Making Sense - Sam Harris - #41 — Faith in Reason

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber

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00:00:46.460 My guest today is Eric Weinstein, who is a mathematician and physicist and economist and all-around interesting

00:00:54.920 guy, who is currently the managing director of Teal Capital.

00:00:59.180 Now, as most of you know who have listened to previous podcasts, my interviews are really

00:01:03.760 more conversations than interviews.

00:01:06.380 I would guess I usually take up about, I don't know, 40% of the space.

00:01:11.320 But if this exchange seems a little more self-referential than normal, I would just like to give you a

00:01:16.240 little context as to why, which I briefly do in the beginning of my conversation with Eric.

00:01:20.840 Eric actually reached out to me, suggesting that he could help me think a little more clearly about

00:01:27.040 how to engage the kinds of controversial issues I tend to deal with.

00:01:30.640 So while we talk about many different things, the subtext is that he's performing a bit of an

00:01:35.740 intervention on me.

00:01:37.500 So I hope that explains why I didn't ask him more questions about all the fascinating stuff he's into.

00:01:42.140 That'll have to wait until next time.

00:01:44.040 In any case, Eric is a very interesting guy, as you will easily discern.

00:01:48.060 And he was also very generous in his efforts to talk some sense into me.

00:01:52.580 So without any more preamble, I give you Eric Weinstein.

00:02:02.520 So I'm here with Eric Weinstein.

00:02:04.760 Eric, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:02:06.300 Well, thanks for having me over.

00:02:07.380 So I was trying to remember how we got connected, and I now recognize why I was confused.

00:02:13.960 So I heard you on Tim's podcast, and I love that conversation, and was poised to get in

00:02:19.080 touch with you.

00:02:19.940 But then you got in touch with me, I think, just on your own on Twitter, having noticed

00:02:24.980 some of my collisions with people.

00:02:26.880 And you expressed, and I have the quote here, but by email, you were dismayed to find that

00:02:33.020 people who you expected would be rational and not at all anti-intellectual were in conversation

00:02:39.440 with me on various topics proving to be just that, and you said that they were, you found

00:02:43.940 them trying to rescue the failed bits of multiculturalism at seemingly any cost to logic and ethics.

00:02:50.260 And this was at the time, Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, who you said that of, and you

00:02:54.360 wanted to just reach out and see if you could help.

00:02:57.080 And I obviously am very happy you did that, and I'm happy to have any help I can get.

00:03:03.260 But then, in the setup to this podcast, you had the somewhat comical and perhaps disconcerting

00:03:10.440 experience of pinging some of your friends about me, only to find that at least two of

00:03:15.080 them also counted themselves among my enemies.

00:03:17.980 Maybe enemies is too strong a term for one of them, but you are friends with Nassim Taleb,

00:03:22.720 the quant author of The Black Swan, and he has made his hatred, might not be too strong 0.54

00:03:29.400 a word, but he certainly made his displeasure with me fairly indelible on Twitter.

00:03:34.600 You know, that is odd for you to discover in the setup here.

00:03:39.020 And also David Eagleman, the neuroscientist who I had kind of an aborted debate with, and

00:03:44.640 that was far less prickly, but still a failure of communication, which from my side happened

00:03:50.660 very much along the lines of these other failures you notice, where there's a kind of,

00:03:54.980 I guess I often think of it as a, my opponent or the interlocutor who becomes my opponent

00:04:01.660 finds him or herself wanting to play a good cop, bad cop routine with me.

00:04:06.820 And I have a criticism of religion in most cases here, that people find, whether they're

00:04:13.520 religious or not, and in most of these cases the other person is not religious, but they

00:04:17.300 find it somehow synonymous with the breaking of some kind of taboo, or they consider it uncivil

00:04:24.820 in a way, and they try to take a position against what I think is undeniably just the intellectually

00:04:33.820 honest position to take at this moment in human history.

00:04:37.180 The conversation breaks down, and so yeah, you and I are going to talk about the limits

00:04:41.760 of reason on some level, and see if we can advance the tools we have mutually to have rational

00:04:49.420 conversations, but it's just interesting that even the agenda we have here today in this

00:04:55.420 conversation got subtly eroded by you, perhaps, you can tell me, but I would imagine a crisis

00:05:01.260 of confidence on your side, where you, because you're reaching out to your network to figure

00:05:05.260 out who is this guy, and you receive some pushback, but perhaps in the midst of answering

00:05:10.660 that, you can say a bit about who you are, and your history of intellectual interests, and

00:05:15.380 how you come to this conversation.

00:05:17.040 It would be a pleasure.

00:05:18.180 I mean, I think one of the things that caused me to come down, when it's obviously much more

00:05:22.940 convenient to do this over Skype or over the internet, is I've seen too many good marriages

00:05:28.140 and rich friendships break up over ASCII and Unicode, and that there's something about the

00:05:33.900 electronic medium which denies us empathy, face-to-face contact, and very often we get off on a wrong

00:05:40.920 foot and we don't know how to write it in real life. And so, in part, it's my distrust of whether

00:05:49.100 these are essential conflicts. This could be like the Trotskyist-Leninist-Stalinists versus 0.57

00:05:56.100 the Stalinist-Trotskyists, and these are hair's breadth of difference in that they tend to get

00:06:01.760 much more exaggerated in terms of the heat that they generate. And then there's also this very

00:06:06.260 interesting problem. And in fact, around my office, we call it the limits of discourse problem after

00:06:12.260 some of your adventures and misadventures. And the question is, who can play? When two people sit

00:06:17.960 down to discuss a topic, is there any set of descriptors which can predict whether the

00:06:22.420 conversation will be rich or whether it will derail over more or less intellectually trivial features?

00:06:27.980 Yeah. So, what is your background, briefly, in just your intellectual history and your current

00:06:34.880 interests? Where are you focused, mostly?

00:06:37.760 I mean, I think by education and credential, I would be a mathematician. I've held positions

00:06:45.980 in mathematics, physics, and economics departments. I've worked in hedge funds and finance risk.

00:06:54.980 And I'm now managing director of Teal Capital, working with Peter Teal in San Francisco on a

00:07:02.260 wide variety of things throughout the Teal Foundation, our macro trading outfit, and various

00:07:08.200 venture funds, and trying to make the world a better place in both the private sector and

00:07:15.340 public intellectualism.

00:07:16.720 So, I know Peter, and not well, obviously. I've just met him a few times. But the first idea for

00:07:21.420 this conversation was actually to have the three of us speak, and scheduling may have made that

00:07:26.500 difficult. But also, I think it's a good thing, given what I've said on the podcast about Trump

00:07:31.840 and his recent speech to the RNC. I just think we would, and I would love to talk to Peter.

00:07:38.080 Peter shouldn't take this part the wrong way. But I just think we would have had to have spoken

00:07:43.180 about Trump at length in a way that would have just subsumed everything else in the conversation.

00:07:46.860 And I'm happy to speak about politics with you. But it's, again, this is one of those issues that

00:07:52.920 proves so difficult to talk about. So I don't know what the outcome of my talking to Peter about

00:07:58.400 Trump would be. But what do you think it is about politics, perhaps second only to religion,

00:08:04.120 that makes conversation either reliably impossible or just so difficult?

00:08:09.940 It's a great question, of course. I have a 2016 version of this answer that might not be the

00:08:15.720 same as the answer I'd given in another election year. I think right at the moment, the problem is

00:08:22.060 that a lot of us, and I assume you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 50. You're pretty close.

00:08:28.760 49, yeah.

00:08:29.340 Okay. I think that fundamentally, we're trying to express ourselves through people who don't

00:08:34.780 represent us. And this isn't their time. This is our time. And there's no way I can represent

00:08:39.220 myself through Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. They don't share my experience. I

00:08:44.740 don't have the same reference points that they do. My life doesn't resemble theirs. They went through

00:08:50.460 different formative experiences than I did. And I think that part of the problem is that we're trapped

00:08:57.280 in prisons of language and we're grooved in ways of thinking that we're adapted to, and I think poorly

00:09:03.500 adapted to the world of the 1980s and beyond, I feel like the Reagan era more or less went from 1980

00:09:11.660 to 2008. And then we've been in a zombie period where we don't have new theories. We just sort of have

00:09:17.840 these old theories that don't die because we don't have anything to replace them with. And they wander the

00:09:23.040 landscape wreaking havoc. And I think that what you're doing and what I would like to think that I'm trying to do,

00:09:29.860 and perhaps Peter is doing, is trying to come up with different languages and new ways of speaking

00:09:36.500 so that people don't end up in these cul-de-sacs intellectually which seem to be attracting most

00:09:44.600 of the population. So I think in some sense, Sam, it's our failure. It's your and my failure and Peter's

00:09:49.380 failure that we are not expressing ourselves as ourselves. So I'm here as your future running mate

00:09:56.180 potentially for 2020. I think we're doomed. And that says more about me than you.

00:10:01.040 I really think, if I can make an analogy, let's assume that the marketplace of ideas is something

00:10:05.900 we take seriously. We've been in sort of an era previously which you might think of as like a

00:10:12.220 mutual fund area where there's only long only. Are you for multiculturalism or against it? Are you

00:10:17.160 for immigration or against it? And I think that all of the really interesting positions right now

00:10:23.620 are sort of hedge fund-like positions, and we'd call them relative value trades.

00:10:28.040 So I'm for a mild increase with a lot of scrutiny on refugees

00:10:34.040 to increase our refugee intake because I think it's humane, and I think that they make great Americans

00:10:40.720 because they're so grateful that somebody took them in in their hour of need if we screen properly.

00:10:45.780 And I'm against other forms of immigration like skilled immigration increases where we tether people 0.98

00:10:51.320 to their employers through H-1B visas. So the idea is I don't have a pro or anti position on

00:10:57.600 immigration. I have a long short position. And I think that because most people don't have an idea

00:11:02.820 that you can hold a long short position, we're trapped in this nonsense discussion about, in my

00:11:11.580 opinion, three topics which are dividing us, which are trade, immigration, and terror.

00:11:17.120 And fundamentally, because you and I have not done a great job of pushing out

00:11:23.200 simple models and good language for dealing with these things, I think that the generation before us

00:11:30.280 talks in completely inadequate terms. And so it's up to us to rectify it. So that's one of the reasons

00:11:36.180 I'm excited to be here.

00:11:37.400 Yeah. Yeah. I think we could probably add race to that list, and then I think it covers at least 80% 0.98

00:11:42.760 of our problems. So what is it that you worry about now in terms of intellectual trends and

00:11:51.440 bad ideas that are regnant? I mean, I have this line that I think is true, and I certainly have used 0.93

00:11:58.640 enough to hope it's true, that bad ideas are worse than bad people. There are not that many bad people

00:12:05.080 in the world. I think, you know, on any appropriate metric, there's probably 1%, you know, psychopaths

00:12:10.920 walking around. But what you find more and more often when you pay attention is just that they're

00:12:17.220 good people under the sway, or more or less good people, certainly psychologically normal people

00:12:22.760 under the sway of bad ideas. And they think they're doing good, or they're committed to some

00:12:27.520 principle that may be even locally good, or at least ethically defensible, but doesn't survive

00:12:34.780 scaling, or they're not paying attention to the associated costs of living that way or thinking

00:12:41.000 that way. And what I constantly find myself encountering are people who are absolutely sure

00:12:49.300 they are on the right side of an important issue, but they're behaving, to my eye, patently

00:12:55.800 unethically. And I think it probably does have something to do with what you just described

00:13:01.020 as being non-obvious to them, that you can have a nuanced or a long-short position on any

00:13:08.620 of these topics, and have that be not only coherent and intellectually defensible, but perhaps the

00:13:15.360 only intellectually defensible position in the end. And yet, because it doesn't survive the broad

00:13:22.400 strokes, litmus test of are you for immigration or not, or against Islam or not, or for religious

00:13:30.460 pluralism or not, it comes under immediate stigma and kind of straw man attacks. Anyway, that's one

00:13:38.560 thing that I noticed that worries me. But what sort of shibboleths and fake ideas and bad ones are you

00:13:45.880 worried about this moment?

00:13:46.820 All of them. I mean, I'm really actually worried about the abstraction that makes it so difficult

00:13:54.160 to think. Because one of the things that, and this is kind of a half compliment, half critique

00:13:59.840 for you, is that I think it's so hard to do what you're doing, to sort of recreate an entire

00:14:09.340 intellectual world from scratch, that is of a piece, that is interoperable, self-consistent, moral, decent,

00:14:18.500 but which allows you to get everywhere. And I see you as sort of having this, it's almost like you've

00:14:23.600 built a yacht that only you can sail with all of these cables and riggings. And so that's not going to

00:14:29.320 work. I am estimating your vocabulary must be something 40,000 words or more. I don't have that.

00:14:36.440 And I think that we have to, in fact, first understand that most of us aren't going to be

00:14:45.160 able to pull off the trick that you're trying to do. It's too difficult. I've called you the

00:14:48.600 intellectual Alex Honnold before because, you know, you're like this intellectual free soloist

00:14:54.220 where one falls smooth and you're doomed.

00:14:55.340 Now watch me fall.

00:14:56.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it can't be that we actually push people to do that. But I think

00:15:02.840 that there's a hidden villain in the story. And I think that the hidden villain

00:15:07.600 are these, you know, very often three-letter organizations, WSJ, NYT, DNC, RNC, FOX.

00:15:18.460 And what they're doing is a really interesting trick of subtracting narratives that have this

00:15:26.220 long, short character. And so I've come up with this model, which unfortunately we're not doing

00:15:31.800 this on video. I'd go to a whiteboard. But if you picture an X, Y axis, an X and a Y axis,

00:15:38.740 and the X axis is some sort of elite rent-seeking policy, something that the elite rent-seekers want.

00:15:46.260 Can you define rent-seeking?

00:15:48.460 Rent-seeking is the ultimate insult from an economist. It says that you're

00:15:52.020 trying to profit without really producing anything. And so if you're, you know, let's say,

00:15:59.560 what was the founding myth of the Carlisle Group? They figured out that Eskimos had some 1.00

00:16:05.980 right to a tax write-off from a failed Eskimo business. And so it turned out that you could

00:16:11.260 sell those rights in some way and you could profit from it. So it probably wasn't intended

00:16:16.360 to be, you know, for a Jewish businessman to figure this out, but that would be some form

00:16:22.060 of rent-seeking. And so the real villains in the story aren't the elite, as we say, because

00:16:26.700 I don't think, you know, top intellectuals and great scientists and fantastic athletes are the

00:16:32.700 problem. I think it's the elite rent-seekers. And they have certain things they're trying to

00:16:37.440 accomplish. And most of us don't really know who they are. They don't really want a lot of

00:16:41.580 publicity, but they're very skilled operators in our system. And when they want a policy,

00:16:47.060 what happens is, is that whatever organs are attached to that group, they tell a story that

00:16:53.080 where there's smoke, there is always fire. And the smoke is opposition to their proposal. And the fire

00:17:01.880 is some sort of moral failing. And so if you'll permit me visually, imagine that you're going

00:17:08.160 counterclockwise around the XY plane. So the first quadrant I call the dupes, sometimes the

00:17:15.140 ivy-covered dupes. These are people who have gone to maybe elite schools. They think that they are the

00:17:21.400 elite, but in fact, you know, they're probably making less than half a million a year. They may

00:17:26.200 have a second home, but they're not really in control and they don't realize that they are in fact

00:17:30.580 being propagandized. And it's very difficult to work with this because they're convinced that

00:17:34.160 they're the ones in the know. In the second quadrant, you have first principles, thinkers,

00:17:38.840 contrarians, and people who are fiercely independent. In the third quadrant, you have

00:17:43.700 troglodytes, people who are opposed to the elite policies, but also may have the moral failings that the

00:17:52.220 elite wish to tar them with. And in the fourth quadrant, you have the shadowy rent-seeking

00:18:00.580 elite. And so what happens is that the Y-axis is the moral virtue vice axis. And the media narrative

00:18:09.940 is like a straight line running from the Southwest to the Northeast. It says that there's an absolute

00:18:15.700 correlation between people who agree with the elite policy and moral virtue. And so what's happening

00:18:25.120 constantly is if I'm a restrictionist on immigration, but I'm also a xenophile, I have a lifelong love of

00:18:30.980 travel. I care about learning languages. Most of my friends come from foreign places. There's some

00:18:39.700 sort of a story that you couldn't possibly be a restrictionist xenophile. You couldn't possibly

00:18:45.200 both support the police and be absolutely outraged at their killing of innocents in unforgivable

00:18:55.280 circumstances. And so what we're finding is that every time we try to tell a story about being in the

00:19:04.320 second quadrant, we get mapped to the third quadrant because we oppose these things, but we don't have

00:19:11.600 the moral failings that they would expect. And worse, people who aren't putting the same kind of

00:19:15.840 intellectual energy, but who have an instinct that the elite policies are wrong, they end up in the

00:19:21.360 troglodyte quadrant in quadrant three, unfortunately, because their intuition says, I think our immigration

00:19:28.700 must be completely out of control. Who calls illegal aliens undocumented workers? If I take an illegal

00:19:36.300 drug, is that an undocumented drug? If I do an illegal act of violence, is that an undocumented 0.98

00:19:41.660 act? The Orwellian news speak triggers many people. And if they can't figure out how to hold the right

00:19:48.260 long, short position, they may just have an instinct to actually start behaving badly and maybe believe

00:19:55.380 that Mexicans are the source of our problems if they're crossing illegally over the border rather than 1.00

00:19:59.440 becoming mostly landscapers or people in the service industry. And so in part, what I'm looking to do

00:20:07.200 is to take the small number of people who are strong enough to try to voice this way of thinking and say,

00:20:13.600 you know, it's entirely possible to oppose these policies, which are nakedly rent-seeking and still

00:20:21.540 be quite virtuous. That expansion of the left-right model to the four-quadrant model, I think, is going

00:20:30.140 to liberate a lot of people who've been drifting to the right, who wonder what happened to the left.

00:20:36.320 When did it become a crime to support liberal ideas within what is traditionally thought of as left of

00:20:44.700 center politics? When you started that description of the four quadrants, though, I imagine that you,

00:20:49.880 and perhaps I think you suggested, that it is very much a top-down, somewhat star chamber effort to

00:20:59.900 bend humanity to the will of the elite. And I guess that that may be going on as well. It's just,

00:21:06.320 I feel like my encounters with really confused dogmatic thinking from both the left and the right

00:21:13.420 has been more democratized than that. So it's hard for me to imagine that some of the

00:21:18.660 the salon writers, say, who attacked me, or people on the left who now my friend Majid Nawaz calls the

00:21:25.340 regressive left, people for whom any criticism of Islam as a set of ideas and of its consequences in

00:21:32.960 the world become synonymous with bigotry and even racism. I feel like the people who purvey that

00:21:39.480 confusion are just journalists trying to get by and bloggers, you know, people who are not in touch

00:21:47.220 with whatever rent-seeking elite you imagine may be behind the scenes. So how-

00:21:54.660 What's the transmission?

00:21:55.420 Yeah, are there two things going on that are fundamentally disconnected? Or is there actually

00:21:59.460 communication between these names we don't know and the journalists and pseudo-journalists who we do?

00:22:05.520 There is. I mean, first of all, the people who you're talking about in Salon, I would probably

00:22:10.100 have in the first quadrant. They would think of themselves as very intellectual, very knowledgeable.

00:22:16.600 But let's look at the exact construct of how you get into trouble with some of them.

00:22:21.400 They don't mind you being against religions, but it's very important that you are against 1.00

00:22:25.200 all religions equally, that no religion is worse or better than any one, any other religion.

00:22:30.300 Right. So this, the idea is that is in some sense, the policy that all religions must be treated the

00:22:36.840 same way. And let's take my religion and Jainism rather than anything involving Islam. So I come

00:22:43.100 from a Jewish background. You cannot tell me that we Jews are no more nor less violent than the Jains. 1.00

00:22:51.780 Deuteronomy suggests that savagery is in our past. We probably started this whole Abramic 1.00

00:22:59.860 murderous frenzy against the apostates. And we have to take responsibility for it. Now,

00:23:07.220 we don't kill apostates anymore because of some fancy footwork to deactivate the bad code.

00:23:13.380 But the idea is that somebody who was neither Jewish nor Jain would feel incredibly uncomfortable

00:23:21.180 making the comment that I just made. Right. And so the idea is that he who breaks the equality between

00:23:30.720 religions, who voices any difference that some are better or worse on different points,

00:23:36.580 must have a moral failing, which that they are secretly bigoted. And so the idea is, is that

00:23:43.160 you are breaking the inference pattern. You don't seem to be, there's no vibe that you give off

00:23:52.140 generically that indicates to me that you particularly hate any particular religion or

00:23:58.100 group of people. But the idea is that by breaking that one principle, the next move is that you are

00:24:07.300 allowed to infer the moral failing that must have led you to do that. And so

00:24:12.120 let's now swap out the two religions that we just talked about and talk about, let's say, Islam and

00:24:21.120 Christianity. So if you wish to say that there's more of a connection at the moment between Islam

00:24:26.720 and terror than Christianity and terror, at least in 2016, this is prima facie obvious. There's just 0.76

00:24:35.040 from statistics that nobody who's looking at what's going on, I think, can claim that suicide bombings

00:24:43.380 are higher in Christianity than they are in Islam. However, I should say just as a caveat there that you will

00:24:51.460 have people, and there have been articles written on this topic, I think even in Salon, claiming that

00:24:56.960 right-wing Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a worse problem than Muslim terrorism. And they get to that 0.99

00:25:06.460 number by first starting counting the bodies after September 11th, right? And obviously there's been

00:25:13.620 very few terrorist incidents of any type in the U.S. since then. And they throw in attempted terrorist

00:25:22.440 attacks and acts of eco-terrorism, for instance. You destroy a car dealership, that's domestic terrorism. 0.61

00:25:29.880 It's counted against Islamic terrorism. So in any case, there are people who believe, contrary to all

00:25:36.160 rational analysis of the evidence, that Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a much bigger problem and

00:25:43.200 is a likely bigger problem going forward. And I'm not against a careful, I mean, I have no prejudices

00:25:49.840 against. I might point out something that almost never gets pointed out, that if I'm not mistaken,

00:25:55.660 all of the people who have successfully penetrated the U.S. Capitol building as suicide terrorists

00:26:03.260 have been Jewish. I think there's only one guy, and he was an Israeli. Now, of course, that can go 1.00

00:26:10.140 crazy on Twitter, but I think this is what we would call steelmanning our opponent's point. We can point

00:26:16.820 to, we can help our opponents make their case and then try to show them that we come in good faith,

00:26:24.680 because what we're really interested in is not pointing fingers at any particular group. We're

00:26:30.540 interested in figuring out how to restore civility. A much better argument against that would be to

00:26:37.160 say that every, you know, A-10 warthog is an instrument of terror. And I really want to talk about

00:26:44.980 message violence and the way that states communicate message violence, which would probably be something

00:26:48.860 that Noam Chomsky would want to discuss. And I think that that's a fair point. But where it gets

00:26:56.220 suspicious is where you start to see the motivated reasoning, which is, how do I shut you down so that

00:27:03.340 you don't point at something which feels very dangerous? And I think that you have an instinct

00:27:07.640 to point at very dangerous things, not to make the danger worse, but we don't yet have a truly

00:27:16.160 terrible terror problem. You know, ex-ante, ex-post, if you're, if it's your child is murder, you know,

00:27:21.520 that your terror problem is as bad as it gets. However, what you and I are both worried about

00:27:27.820 is where we are headed, future instability, and how we could get into a mess that we will

00:27:33.940 not really be able to get out of without significant damage and injury to the American

00:27:42.040 experiment that I think that both of us are very excited about, even if we're troubled about where

00:27:46.560 it is at the moment. And I think what you're really doing is you're looking forward and you're

00:27:50.900 extrapolating and you're thinking ahead and you're getting penalized in some sense for that act.

00:27:57.220 Oh, interesting. Maybe I'll unpack that a little bit because that's, that's all too true. So I,

00:28:02.840 but you use this phrase steel manning, which I haven't heard much, but obviously it's the opposite

00:28:08.580 of straw manning someone's argument. And I think it's a crucial feature of what I would generically

00:28:15.160 call intellectual honesty. If you're going to argue against a position, at minimum, you should be

00:28:21.080 able to summarize your opponent's view in a way that he wouldn't find fault with. And better still,

00:28:27.220 if you summarize it in a way that that's even better than he or she would come up with on his

00:28:32.060 own, then that is the thing you take down in your argument. That is the way any really civil and

00:28:40.640 productive debate should operate. And what I find most difficult to deal with, our podcast listeners

00:28:47.060 will, we'll, we'll have heard this a thousand times, but are the, the misrepresentations of my

00:28:52.780 positions, wherein the, the, the, the critic isn't even interacting with a view I hold and I'm getting

00:28:58.860 smeared for this fake view. And I think that's a, you know, as a general principle of public conversations

00:29:04.940 and just one's interpersonal dealings with people who you, you don't agree with, steel manning is

00:29:12.260 something we should just have in our, our heads is something we, we, we need to do and expect should

00:29:17.700 be done toward us in, in these conversations. But the other, the other point you, you make is,

00:29:22.340 is true, which is, and this is, this is often a point of confusion. I, it's not that I think

00:29:28.940 that the immediate risk of death from terrorism for any American or any Westerner really, or really

00:29:38.880 even any person in the Muslim world, though they, they run a far greater risk than we do outside of

00:29:45.960 it. It's not that I think that risk is immediately intolerable and worse than any other, other thing

00:29:52.800 we could be worried about. You and I are far more likely to die in a car accident in the U.S. than

00:29:57.840 as a result of terrorism. But what I worry about are, as you said, I worry about where this is all

00:30:04.960 headed. And, and in at least two senses, there, there's obviously the risk of much bigger forms

00:30:10.580 of terrorism. You can, we can worry about nuclear terrorism and biological terrorism. And I think

00:30:15.080 it would be at this point actually surprising if some, something, you know, orders of magnitude bigger

00:30:22.900 than we've seen doesn't happen in the next 50 years, right? So it's, it's, it's, this is, it's,

00:30:28.100 this is not science fiction. It's not an irrational fear. I think given how bad we are at stopping the

00:30:35.220 proliferation of technology and given that technology is only becoming more potent and given that there's,

00:30:40.680 you know, nuclear materials that are not getting uninvented. And given that the, you know, the

00:30:46.080 proliferators and the terrorists only have to be right once as the security people say,

00:30:50.440 and we have to be right all the time, the idea that we're not going to have at minimum a dirty

00:30:55.460 bomb go off and in a major city rendering some part of it uninhabitable for, for decades, that

00:31:03.080 seems actually far-fetched to me. And given our capacity to overreact to things, so even, so take

00:31:11.320 what may in fact be the worst case scenario. You have a nuclear bomb that goes off in the port of Los

00:31:16.520 Angeles or in Times Square and it kills, it's a, you know, a small one and it kills, let's say,

00:31:21.080 a hundred thousand people outright. A hundred thousand people, more than a hundred thousand

00:31:24.820 people die in our society every year from medical errors. The last time I looked, it was like something

00:31:30.020 like 200,000 people die from iatrogenic insults because doctors and nurses don't wash their hands

00:31:36.300 or give the wrong medication, et cetera. And yet, so we absorb those deaths year after year after year,

00:31:42.460 and we absorb every other species of death, whether it's, you know, from smoking or car accidents or

00:31:48.220 our own use of firearms. And yet, if a bomb went off in a city and killed a hundred thousand people,

00:31:55.680 our reaction to that, rightly or wrongly, I mean, you can certainly defend, you could defend a different

00:32:00.400 reaction to that than our reaction to heart disease, say, but our reaction to that and our overreaction

00:32:05.640 to that would very likely just derange human history for a generation at least. So I think

00:32:13.660 you have to price in our capacity to overreact to these things into the real world cost of these

00:32:19.040 things happening. And so in any case, that's just to, to expand upon what you, what you already just

00:32:24.180 said. I think it's, it's a, and there's a, and the problem is there's usually not time enough to

00:32:30.460 spell out everything in, in the context of saying, listen, we need to be worried about

00:32:35.580 this phenomenon of global jihadism. And there's a reason why we are appropriately worried about

00:32:41.740 what is being said and not being said in one community among all the other religious communities.

00:32:47.240 We're worried about the reform of Islam. We're not worried about the reform of Methodism and Mormonism 0.77

00:32:53.380 and Scientology, and for good reason. And that's something that at a certain point can't require

00:32:59.620 a 10 minute defense. It has to be, we have to have the shorthand version of that that's accepted

00:33:04.280 everywhere we talk about these things. Well, one of the things that I say that's unpopular in some

00:33:09.580 quadrants is that things that rhyme tend to be more true. Now it's not, it's not universal.

00:33:14.800 Obviously when somebody says if the, if the glove don't fit, you must acquit, um, that, that may or may

00:33:19.880 not be right. But in general humans, uh, when they have something very important to say, try to hone it to a

00:33:25.900 fairly well. And they make it mimetic. They make it easy to remember. It's probably in some sense,

00:33:31.500 uh, you know, sort of syntactic sugar for the brain so that it remembers, uh, the wisdom.

00:33:37.520 And I believe that it's important to have the hyperlinked statement so that when you,

00:33:41.620 if you don't agree with the statement, you can click on it, you can see the paragraph version,

00:33:45.740 the paragraph yields to the essay, really yields to the book. So depending upon how much information

00:33:50.200 you need to support an idea, um, uh, it's there. So if you made a statement, for example, that global

00:33:57.180 jihadism is actually one of the most serious things that we're facing, somebody says, come on, Sam,

00:34:01.680 you know, shark attacks, uh, are incredibly rare, but because of shark week, uh, we're in a constant

00:34:07.400 state of terror. Um, okay, well then that person would need to click on the hyperlink to see why it

00:34:13.380 is that you actually aren't going down that path. And so I think it's important that the user and the

00:34:19.740 listener be able to be in dialogue with your statements. So I think you need to make the

00:34:24.140 same statement at four different levels that fail over into each one into the next. Um, when you're,

00:34:30.400 when you're making these points. And I think that there are too few of these honed statements at top

00:34:35.120 level that neatly point, um, to the backups, because in general, whenever I run something to ground that

00:34:41.560 you're trying to say, um, I may not get it at first. I may not understand it. And I may not, uh,

00:34:48.040 so I, I often am arguing with my misinterpretations of you. And, um, every time I think I've got you

00:34:55.960 on something, uh, I discover some podcasts, some books, some talk where you've actually covered it.

00:35:01.200 Um, maybe not everyone, but it's, it's happened to me enough times, um, in listening to you that I'm,

00:35:07.920 I'm feeling that, uh, I now expected the default.

00:35:11.440 I need a better me to, to speak for me in, in those cases. Does anything come to mind as an example

00:35:18.480 of something that was initially problematic that you ran to ground and were satisfied or, or not?

00:35:23.500 I think for example, some of the spirituality stuff, I think that, um, well, I have some things that I

00:35:30.260 haven't run to ground yet. For example, I think you've said things that people can't, you've said

00:35:34.300 that people can't change their beliefs the way they change their clothes. And I think I'm actually

00:35:38.600 pretty good at that. Um, I think I maintain different rooms in my mind. I actually have

00:35:43.440 what I call a jihadi sandbox where I, I listened to the nasheeds. I watched the videos, I read

00:35:48.880 inspire and the beak and all these things. And I let the jihadi in me become animated so that I can 0.64

00:35:54.900 study my own reaction. Um, and I wonder, you know, sometimes I see you as, uh, this is like me being

00:36:01.240 really critical of you as the guy running into a, uh, you know, a screening, uh, of the Godfather

00:36:06.700 and saying, what's wrong with you people? Don't you realize it's just photons, you know, projected

00:36:11.120 against a wall. And, uh, you know, I need to know in part how you reconcile my need for fiction,

00:36:19.440 theater, uh, distortions of belief. I believe that in fact, in my least distorted States, it's usually

00:36:25.220 achieved, um, by having lots of different, uh, fictions, falsehoods, and incomplete pictures

00:36:31.120 that together yield a fairly complete picture. But, uh, you know, it's, I I'm fond of the double

00:36:38.540 distortion of somebody wearing glasses where their eyes are distorted and their glasses are further

00:36:43.440 distorted, but the compound of the two is an undistorted picture. So there are ways in which

00:36:49.300 I worry that the sort of new atheist project, um, really has a very limited market because

00:36:56.300 it's very important for me, for example, on Friday nights to put away my atheism, uh, and go into a

00:37:03.120 Jewish traditional Shabbat dinner where it's not that we're wink, wink, nudge, nudge, uh, going to

00:37:08.860 have Shabbat dinner. We actually kind of go through it and try to do the prayers, uh, straight up. And at some

00:37:15.020 point, my daughter was in a Jewish, um, preschool and they asked her something about believing in

00:37:20.600 God. And she said, uh, Oh, I only believe on God on Fridays. And I think that that's actually, uh,

00:37:27.000 a more healthy perspective. That's something that I don't know whether you've, you've talked about it

00:37:30.720 or dealt with it. No, no, I haven't. Well, I don't know that I could sign on the dotted line

00:37:34.760 with your daughter's statement there, but I think there's something a little euphemistic creeping in

00:37:40.020 there perhaps for her or for you, but I think the general picture you paint of a multiplicity of

00:37:48.200 beliefs, which aren't necessarily reconciled in any single brain or certainly any single moment

00:37:55.320 and a kind of piecemeal worldview that we change in and out depending on context. I think part of

00:38:02.600 that's inevitable. I think it's, and I said this somewhere, it probably was, I think it was my first

00:38:09.220 book, the end of faith, which is, it's probably computationally inevitable. I think, I think there

00:38:13.580 was a, an example I gave where if you just looked at the computational requirements of checking a

00:38:19.140 list of propositions for logical contradiction. And I mean, this is an NP complete problem where

00:38:25.280 there's, as you add propositions, the runtime for even a computer, the size of a universe with

00:38:30.400 components, the size of protons with switching speeds at the speed of light, you still would,

00:38:35.400 after 15 billion years, you'd be fighting to add, I think it was the 300th belief to the list,

00:38:40.360 right? So it's like, we're, we are not going to be perfectly coherent, even if, even if our minds

00:38:45.860 worked as just checking a list of propositions for, you know, syllogistic error. So there, there will be

00:38:52.860 contradictions. And there is a, just neurologically speaking, a committee in there that is pulling the

00:38:59.900 gears and levers of, of emotion and behavior. And we have a very strong emotional attachment to certain

00:39:06.500 things, which can cloud our cooler judgments about what is real. But I just think that, that in science

00:39:14.120 and in clear thinking generally, we do our best to, at least in those conversations, when we're asked,

00:39:23.160 you know, what do you really believe is real? We do our best to only promote to kind of the

00:39:29.660 canonicity, you know, in our worldview, those things that we think we can defend based on evidence and

00:39:36.400 arguments and logic. And, and we can be wrong about that. It's just that the, the, the possibility for

00:39:42.360 incoherence in one's worldview can be pretty startling because I mean, there are people who,

00:39:46.720 or in this, in this case, in, in the end of faith, my wife and I were in Paris and we had as a conscious

00:39:53.800 decision decided not, not to go near the American embassy. This was brilliant. Yeah. And then we were

00:39:58.140 also, and those of you who haven't heard this, you can listen to the, I think it was my last podcast on the,

00:40:05.240 where I'm re actually reading the end of faith on the podcast. And I, I read this episode, but, and we were

00:40:10.320 trying to get, get a hotel room with a view of the embassy garden. And the phrase American embassy

00:40:15.680 was just functioning in two discreet and incompatible ways in our minds. And so we just

00:40:21.320 had a, you know, a folly a deux and it wasn't reconciled for us until a friend said, don't you

00:40:27.980 realize we had actually checked into the hotel with a view of the American embassy. And a friend said,

00:40:31.580 what the hell are you doing? You're right. It's the 4th of July. You're right next to the American

00:40:35.340 embassy. And then we, then the walls came down and we realized we had, had been both seeking and

00:40:41.300 seeking to avoid proximity to the American embassy all day long.

00:40:45.680 Now that's an especially crazy instance, which even now I can't understand how, how it was true

00:40:51.800 of me, but no doubt there are many things I think are true, which are incompatible with other things

00:40:57.500 that I think are, are true. And only conversation with oneself and, and experiences reading and

00:41:04.500 argument with others can, can bring those to light. So for instance, your, your jihadi sandbox. I,

00:41:09.940 I also have that jihadi sandbox and I have a blog post that I've referenced a few times on the

00:41:14.660 podcast entitled Islam and the misuses of ecstasy, where I, I try, try to describe in a series of,

00:41:21.540 of embedded videos, just how deep my sympathy with the surface features of, of Muslim religion and,

00:41:29.700 and spirituality runs. And, you know, I think the call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things

00:41:35.780 ever to appear on earth. I love the sound of it. I love the sound of it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a

00:41:41.600 great one that I linked to in that blog post. And I love Kowali music, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,

00:41:48.380 the Pakistani singer. Saw him in Boston. What, what a show. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's unfortunately,

00:41:53.720 I never got a chance to do that. And I love the poetry of Rumi. And I, and I, and I even get

00:41:59.660 what the attract. Have you talked about this on any of your shows? Not, not at length, but I've,

00:42:05.580 I've. So this, I wanted to come down here and talk to you about this in particular, because I think one

00:42:09.840 of the things that's going on is that you do not spend enough time talking about all of the fantastic

00:42:17.700 contributions of this culture. And, um, you point in one case at the really appalling lack of scientific

00:42:28.240 achievements of Muslims, let's say, since the Nobel prize, um, has been given out. I think there've

00:42:34.480 been three in the sciences and one of them was, uh, to the great Ahmadi Muslim, uh, who contributed to

00:42:40.920 the standard model of physics. Um, so he would be considered, uh, not a Muslim in Pakistan. Right. 0.98

00:42:47.240 Um, but I think one of the problems is you're not advertising the emotional valence that I've

00:42:55.400 secretly suspected you must have. So, you know, when I, when I, when I struggle with this, I have a,

00:43:01.660 a friend group that is disproportionately Islamic and, um, it's been one of the great experiences

00:43:10.260 of my life since I was 16. My, my, my closest friend, um, you know, welcomed me into his family,

00:43:16.220 his culture, uh, completely eyeopening experience. And this is a friend from high school or a friend

00:43:22.960 from college. And, um, um, he, uh, you know, his family engaged in traditional practices with the

00:43:31.640 hand kissing and touching feet and all sorts of, um, or I guess the feet touching was a different

00:43:38.540 kind of field of, uh, respect, but the family was so courageous. I mean, his sister was brutally

00:43:45.440 gang raped in India and the, uh, the father supported his daughter, um, talking about it openly when you

00:43:54.860 would imagine that there were the feelings of shame and the issues of honor would have been dominant.

00:44:01.220 And so in my life, um, I have traveled, uh, always openly as a Jew in the Islamic world.

00:44:09.600 And I've been treated incredibly well. I believe that if the Nazis were ever to recur,

00:44:14.260 the floorboards under which I would be hidden would likely be Muslim floorboards. Um, so it's very 1.00

00:44:22.080 painful, uh, to not have this long, short language where in general, um, I've been in, you know,

00:44:30.880 in a, in a, in a largely Islamic social context since I, since I was 16, people don't ever address

00:44:38.300 you as, Oh, crusader. You know, I mean that, that kind of speech that you get used to watching ISIS

00:44:43.340 videos, which most people don't watch, but I've, I've watched a great deal of them just because I

00:44:47.420 need to know about this. Uh, you're talking about two completely different worlds that are connected.

00:44:54.380 And I think it's really important to advertise more, more heart, more empathy, more emotion,

00:45:02.700 because otherwise the very dry analytic way in which you go about thinking about this,

00:45:08.060 I think it's, gets too much play in a certain sense. You were so logical that the fact that the

00:45:14.920 texts say these very clear things or that there's ambiguity, but there's a hierarchy for resolving

00:45:20.640 the ambiguities. This appeals to your analytic mind. And I think both you and I have an analytic

00:45:25.820 bent and we would be much more tempted. Were we highly religious to go down these sort of, well,

00:45:31.880 you know, it says here in the text that this is true. And if I really believe this is the infallible

00:45:35.400 word of the creator and that, uh, I'm going against God not to follow directions, we would be tempted

00:45:42.860 by that interpretation. And so I think in part, it's a little bit, um, perverse that you almost

00:45:49.300 have more sympathies with the literal versions, uh, of, uh, of the religion than you do with what you

00:45:57.320 call. And I think it's somewhat disparaging nominal members of the, of these religions. And if I can

00:46:02.440 tell one story from my own, because I know it better, I grew up, uh, in an atheist Jewish household

00:46:08.920 and my wife who is from India grew up as a Jew in Bombay. Um, and so, uh, our commonality was Judaism.

00:46:17.180 So we, we got married in a Jewish context. Now, when I went to the rabbi, uh, I said, I want to do

00:46:23.560 this by the book. So he laughed and he said, well, why don't you write the ketubah for your,

00:46:28.300 your, your wedding contract? Um, so we wrote something, we gave it back to him. He says,

00:46:34.160 this, he says, I can't work with this. This is garbage. So he said, you know, why don't you come 1.00

00:46:39.340 back, come back with another version? So we, we did it. And he said, this is poetry. This is poetry.

00:46:43.720 This is the bride price of virgins. Treat it like a contract. So we went back to the original, 0.60

00:46:50.140 tried to do a modern version of it, uh, you know, and sort of an isomorphic version.

00:46:55.120 And finally he says, uh, this is the worst I've seen. I've been marrying people for decades.

00:46:59.920 So finally I exploded at him and I said, rabbi gold. I said, you know, I put hours and hours into 0.74

00:47:05.940 this and, uh, I don't think it can be done. And he looks at me and he says, uh, huh. And I said,

00:47:12.560 well, what is that about? He said, well, he said, you're trying to get married in a, uh, you know,

00:47:18.360 more than 5,000 year old tradition. And you have an idea that there is a by the book and it's very

00:47:24.240 important that you understand that it is impossible to be a Jew by the book because

00:47:28.160 this particular contract says the bride price of virgins will be in Zuzim, some currency that

00:47:34.400 hasn't existed for years. And that the contract itself cannot be a formality. It actually,

00:47:40.740 actually has to mean something. And since nobody knows what a Zuz is anymore, 0.74

00:47:45.080 it's literally impossible to fulfill. Now, I don't know if that's exactly right or exactly wrong,

00:47:51.680 but his point was, is that it's all create your own Judaism. There is no true Judaism.

00:47:57.140 And I think that that was liberating for me because I was having a very hard time

00:48:02.180 following some rules, not others. I don't really like pork, you know, really good prosciutto and

00:48:08.300 pepperonis, you know, as a pleasure. And I was always too far to, to walk to the synagogue on

00:48:14.460 Saturdays. So I think that it's very important to realize that there is no way usually to fulfill

00:48:20.060 these texts. And as a result, um, this lines up with what Majid Nawaz talks about, about multiple

00:48:28.220 interpretations are the beginning of de-radicalization. And I think what you struggle

00:48:32.700 with a lot is that you're very sympathetic to the literal and you're much less sympathetic to the,

00:48:38.520 uh, doped with nonsense or, you know, clearly our Judaism in the modern era is doped with 0.86

00:48:44.300 Christianity, which I think is a pretty good thing. Um, if it goes too far, I get very alienated, 0.95

00:48:49.620 but I think it's important to realize that the nominal versions of these religions, um,

00:48:56.820 are in some sense, the true versions of these religions within the civilized modern era and the

00:49:02.440 literal attempts to go back to, I don't know, sixth century or some thousands of years before Christ

00:49:08.980 are, uh, this is nonsense. So to, to rewind all the way to the point of my not expressing my sympathy

00:49:17.360 with the liturgy and iconography and spirituality and, and food, architecture, music. Yeah. Of,

00:49:25.380 of these cultures enough. I guess the, the way I have decided to go long short there is not so much

00:49:33.080 focusing on those features. Although I have a little bit, but more to point out that my,

00:49:40.360 my real sympathy and solidarity is with the people who are suffering most under theocracy. And those

00:49:48.060 are in this case, actual other Muslims who are not disposed to live under theocracy. So it's liberal

00:49:54.760 Muslims, it's Muslim women, it's apostates, it's free thinkers. And I, you know, I try to come around 0.56

00:50:01.340 if I don't do it in every paragraph, I try without letting too many minutes elapse on the clock to

00:50:07.080 come around to the point, just the, the stark acknowledgement that obviously no one suffers

00:50:12.820 the consequences of global jihadism and Islamist theocracy more than Muslims do. And, and, and it's 0.84

00:50:19.480 the Muslims I hear from in the ex-Muslims and the, and the liberal Muslims who I am always thinking

00:50:26.400 about in addition to worrying about the civilizational consequences of, of jihadism. And I, and I'm also

00:50:32.540 aware that my sympathy with spiritual aspiration and spiritual experience, you know, my, my like,

00:50:40.000 my finding something intelligible in, in the poetry of Rumi doesn't survive collision with the doubts

00:50:45.860 in the brains of many, of much of my audience. I mean, you know, I, I, I speak to atheists and

00:50:50.860 secularists who, who have no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about meditation. And they certainly

00:50:56.140 have no idea what Rumi's talking about and many of them don't want to know. And so there's, there's,

00:51:00.460 you know, it's not, I don't really, I'm not censoring myself on the basis of that, but it's just

00:51:04.400 Rumi's not so interesting to, to much of my audience, or at least hasn't been thus far.

00:51:10.900 The other reason why I focus on literalism is because I think there, there isn't a, there's an

00:51:17.380 asymmetry here and a real advantage to the literalists. And I don't know how we ever get out from under

00:51:25.760 this thing, because the issue for me is that there, there is a more and less plausible reading

00:51:32.500 of any scripture. And this is what I ran into with, with Majid in our conversation together. So, so the,

00:51:38.420 so the implausible readings don't survive very well because they are in fact implausible. It is,

00:51:43.920 it is, you can't really read any of these traditions to speak of the Abrahamic ones, Judaism,

00:51:50.240 Christianity, and Islam. You can't read any of their scripture and get as a plausible reading 0.96

00:51:57.440 the value that homosexuality is just as good, ethically speaking, as heterosexuality, 0.85

00:52:04.560 or that women are and, and must be the political equals and the moral equals to men, right? So it's

00:52:10.880 what you have to do is you have to bring those modern values to the text and cherry pick and

00:52:17.760 leverage in ways that is a bit of a, a pantomime of scholarship. It's not really, I mean, you,

00:52:25.980 you know what you want the answer to be in advance, right? It's not like, it's not like you're

00:52:29.720 discovering those values in the text because actually the antithesis is in the text and

00:52:34.220 wherever those topics are touched for the most part, it's certainly clearest on, on the case of,

00:52:39.480 of homosexuality. It's just, it's anathema, right? So it's, you know, it's, it's anathema in 0.93

00:52:45.900 the Hebrew Bible, it's anathema in St. Paul, it's certainly the anathema in, in the Quran and the 1.00

00:52:51.680 Hadith. And so it's, it's a, if you want gay people in the 21st century to have all the rights 0.90

00:52:58.100 and privileges and respect that you do and a right to want, well, then you have to find some rationale

00:53:04.500 by which to ignore these texts now, or at least those parts of the text. So, I mean, one thing I

00:53:09.960 would like people to be is just honest about that process. But the, but the problem is that once you

00:53:15.200 become honest about that process, there is something fundamentally corrosive about that

00:53:21.220 because you're, you, you are bringing merely human values to this project and based on your own

00:53:29.160 moral wisdom, 20, the 21st century upgrade to your ethical firmware, you are valuing those modern

00:53:39.060 moral intuitions more than you are valuing the word of God in that case. And being honest about

00:53:45.060 that, I think is, is in fact necessary for modern people to really modernize and, and tolerate a

00:53:52.540 plurality of views. And, and in this case, accept things like gay marriage. But in the face of that,

00:53:59.220 the fundamentalist, the literalist always has the advantage of being able to say, you see, these

00:54:04.920 apostates are not living by the letter of the text. It says right here, what you should do.

00:54:10.760 So who is living by the letter of the text? Now you might say ISIS.

00:54:14.600 Yeah. I mean, they're, they're certainly aspiring to, yeah, they're doing their best job.

00:54:18.340 But let, let me again, drag it back to Judaism because, uh, I'm always happier, uh, playing in 0.92

00:54:24.540 my own backyard than, uh, hopping the fence into somebody else's. I think, uh, Sam, that even what

00:54:31.340 you just said is not, it's not exactly right. Um, the way, and again, I wish this was original to

00:54:36.700 me, but it came from, uh, Ben Zion gold who, uh, just, just left us. And, uh, what he said to me

00:54:42.740 is he said, you realize that our rules for freeing slaves after, I don't know what it is, seven years

00:54:48.620 or something like that were progressive in their time. Um, and he said, do you wish to be loyal to

00:54:56.160 the spirit of Judaism, which was progressive in its, in its day, literal Judaism. But if you tried

00:55:02.180 to implement slavery now, you'd be absolutely regressive. So you are in fact forced into

00:55:07.380 choosing between letter and spirit. And why is it that you have decided that the letter is the true

00:55:12.820 and the spirit is the false. And I think that, you know, you, you, you were pawing at this with the

00:55:19.520 Quran. And I think, I think this is an incredibly important issue, which is that the Quran resists 1.00

00:55:26.160 and I'm going to dip into science a little bit, a sort of regulated expression model.

00:55:31.700 So if you think about the discovery of the operon and DNA, where you have, uh, something that digests,

00:55:37.540 I don't know, sugar and, uh, you don't want that protein produced, uh, on mass when there's no sugar

00:55:46.440 around. So you have some repressor that sits on the DNA and when there's sugar around, the repressor

00:55:51.200 is lured off of it and the, uh, proteins are transcribed and they digest the sugar. And so

00:55:57.340 there are parts of the code that you want to be active sometimes and not active others.

00:56:02.580 So the problem of course, with, uh, Islam is, is that it really is very well constructed to resist 1.00

00:56:08.920 a lot of this innovation, which I think what is by the, be the, it's this concept that you're not

00:56:14.240 supposed to innovate, uh, around the literal. But, um, the fact is, is that regulated expression has

00:56:21.040 always been a part, uh, of these religions. And so if you find somebody who is claiming, no, no,

00:56:27.220 it's a literal, this is just, just literal. And we have to live by the letter of the book.

00:56:32.460 And you point out the contradictions and you point out all of these things, you point the thing about

00:56:36.100 spirit, you can start to say, you know, God, if, if God exists is certainly open source, we've, uh,

00:56:41.840 cracked the nucleus of the cell, the nucleus of the, of the atom. We, we've learned a tremendous

00:56:47.800 amount and God is inviting us to understand how he or she, uh, has put this whole construct together.

00:56:54.140 And so, you know, is it, it's clearly the Quran is not the last word, nor is the Torah, because,

00:57:02.260 uh, in fact, God has left so much information, uh, should he or she exist, uh, that wasn't available

00:57:08.740 then, which is our text. If I, you know, I spit into a tube at some point and send it off to 23 and

00:57:13.960 me. And I was astounded that it came back, uh, you know, Jew, it was like 96.8 Ashkenazi Jewish.

00:57:21.040 And so with, with the multiple parentheses around your name, those were added later, but, uh,

00:57:28.500 you know, I, I think that part of the problem is, is that, I mean, it's almost like the ISIS variant 0.98

00:57:35.360 really appeals to your logical, consistent mind saying, you know, if it is about the text and

00:57:40.880 the text is perfect, this is the, this is the closest, uh, any nation on earth has come to trying

00:57:46.740 to carry this out. And, you know, I, I was always bothered. Why is it that, that homosexuals are 1.00

00:57:52.620 thrown off of buildings? And I had to, you know, chase it down, as you must know, to the hadiths 1.00

00:57:56.780 where it says, you know, that sodomites should be taken to the tops of cliffs and thrown off and

00:58:01.240 buildings stand in for cliffs. And then, you know, the ultimate weirdness is the denial that

00:58:07.400 there is any link whatsoever between these texts. And let's say this particular method of execution

00:58:12.900 of these supposed sodomites. And I think it's actually entirely possible to push back against 0.87

00:58:18.700 these things by looking at the fact that everybody who sets themselves up as a literalist, uh, is in

00:58:26.160 fact going to be failing, uh, by one form or another. And so when you realize that we are all failing

00:58:30.800 to live within these religions, that it is impossible, uh, to be as they instruct, um,

00:58:38.860 everything opens up. And so I think that in part, uh, this is actually a Sam Harris trap,

00:58:43.640 uh, based upon, uh, your capacity to decamp and to explore internally consistent ideologies,

00:58:51.800 which you do not share.

00:58:53.200 Before I push back against any of that, let me just say that I have come to Jesus,

00:58:59.080 Jesus in the sense that I acknowledge that the trend that we have to foster is just what you 0.54

00:59:05.960 described. We, we need modernizing reformists, looser interpretations of all these traditions.

00:59:11.900 And that's, that's the end game for civilization. The end game is not for everyone to wake up on a

00:59:18.140 Tuesday agreeing with me that all of this is divisive nonsense and they have to be hang up their

00:59:23.060 shingle as, as atheists or skeptics. But first of all, my concern, my concern is that any analogy to

00:59:28.800 Judaism is very likely misleading in the sense that Judaism really is an idiosyncrasy for, for,

00:59:35.260 for many reasons, theologically, historically, as a matter of just demographics at this moment. And

00:59:41.220 I mean, it's, it's true to say of Judaism and impossible to say of most other religions that you 0.82

00:59:48.320 can find people who, for whom the religion, their Judaism is very important. And they might even be

00:59:54.360 rabbis and they might even be conservative rabbis, although they're, they're not going to be ultra

00:59:58.000 orthodox and they believe almost nothing in the books, right? They just, they're, they're wedded to

01:00:03.160 the tradition. They like the music. They like Shabbat. They like the, the, the food.

01:00:06.940 The food isn't so great.

01:00:08.060 That I think is objectively true.

01:00:09.440 Sam, do you know the only problem with Jewish cooking? 1.00

01:00:11.560 No.

01:00:12.560 72 hours later, you're hungry again.

01:00:14.120 Oh, so I think analogies to Judaism are dangerous because so many Jews, even quote, 1.00

01:00:23.960 religious Jews are deeply secular and some believe almost nothing supernatural in the service of their

01:00:31.500 religion. And I've, you know, I debated them. The one instance I keep coming back to is I was

01:00:35.780 debating, I think it was, it was Hitch. It was a debate that Hitch and I did with two rabbis 0.90

01:00:41.380 David Wolpe and Rabbi Artson, I think it was. And at one point I said something that presupposed

01:00:48.880 that I think it was Wolpe who's, who's conservative, he's not reformed. I said something that presupposed

01:00:53.720 that he believed in a God who can hear our prayers. And he turned to me and he said, just aghast,

01:00:58.920 he said, well, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear our prayers? Right. And so,

01:01:02.580 and then, you know, I was momentarily flabbergasted. It's like, so what are we,

01:01:06.580 what do you actually believe? You know, given that you do, this is your full-time job.

01:01:11.380 But you can't really map that onto Islam or Christianity. Certainly it's American variant

01:01:20.100 in any realistic way. But my other, my problem with some of what you said there is that, yes,

01:01:26.600 you can take the claim about slavery in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, that you can say, well,

01:01:33.400 there's the letter here, but then there's the modernizing spirit or the liberalizing spirit

01:01:39.240 of the text. But I just have two issues with that. One is that it was possible even 2,000 years ago

01:01:47.480 to understand ethically that slavery was wrong and to have a tradition that just repudiated it

01:01:53.720 or certainly never endorsed it. That kind of wisdom was, you know, among the Jains or the Buddhists.

01:01:59.640 I'm sure there are Greek philosophers who I can't think of at the moment who thought slavery was

01:02:03.820 wrong. It was possible to have that insight. And my other fundamental concern is just that

01:02:10.460 it would be possible for you and I to invent a religion right now that was better than any

01:02:17.280 existing religion. In fact, we could make it just as irrational. We could put a hell at the back of it,

01:02:23.200 like believe this list of propositions and be committed to these behaviors, or you will spend 0.97

01:02:28.440 eternity in hellfire after death. But the list of propositions and behaviors we would come up with

01:02:34.740 would be fundamentally benign and constructive and a much better operating system for a global

01:02:42.020 civilization in the 21st century than any of these religions. I'm not sure about that.

01:02:47.000 Okay. Well then, but if you're not sure about that, then take your favorite of the old school

01:02:50.440 religions and just remove a few of the bad precepts. You know, just change the bit about

01:02:55.160 homosexuality and slavery. And you've, you've in, in 30 seconds, you've improved Judaism and 0.93

01:03:00.460 Christianity and Islam. So, well, in part, um, I'm not sure the best way of making this point.

01:03:06.840 There, there are several things I care about other than truth. And one of them is fitness,

01:03:10.660 uh, in the sort of, uh, sense of, uh, natural sexual selection.

01:03:16.460 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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01:03:51.560 Thank you.

01:03:56.220 Thank you.

01:03:56.500 Thank you.

01:03:56.520 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 01, 2016

#41 — Faith in Reason

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