#449 — Dogma, Tribe, and Truth
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Summary
In this episode, Ross Douthat joins me to talk about his new book, "Believe," and why he thinks religion is a necessary part of a healthy culture. We talk about the role of religion in shaping our culture, and how it intersects with the challenges we face as a society.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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I am here with Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks for joining me.
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So, we've never met. Am I right in thinking that?
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No, this is the closest I've come to your physically embodied presence.
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All right. Well, let's see if the internet keeps us together here for the requisite hour
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or hour or two. Well, so I've been reading your book this week, Believe, which, when did
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Yeah, it came out, I think, February of this year, of 2025.
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And this is where you make your case for the rationality and even necessity of religion,
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which I think we're going to get to because I think you and I have a—we share a sense
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that our culture is ailing, but I think we probably diverge, at least on several key points
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as to whether religion is part of the cure or part of the disease. But we don't—you
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know, I don't think—I mean, I think our core concerns are so held in common so fully that
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I think we—I don't know. I'm interested to see where this conversation goes because it's not—I
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don't want to have and I don't think we will produce a conventional debate about—between
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an atheist and a believer about the rationality of faith, although I think some of those points
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Yeah, we'll have a dynamic interaction that ends with your conversion.
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Yeah, well, that's how you sold this to me, right?
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On both, you know, if you're right, we're both hoping for that.
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Okay, so I think we should probably start with the problem. What most worries you at this
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moment when you look at—because you spend a lot of time thinking about politics, as
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I do. You probably spend more—you're over at the New York Times commenting on culture
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regularly. What most concerns you at this moment?
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I guess big picture, a little bit separate from the turbulence of politics right now,
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is I'm worried about a kind of sense of human obsolescence in the 21st century that I think
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has been partially forged by the experience of digital culture and disembodied ways of living
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and is visible in a lot of different trends, including political polarization, but especially
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in sort of general unhappiness, anxiety, issues of mental illness, and so on, that are in turn
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connected to people not getting married, not having kids, and effectively not perpetuating
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And I think we're in the shadow right now of trends in artificial intelligence that,
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however far they go, are likely to kind of ramp up the pressure on human beings as human
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beings. And I wrote an essay, I think around the time, actually, that my book on religion
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came out, where I suggested that we were in this kind of bottleneck, almost, this kind of
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evolutionary bottleneck, which is maybe more a cultural evolutionary bottleneck, but where
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there was just going to be all this pressure on human nations, human cultures, human families,
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human individuals to sort of figure out how to live under this, you know, very, very novel
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technological dispensation. And that a lot of institutions, people, whole countries might
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not make it through that, you know, with extreme examples being, you know, nations in East Asia,
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like South Korea and Taiwan that have incredibly low birth rates to the point where it's unclear
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how these nations will survive the next 50 or 60 years. And yeah, so I think that's, maybe
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that's a slightly unusual way of putting it, but I think this is a widely shared concern
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that shadows a lot of, again, a lot of more immediate political debates, like in a lot
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of the kind of new polarization of our era, the, you know, reactionary and far left politics
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And I think you can see people sort of searching for a form of politics that's adequate to
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the 21st century challenge. And I don't think people have found it at all. And I think our
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politics is a mess because of that. But I think people are sensing that we're in a pretty unique
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squeeze on human cultures as we've known them, and we need to figure out how to get through.
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Yeah. It's interesting that, just take the AI piece as a first facet of this ghastly object.
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It's interesting that even in success, I mean, even in perfect success, if AI amounts to exactly
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the drudgery-canceling all-purpose technology that we hope for without any of the terrifying
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downsides, many people are still worried that this could be something like an extinction-level
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event for human purpose, human solidarity, human culture. I mean, just people are terrified
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that without the necessity of work, to take just one piece here, we, not all of us certainly,
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but most people will find life much harder to live. I actually don't share that concern.
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If you do, maybe you can prop up that fear because I think there's reasons to think that's
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I mean, I think it depends on the human being and the human culture. Do I think that the human
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race will be able to survive and find ways to flourish and thrive and do amazing new things
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under optimal AI conditions, even if that means that lots of jobs go away? In the long run,
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yes, I'm in that sense a long-range optimist about the future of the human species. I think
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anything short of the total dystopian AI scenarios are scenarios in which human beings are going to be
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able to survive and thrive. But I think there's going to be a lot of turbulence, angst, difficulty,
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and sort of disappearance along the way, that there are going to be all these forms of life and ways
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of living that are just not adapted to, again, even the world we live in now with kind of this level of
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digital existence, sort of people separated from physical reality, from meeting other people in
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reality. Like there's already a lot of strain on very basic things like having friends, getting
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married, having kids. And when you add in, let's say, lots and lots of jobs disappearing and a kind
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of, you know, existential metaphysical anxiety about AI being able to sort of substitute for things that
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we thought of as human distinctives, plus, you know, whatever other weirder forces come in. Yeah,
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I think it is a very difficult situation that people need to be prepared for, I guess is how I
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would put it. It doesn't mean that we're doomed at all, but some things are going to be doomed some
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places and people are going to be doomed. And you want to start thinking now, really, you want to start
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thinking, you know, 25 years ago about how you, right, like you as a, you know, a person with
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relationships and friendships and you as someone who's involved in culture and politics, what you're
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doing that is sort of making your humanity resilient, I think, against these forces.
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Yeah. So if you take the job piece, which is really the first point of concern for people,
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imagine a world where something like UBI was the necessary response to all of the abundance that
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AI has created. So people don't have to work. Everything has become like chess, which is to say the
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computers are better at everything or virtually everything that humans have used to do to work.
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Clearly, we need to figure out some new ethic and economics and politics around the non-necessity of
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human labor and figure out how to spread the wealth around. And so at that point, it would be true to
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say that, you know, something like UBI, I don't know if UBI is the actual right framing, but let's say
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that was the case. Many people, certainly most people commenting on this issue seem to think that
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most of their neighbors, if not themselves, need to spend eight hours a day doing something they
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might not want to do in order to feel like they have a purpose in life. But it seems to me we have
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a kind of ready sample of people, a fairly large population if you look at it historically, who
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haven't had to work and figured out how to live reasonably or at least recognizably happy lives under
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those conditions. And those are, we call them rich people, right? Or aristocracies of one flavor or
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another, right? People who really didn't have to figure out what to do that others would pay them
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for. Or if they did that early in their lives, they got to a point where they didn't have to do it any
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longer. And then they had to figure out what to do with leisure. And it would seem very surprising to
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me if in the presence of unlimited leisure, we as a species and as a culture couldn't figure out how
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to enjoy it. I mean, there might be some painful bottleneck where, you know, all the people who were
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totally dependent on drudgery to find some structure in their lives, you know, spin out of
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control. But it just seems like this is this would be a problem of education and culture and a new kind of
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ethical and political conversation rather than some kind of insuperable obstacle that we couldn't clear.
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Yeah, I mean, I'll be more pessimistic a little bit. I mean, first, I would say that in my most
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optimistic, my optimistic scenario for AI is a kind of middle ground scenario where, which I also think
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is fairly likely in terms of the capacities of AI to just sort of replace human labor. I think the people
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who think it's more likely to be a complement to various kinds of human labor, that you'll still have
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lots of people, you know, working jobs and doing things in the world that earn money. I'm hopeful that that is
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still the most likely pathway. In the pathway, even in the limit, I mean, you actually think you're hopeful
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that even in with 100 years of progress, that's likely to be how we organize ourselves.
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Again, one of the striking things about AI as a journalist who tries to write about it and like you
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interview people about it is that, you know, even the people who see deeply into the technology
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struggle to sort of form any kind of consensus predictions about just how far it would go.
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My basic view tends to be that I'm skeptical of true superintelligence theories. I'm skeptical
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that you get to a point where they're embodied in the world in ways that are completely substitutionary
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for what human beings can do. Some of that probably does have to do with some views I have about
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the human mind that are connected to religious ideas and assumptions, maybe. But let's just for
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the sake of the conversation, let's say that you're right and or not that you're right per se, but
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you know, that this this world is is the one we head into where there is some kind of guaranteed basic
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income derived from the productivity of robots and so on. I think you have to work very hard,
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very hard, given human nature as we have it, to prevent that from being a world where lots and lots
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of people lead fundamentally debased lives. I think you said enjoy, you know, enjoyment,
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right, or pleasure and so on, right? Like, yes, leisure, people, leisure, people with leisure,
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seeking pleasure. It's very easy. And we see this again, right, right now in, I think, societies around
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the world, it's very easy to default to a kind of round the clock entertainment cycle. This is before
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you even get into issues related to, you know, drug use and so on. It's just like they're, you know,
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the experiments we have with UBI, while not entirely depressing or not super optimism inducing. And just
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to take your example of the aristocracy. So the historical aristocracy in the Western world, one,
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lots of aristocrats did have to work because they were managing large estates or engaged in politics to
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protect those large estates. Lots of them fought in wars and got killed in large numbers and found
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purpose and meaning in that form. And then there was also just this constant struggle within
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aristocratic groups to prevent decadence and debasement. You know, if you think about the
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stereotypes of the third generation Rockefeller or Vanderbilt, as opposed to the first one,
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it's not like, oh, you know, these people are all sitting in an English garden, reading Plutarch's
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lives and, you know, painting watercolors. They're out sort of wasting their inheritance
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and squandering it and being, you know, yeah, being sort of debased and decadent. And I think
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such a society, the society you're envisioning, it could create you. I'm not going to say you can't
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create a world where the mass of human beings gets to have like a Montesquieu style aristocratic
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reverie experience, but it would be incredibly hard and require constant for a constant, constant
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reinvention, constant effort in ways that we have never seen in the human society to date.
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So you just have to be I think you just have to be aware of the magnitude of the challenge if you're
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talking about a purely leisure based society. You know, one interesting model is the vision of
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something like Star Trek, right, where you have this kind of utopian vision where apparently some form
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of, you know, AI and things related to AI have relieved scarcity and want and so on. And that's
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a show, a story that's all about human daring and mastery and accomplishment. But it does focus on
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people who are choosing to be explorers, who have set up a system where they're still in charge of
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the ship, even if the computer could make better decisions, right? There's never a moment where
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Kirk or Picard says to the computer, OK, you decide how to handle the Romulans, right? And then you
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also don't know, like, what is actually going on on Earth? Are people just, you know, people are
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just sort of hanging out? Like, everyone isn't doing space exploration. I think the question of
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what the average citizen of the Federation is doing with their life under Star Trek conditions is sort
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of the question that sci-fi speculative thought needs to reckon with in the sort of AI abundance
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scenario. Well, I didn't think we were going to talk about AI, Ross, but I think it's an interesting
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window onto some of these concerns because, well, first let me just add a little fine print so that
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you understand the abundance I think is conceivable. You know, I'm not by nature an optimist and I'm not
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optimistic really that we're going to escape some of the real downsides of AI. But if we were, I think
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it would be surprising to find that the only thing keeping us sane was that most people spend most of
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their lives doing kind of fairly arbitrary things to earn a living that they, at least they imagine
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they'd rather not do, and only to get to the weekend where they're free to debauch themselves.
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And there's, yeah, and that just basically having that kind of the opportunity costs thrown up
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against a life of pure leisure was the thing keeping us relatively sane. I think we just have the same
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problem. But do you think that, I don't know if that's a fair description exactly of how, the way
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human beings think about work historically, yes, it obviously does have elements of, you know, arbitrary
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force productivity and toil. I think of the broad achievement of modern civilization, though,
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as one that has partially, not completely, but partially liberated people from the purely arbitrary
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and punitive nature of work that's allowed lots and lots of people, not just a narrow elite,
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to have jobs that they take some kind of genuine satisfaction in that are themselves sources of
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community. I think one of the lessons of the COVID era and the work from home era is that not everyone,
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but lots and lots of people did find a form of sort of community and solidarity and so on in
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the workplace, in those kind of collective action that employment offers, even when it's not the
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most exciting thing in the world. And then it's also, yeah, I mean, it's not like historically people
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who are working, I mean, a historical model in the United States of America, right, for long periods
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of time has been communities and situations that are oriented around family, where you are working for
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your family, you're working to support them in agrarian societies, you're working collectively
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with your family. And again, I don't want to say from a 21st century perspective, like, you know,
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the dignity of the toiling surf for something like, obviously, there's incredible impositions involved
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in work and child rearing and all these things in most of human history. But I think it's too dismissive
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to say, you know, oh, we're just liberating people from something that is inherently forced upon them
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that they don't really want. I think people are working creatures, they're communal creatures,
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they like doing things together, they like having a sense of mission, they like doing things to help
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the people closest to them. So you are taking something away if you're saying, oh, no, here's
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your, you know, here's your UBI and just decide what to do with yourself.
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But Ross, any part of a job that maps on to what people actually like doing that they would do for
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free? Well, then that's the precisely the kind of thing they would presumably they would do if they
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could do anything they wanted, right? If they were given 24 hours in the day to spend however they
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wanted with their friends and family and with other collaborators they meet, all of this, you know,
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highly potentiated by access to unlimited intelligence and wealth. And again, this is the
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Then, you know, if they want to become, you know, Christian contemplatives or build houses that are
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bespoke for people who want their houses built by human artisans or whatever the, I mean, it would
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be, it could be Burning Man for half the people and, you know, Meister Eckhart for the other half.
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There would just be no impediment to just using your attention the way you want to use it.
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And that's, it's just, we're living in that condition anyway, except it's just framed by
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periods of time where most people have to do things they, at least within their own minds,
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they think, well, I wish I were free to do less of this and more of the thing I really want to do.
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And I think, I think you and I both fear that, you know, most people are capable of wanting to do
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the wrong things, right? I mean, we're, we're, our attention gets captured by, you know, mere
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entertainment, say more than, than in retrospect seems good for us. And so we're, we're, I think
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you're worried and I'm also worried, but we're already in that culture now. It's just, people
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just don't have unlimited time to explore it. We're worried about a kind of a digital entanglement
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with, with things not worth paying attention to on some level.
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Yes. And I, and I, I agree with you. I think we are in some version of that culture now. And so far,
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the results are that large numbers of people given a profound degree of freedom, but also confronted
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with incredibly addictive devices, substances, and entertainments to varying degrees, lose themselves
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in those things and don't do, don't, don't do Burning Man or Meister Eckhart. Don't, again,
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don't get married, don't have sex, which is sort of, you know, the, the, the interesting endpoint for
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now of the liberated 21st century society is not more sex, but less sex. These, again, you, I think
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you need, it's not that you can't imagine a society that has perfect abundance and also does not fall
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prey to these kinds of snares, but you have to imagine entirely novel forms of essentially
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communal and political self-restraint imposed on those human tendencies. Or maybe, I mean, look, I,
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you know, maybe there are people who would say, well, no, what you need are pharmaceutical
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interventions, right? Instead of Soma from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to sort of, you know,
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take the edge off everything, you need, you know, a perfected ozempic that removes, you know, that,
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that cures original sin, right? Cures, cures, cures certain kinds of temptations. I mean, I think
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there's a lot of different narratives you could offer. All I would say is, I think you need a pretty
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dramatic, pretty substantial change in either human nature or human societies to prevent the perfect
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abundance future from looking like Brave New World, looking like the, you know, sort of the spacecraft
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in WALL-E, like where, you know, or a world, a world that has a kind of, a kind, maybe a kind of,
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you know, digital age aristocracy that does seem to be doing pretty well, but that doesn't have a large,
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large share of human beings, again, sort of debased by the experience of addictive conditions under,
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and plenty. Well, it seems like we need some radical changes, even in our current situation,
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with respect to our culture. What's your view of what's happening right of center? I mean, I know
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you consider yourself right of center, and I don't know how far right, but... Depends. Yeah, perhaps,
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perhaps you can... Depends on the month. Give me the potted... The potted version? The bio of your
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political persuasion, but then let's talk about what's happening in the Republican Party in America.
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The potted bio is that I'm some kind of religious conservative who has, generally, like in the
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past, I have been more focused on religious and cultural issues.
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