is also part of the American tradition, and it deserves respect and cherishing.
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But you cannot resort to violence or prevent others from speaking.
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That $600,000 could have been spent on dozens of students going to school for free.
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And when we lose sight of these core liberal commitments, I think we wind up spending money
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and eventually spilling blood, which is just heartbreaking.
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So, yeah, I mean, I think it's nuts that many of these speakers need protection.
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We're going to go back to Yale because I have to get there, but I'll just give a little more color
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You sent me an article from The Economist prior to this interview, which I hadn't seen,
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I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs here to give people a sense of it,
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because as much as I've paid attention to this, I was still surprised by these details.
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Yeah, and I'll interrupt you before I said there's been a number of examples of almost
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stereotypical kind of cultural revolution, like almost Maoism, where the far left resorts
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So with Brett Weinstein, I mean, Brett is a completely progressive individual for his whole life.
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And Rebecca Tuval, who wrote that piece, you know, she was stunned.
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And this professor at Reed, who, you know, who I might or might not agree with about a variety of things,
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I mean, there's so many of these cases which are so hard to understand.
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And I hope we can talk a little bit about where they might be coming from as well, but go on.
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Okay, so there's this Western Civ course that apparently has been receiving protests,
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Assistant Professor Lucia Martinez Valdivia, who describes herself as mixed race and queer,
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asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November.
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And Sappho is a great poet, and also, you know, a favorite of queer theory as well.
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It's not a surprise she'd be lecturing on Sappho, but still.
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Her poetry on love is unbelievable, but anyway, go on.
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I'm going to get some hate mail for my reaction to that, but it gets better.
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Ms. Valdivia said she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder
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and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face of their opposition.
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At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics
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and sit quietly in the audience, wearing black.
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After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears.
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Demonstrators said that Ms. Valdivia was guilty of a variety of offenses.
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She was a, quote, race traitor, who upheld white supremacist principles
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She was, quote, anti-black, because she appropriated black slang
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She was, quote, an ableist, because she believes trigger warnings
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She was also a, quote, gaslighter for making disadvantaged students
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I'm scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality,
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or even texts that bring these issues up in any way.
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especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts.
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They denounce the latter as being a tool of white cis-heteropatriarchy.
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So, I mean, this is just so insane on every level.
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And this use of the term gaslighting, with which I'm familiar,
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which has been used ever since the film came out, whatever, 60 years ago,
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but I hadn't heard this being appropriated by the intersectional mob.
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But then I recently re-watched part of the video of you talking to students at Yale,
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and I heard one of the students admonish you for gaslighting,
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I have to say, Nicholas, that video is just astounding to watch,
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and I can only imagine what it was like to be there,
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not having yet been schooled in this trend that this is the sort of thing
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Were you aware of this happening to anyone else before it happened to you,
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because since then there have been so many similar episodes
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that I don't remember if two years ago I was then aware of other episodes.
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Part of the problem is here that there is some merit to some of the ideas,
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And in my view, a lot of merit to some of the complaints of the students.
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And the problem becomes that these things have been so generalized,
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and what Jonathan calls concept creep as well affects these phenomena.
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Earlier, you and I talked about a commitment to the idea that there's an objective nature to reality.
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Now, there is a long philosophical debate about this topic.
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It's a deep and interesting set of ideas about subjectivity.
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You know, can we even see the world objectively?
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I think it does, but you can make an interesting philosophical argument.
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What about the notion of so-called social construction?
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The idea that the gender of the scientist or the racist beliefs of the scientist color their objectivity?
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We know this from research done by historians and others.
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We know that it's difficult to be an impersonal observer.
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You know, that every observer is situated somewhere.
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Now, I also think there is an out there out there and that it is knowable and that we do our best to understand it.
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And so when you carry the rejection of objective reality to the extreme that you call it a tool of heteropatriarchy,
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You've taken a core idea which says, look, we need to not always believe what we are told,
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or we need to understand how a person's position in society might affect what they see.
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And we know this affects even ostensibly objective phenomena.
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We know that scientists, for example, looking—so Emily Martin has done some fantastic work,
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which I teach, on how scientists looking at, you know, at cell division or menstruation,
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you know, interpret the biology by virtue of who they are.
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But then it takes it to such a ridiculous extreme that it becomes absurd.
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And similarly, the notion of cultural appropriation.
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So the kernel of the idea there is that some communities of people are so denigrated that not only are they,
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let's say, killed and wiped out, but all of their ideas and culture is stolen from them, is expropriated.
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And that all that's left is a kind of caricature of who they are.
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And there is some truth to that, too, that it's like adding insult to injury.
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You know, not only do I engage in genocide, but, like, I take all your ideas, your culture as well,
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The problem is that, again, it's carried to a preposterous extreme,
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so that now, you know, the whole history of ideas and of culture, of art and music is endless theft.
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I mean, it's endless modification and transformation and exchange of ideas and of thoughts and musical and artistic forms and so forth.
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So to then start claiming that, you know, like in the Reed College example, that, you know, that she couldn't teach these things,
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you know, she couldn't where poetry is lit because she's appropriating African-American slang,
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is just a crazy caricature of what is otherwise potentially an interesting philosophical idea to discuss.
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And so I think, you know, this is the thing that has made it especially hard for me,
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is that I believe that I have a more than passing understanding of the epistemology here.
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And I have a more than passing sympathy for some of the concerns about, that the students have,
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about police brutality, about economic inequality, about racial justice.
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But I am deeply concerned with the Maoist abandonment of reason and discourse and the kind of dehumanizing, atomizing of people.
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I mean, one of the things that has really depressed me in the courtyard that day,
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and I wrote a little bit about this in that one other prior,
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I think you're the only second public remarks I'm making about this, the piece in the New York Times.
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There was a young woman who I think was African-American, and she said to me very plaintively,
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and it pulled at my heartstrings, she said, you know,
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you cannot understand our predicament because you are a middle-aged and white and male.
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And I said to her, I said to her that I understood what she was saying,
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but that I nevertheless believed in our common humanity.
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And I believe that all of us, and I still believe this, that all of us as human beings
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can speak to and understand each other, united by our common humanity.
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And that even though I was a different gender and age and skin color than her,
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that I nevertheless could understand her, and that I was interested in making the effort to understand her,
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And that was, and then there was another student, a minority student,
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where he wrote that he had never been more disappointed in his colleagues
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than when I was then, the titles at the time were that we were the masters of these colleges.
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Now we're called head of college, the title has changed.
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And he said, I'd never been more disappointed when the master made the argument about our common humanity
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And so I think when, so my point is, when you abandon the commitment to our common humanity,
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when you atomize people, when you believe that only certain types of people have authority
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to use certain types of cultural ideas or tropes, you efface, for me,
00:26:53.240
a fundamental reality of our common humanity and a fundamental tool we can have to interact with each other.
00:26:58.240
So that professor at Reed, the claim that she can't wear a t-shirt that says poetry is lit,
00:27:03.300
is to me just, is preposterous and violates every basic principle, in my view,
00:27:10.220
To use the example of what the young woman said to you in the quad,
00:27:14.360
that amounts to a naked declaration that meaningful communication is impossible.
00:27:20.900
Yes, which I think is really self-defeating in the end.
00:27:24.220
So what is your game plan if you're saying that you can't communicate your grievances...
00:27:31.620
Yeah, to anyone who doesn't suffer them along with you.
00:27:36.540
There are other experiences that we all have had with pain and suffering and death and grief.
00:27:42.540
Um, and, you know, maybe I've not had exactly the same kind of suffering as you, Sam,
00:27:48.640
but I'm pretty sure you've had some knocks in life.
00:27:51.020
And I'm pretty sure that if we had a drink together and we're talking about a topic
00:27:54.700
that we would find common ground or shared understanding,
00:27:58.460
even with dissimilar trajectories through life.
00:28:04.020
Another person struggled with the divorced parents.
00:28:06.300
Another person, you know, escaped Vietnam on a boat.
00:28:09.660
And another person, you know, witnessed violence.
00:28:12.680
And another person, you know, there are gradations and differences.
00:28:15.020
But I believe people can empathize with each other.
00:28:19.640
But so what was so disturbing about that encounter you had was the insistence that none of that
00:28:27.680
is possible and none of that is ethically or politically relevant.
00:28:31.160
And what was in its place was a desire to essentially shame you into silence.
00:28:39.600
And this is, again, coming from Yale students, objectively, some of the most privileged people
00:28:45.320
who have ever lived, whatever the color of their skin.
00:28:50.060
Again, you know, taking on board everything you just said about who knows what suffering,
00:28:54.760
even privileged people have had in their lives.
00:28:57.200
But the idea that these were some of the most aggrieved people on earth,
00:29:03.520
this was like the wailing of the widows of Srebrenica.
00:29:10.000
I'm speaking as someone who just watched this from outside, who's not, you know,
00:29:13.180
doesn't know these students and hasn't lived with them and dealt with them subsequently.
00:29:17.960
But just to see the breakdown of discourse through the lens of what you experienced there,
00:29:29.520
Before we get more into this, and again, we're going to talk about the more general insights
00:29:34.940
we can glean here about crowd dynamics and social contagion and all the rest.
00:29:40.080
But before we do anything else, I want to back up and just remind people how this kicked
00:29:47.940
You can be as abbreviated as you want, but just describe what the sequence of events.
00:29:53.840
Well, I would rather have you describe the sequence of events.
00:29:56.700
I mean, so in my recollection, what happened is your wife, Erica, who was also a professor
00:30:03.160
at Yale, responded to an email that came out from the school admonishing people to dress
00:30:10.300
in the most tasteful possible and politically correct Halloween costumes.
00:30:15.040
And your wife, Erica, if memory serves, wrote a response to this to the some hundred students
00:30:21.940
who were under her charge in, what was it, their dormitory or their house?
00:30:26.760
Yeah, I mean, I think the original email was sent by a dean, a person in the dean's office
00:30:33.120
here, a man by the name of Burjwell Howard, who had previously been dean at the Northwestern
00:30:42.220
University, and he had sent the same Halloween costume email there, and then sort of decided
00:30:48.700
to resend it five or 10 years later at a different university and at a different time.
00:30:53.480
There had been, to my knowledge, no episodes of students wearing blackface at Yale or pushing
00:31:05.160
And actually, in the New York Times the previous month, there had been a whole exchange about
00:31:11.820
So in the zeitgeist, people were talking about how this was getting a little out of hand and
00:31:16.960
seemed a bit silly that universities were providing official guidance on Halloween costumes.
00:31:21.060
And I think there were six people who wrote in that article, and five were against Halloween
00:31:27.440
And so there had been a number of emails that had come out at Yale at this time in the run-up.
00:31:33.360
And I think this one that Dean Howard sent was maybe the third and broadest, most detailed.
00:31:39.500
It had links to acceptable and unacceptable costumes or recommended and non-recommended costumes.
00:31:49.420
And that is to say that it's not necessary to set out to cause needless offense.
00:31:57.500
I think in a free society, we have to tolerate offense, but it's not like I'm interested in
00:32:04.760
And we can talk about some examples on college campuses where this can be hard.
00:32:09.480
Anyway, and what had happened is we had been hearing from the students, and Erica in particular
00:32:14.340
had been hearing from her students, that the students felt infantilized by this email.
00:32:17.440
So many of the students were objecting to this, that they couldn't believe this.
00:32:21.860
And Erica that day had taught a class, this was in late October, where the students in
00:32:29.440
And there was an animated and intellectually rigorous conversation about what stage of development
00:32:36.160
are college students at, and are they capable of choosing their own costumes or negotiating
00:32:39.720
among themselves, you know, if they have taken offense, talking to each other and so forth.
00:32:44.820
And because we had, it's more detailed than you want, probably, but because earlier in the
00:32:50.120
year, so this was in October, in August, I had sent an email to the students, the 400 students
00:32:56.820
That summer, there had been the murders in Charleston, where this man, whose name I'm blocking,
00:33:01.520
thank God, who went into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Mother Church in Charleston,
00:33:07.020
and slaughtered nine or 10 people at close range who had welcomed him into their midst.
00:33:12.080
So he was white, and the victims were all black.
00:33:15.200
And, you know, a vile and despicable carnage, motivated by racial hatred.
00:33:21.680
And there had been a lot of discourse in the public space that summer.
00:33:26.300
And that was the summer where all the Confederate flags began to finally come down.
00:33:29.900
And I was very concerned about these events, like many people were.
00:33:35.660
And I had organized a series of speakers at Silliman.
00:33:38.140
We had a famous African-American historian from MIT who came and spoke about the history
00:33:46.780
We had some people talking about other aspects of this.
00:33:50.480
We also, I had booked months earlier, Greg Lukianoff, who had come to speak about free speech.
00:33:56.640
You know, there was a series of public speakers.
00:33:58.020
Anyway, I sent an email in August, late August, beginning of September, to the students in
00:34:04.740
And I talked about how, as a public health person, one of the things that I found most
00:34:08.120
distressing was that Walmart had stopped selling Confederate flags, but not guns.
00:34:17.420
That there was all this focus on symbolism, but not on practical concerns.
00:34:22.020
You know, that really we need to address, let's say, issues of inequality and issues of violence
00:34:26.420
in our society, and that these symbolic things, while important, were distracting, potentially
00:34:30.920
So I had an essay about this, which is, I think, still somewhere online.
00:34:38.520
Dozens of students wrote to me, and they said, wow, this has got me to think.
00:34:43.100
And the masters at Yale, you know, previously, we hadn't been spoken to in this way.
00:34:49.280
It was like writing an essay, like a thoughtful essay where you're trying to defend a point
00:34:53.680
And we had done this previously when I had been at Harvard.
00:34:59.480
And I, you know, we would regularly communicate with our students in this fashion.
00:35:04.120
And, you know, we had debates there about religious symbols in public places and vegetarianism.
00:35:10.700
And, you know, could we roast a lamb at Greek Easter in the college courtyard, using university
00:35:19.680
I mean, you know, they raise interesting sort of questions for the students to debate.
00:35:22.280
And anyway, so we got all this positive feedback for this.
00:35:26.660
And there had been a lot of students complaining about the Halloween costume guidance email.
00:35:32.100
The New York Times article was in the public sphere.
00:35:36.440
Previously, we had gotten some praise for engaging the students with ideas.
00:35:39.700
And that's what motivated my lovely wife, who has spent her career taking care of battered
00:35:45.480
women and inner city children and, you know, homeless substance users.
00:35:56.380
Got her to send this email, which said, you know, do you students?
00:35:59.540
And the email, just to clarify, my wife's argument was not actually taking a stand one
00:36:04.420
way or the other on whether the guidance was necessary.
00:36:06.420
And one way or the other on the costumes, she was saying, do you, you students should
00:36:11.620
probably consider whether you wish to surrender this authority to super ordinance.
00:36:18.900
It fundamentally was a left-wing position saying you should be deeply skeptical of surrendering
00:36:24.480
power to, you know, the state, to the administration.
00:36:29.760
But that was the intellectual essence of my wife's very gentle email, the aftermath of
00:36:38.600
I mean, I should say that the email was utterly balanced, as was Brett Weinstein's email to
00:36:59.120
I believe we show respect for the students when we say, you know, we are interested in
00:37:05.280
And again, we're talking about people who are old enough to be shipped off to fight a war.
00:37:09.760
We're talking about people who, in a few short years, will be on the job market as some of
00:37:16.360
the most highly educated and in-demand young adults in the country.
00:37:21.700
I mean, these are people who should be able to talk about a Halloween costume that offends
00:37:28.900
But you see, the problem is, again, there's—see, this is, again, where I have some empathy
00:37:36.120
Because, again, you see, there's a kernel of—like we discussed earlier with this notion of cultural
00:37:42.400
appropriation and these claims that science is an objectivity—claims to objectivity are
00:37:48.060
tools of oppression, you know, these ridiculously extreme claims—there's an element of truth
00:37:57.640
You know, 18 to 22-year-olds feel a sense of alienation.
00:38:02.360
And now, you know, if you're a minority student in these institutions, there may be an extra
00:38:08.880
And I think there are ways that we can discuss that with students.
00:38:12.320
I think there are ways we can reform our institutions.
00:38:18.620
But I, as Jonathan Haidt has said, you know, I think the fundamental commitment of these
00:38:28.720
And, you know, this has to be done in a way in which we retain a deep and abiding commitment
00:38:34.000
to speaking the truth and having open expression.
00:38:38.780
She sent the email, and some furor erupted, and then you stepped out of the building to
00:38:52.400
I'm not sure I want to go into all the details because it's, you know, a sense—
00:38:55.920
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