In this episode of the Russell Brand podcast, "Under the Skin," Russell interviews me about how I got into Atheism and why I think it's a good idea to have a face-to-face conversation with someone who doesn't share my views on some of the things we discuss in The Waking Up Podcast. I also announce a new event I'm hosting with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver, Canada on June 23rd and 24th. Tickets for that event are now available for pre-sale to supporters of the podcast. If you're interested in going to that event, you should act sooner rather than later, because once it becomes available to the general public, it may well sell out as quickly as the first one did. And if you're not a supporter and did not get that code, please email us at info@samharris.org to get a discount code to get tickets to the second event, which is happening on June 24th and 25th. Sam Harris is a writer, neuroscientist, philosopher, and host of the Podcast, "Waking Up With Sam Harris." He s written five books and is a regular contributor to The New York Times Bestsellers. He is a proponent of secularism, vegetarianism, and vegetarianism. He has two daughters. He s previously studied both Eastern traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Buddhism. He's a jiu-jitsu, and he's made several trips to India. He s a vegetarian, making several visits to India, and a vegetarian. Sam is a married father of two daughters, who is a champion of vegetarianism and vegetarian meditation. and he is a devotee of jiu jitsu, which he calls himself "Jiu jiu." He has argued that science can determine moral values and a free will, and that the moral landscape is a free-minded, free will and free-thinking. And he s a good humanist. . I would like to thank my listeners for all the support they've shown me, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you, the listeners who've been kind enough to send me their thoughts on what they think I can do better in the next episode of "Under The Skin" and what they'd like me to write about it. I can't wait to hear from you. -Sam Harris - -- "The Waking up Podcast" - "Sam Harris"
00:02:52.380And tickets for that event are now available to supporters of the podcast.
00:02:56.060A pre-sale code has gone out to you by email.
00:02:59.800If you're a supporter and did not get that code, please email us at info at samharris.org.
00:03:06.020And if you're interested in going to that event, you should act sooner rather than later,
00:03:10.780because once it becomes available to the general public, it may well sell out as quickly as the first one.
00:03:16.440Just to be clear, Jordan and I will try to cover different ground at the two events.
00:03:24.780So going to both wouldn't necessarily be a waste of your time if you're into this sort of thing.
00:03:30.180We will try to move on from whatever progress we make the first night.
00:03:34.760And we'll probably go out in advance to all of you for questions and topics so as to make sure we cover a different set of five or ten each night.
00:03:43.540I'm not sure how many events like this will do, but if you've been paying attention, you'll know that Jordan has been having quite an impact,
00:03:52.280especially on the minds of young men, for better or for worse.
00:03:56.940And I would say for better and for worse.
00:03:59.760It's pretty clear to me that much of it is for better and certainly some of it's for worse.
00:04:06.220And I just think it is a very intriguing social phenomenon, which could be straightened out.
00:04:15.420So insofar as I can help make sense to our respective audiences, I will try to do that for as long as it seems useful
00:04:22.220and hope to broadcast at least the best parts here on the podcast.
00:08:57.900I was aware of people like Richard Dawkins for their science, but I was not someone who had read books on atheism.
00:09:06.220And so my first book, The End of Faith, which really, really initiated this publishing phenomenon that was called The New Atheism.
00:09:13.160Because then it was me and then Dawkins and then I came out with my second book and then Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, all of us had these books that came out.
00:09:21.640I never even used the word atheism in The End of Faith.
00:09:24.520And it wasn't that I thought not to use it.
00:09:28.220So I was just talking about the conflict between reason and faith, the conflict between science and religion, the obvious untenability.
00:09:36.320I mean, the actual proper horror of the fact that we have a world that is shattered into these separate religious communities and these separate and incommensurable worldviews based on an adherence to these ancient books.
00:09:49.660And that struck me then and strikes me now as just as perverse as people blowing themselves up over rival interpretations of Shakespeare.
00:09:58.260I mean, just imagine there was some Hamlet cult versus some King Lear cult, right?
00:10:02.780And people are willing to die for these differences.
00:10:08.640I mean, our world is just that absurd.
00:10:10.300And so I reacted to all of this in the aftermath of September 11th without ever defining myself in my own mind as someone who was now shilling for atheism.
00:10:20.480But then I got inducted into the conversation about atheism.
00:10:23.960So it's somewhat ironic that atheist is one of the first words in my bio, but it's not an identity.
00:10:33.180Although you're, as you say, you're kind of the inciting incident of your public life, your life as a public intellectual was 9-11, which you rigidly define as a, I suppose, judging from what you've just said, as a religious event primarily or an act of religious violence.
00:10:55.220It was clearly that you might want to talk about other variables that could explain it or that could have other motives that people might have.
00:11:04.640You know, you might want to talk about politics or economics or U.S. foreign policy or the legacy of colonialism.
00:11:10.280But I think it is absolutely clear that while those variables account for some of the misbehavior in our world, there are still people who get up in the morning with 100 percent of their motivation being a religious expectation of an afterlife.
00:11:28.800I can just find you these people who have none of the other variables that people would want to use to explain the terrestrial variables, economics, politics.
00:11:38.220There are people who have never suffered any economic insecurity who devote their lives to jihad.
00:11:43.920There are people who drop out of the London School of Economics who are British citizens so that they can go fight with ISIS.
00:11:51.840What does that, to you, imply, the toxicity of religious ideology?
00:12:02.560I mean, this is the horrible paradox here.
00:12:04.520I think the experience of people, even in the most extreme, and we might want to say psychopathic cults, something like ISIS, the experience, by and large, is not of being a psychopath.
00:12:20.040Obviously, my criticism of religion is much wider than focusing on fundamentalist Islam.
00:12:24.480But to take this case, many people think that ISIS was acting like a bug light for the world's psychopaths, that only psychopaths would go over there and behave this badly.
00:12:36.680And then what you're talking about is bad people who would behave badly anyway.
00:12:42.340These are people who were going to rape and kill anyway, and they just found an excuse or a pretext by which to do it under the aegis of religion.
00:12:52.160I mean, we just know enough about the bios of these people.
00:12:54.900And you would never say that of someone who was observing some other religious behavior slavishly under some doctrine.
00:13:04.920So you wouldn't say that—you wouldn't explain the behavior of people at the mass, the Catholic mass, you know, where they line up to eat a cracker.
00:13:13.780You wouldn't say, well, this is just politically motivated cracker-eating behavior.
00:13:18.080These people would find pretext to eat crackers on Sundays anyway.
00:13:22.000They would ritualize their cracker-eating behavior for some other reason.
00:13:25.480They have a belief that explains exactly what they're doing with this cracker.
00:13:30.200This is a doctrine that they're following, and if the doctrine were different—if the doctrine said eat two crackers, they'd be eating two crackers.
00:13:36.940But, like, personally, and presumably you would agree with this, the Catholic mass is serving a particular function, as all ritual and ceremony is.
00:13:47.120And the literalness of the cracker is secondary to its evident perfunctory role as a place for social cohesion, acknowledgement of mortality, and the potential for the human soul or the human essence to aspire to something beyond the carnal blood and body drives.
00:14:10.500If we take Christ from a more theological as opposed to sort of reductive, simplistic, and I think, for me personally, spiritually useless perspective, as the metaphor of Christ being the potential for transcendence beyond the flesh individual to the enlightened male or the enlightened being, I suppose.
00:14:34.160But then the mass, for me, is an opportunity to ceremoniously acknowledge that meaning.
00:14:41.300So, like, I would look at a mass and go, oh, this ain't about literally eating crackers.
00:14:46.320And even the metaphor as explicitly stated in the scriptural terms of that denomination, there's more—even that is limiting.
00:14:56.020I would say that people's drive to do that is myriad.
00:15:01.100But you're flipping the logic of what I'm saying.
00:15:03.200So I'm saying that the thing that explains the actual ritual, the cracker eating, is the doctrine, right?
00:15:09.600If the doctrine were different, if Jesus had said, well, this bread has nothing to do with my body, so it doesn't matter what you do at the mass, right?
00:15:18.520To eat anything is to pollute your body.
00:15:20.160You should just be thinking about me, right?
00:15:21.600If that was the doctrine, there would be no cracker eating ritual, right?
00:15:25.200So the doctrine is, I mean, it's a bizarre act of human sacrifice and cannibalism at the bottom of it, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
00:15:33.840But it does, if you look at the roots of agricultural deity worship and the relationship between the known and the unknown and the necessity to have a relationship with plants and seasons.
00:15:43.320It doesn't make sense that people would want to be eating his body.
00:15:55.860I will grant you that many people aren't thinking about it literally now, but that's just to say they've lost their faith in the actual doctrine of the church.
00:16:04.020And also, I think we have to look beyond rationalism.
00:16:06.200I think when we're dealing—you know, you're a man who's deeply interested in mysticism and spirituality and anything.
00:16:10.600Once it's on the plane of the corporal and the rational, then to evaluate the symbols purely rationally, they're always going to be sort of kind of left wanting.
00:16:21.840Because, yeah, eating a wafer or drinking some wine.
00:16:24.960But if you have a relationship with the wholeness—
00:17:40.580—unwittingly or otherwise into what's become known as the new atheistic movement, that for me, what—this is a question, I suppose.
00:17:49.600That particular event, taken in isolation, is like, you know, barbaric and horrific and dreadfully cinematic and totemic, but definitely taking place within a historical context.
00:18:08.200For me, the variables that you fleetingly mentioned—economics, colonialism—these are like, how do we delineate?
00:18:15.880How do we sort of—where are these imaginary lines drawn between this is religious violence, this is political violence, this is acceptable violence?
00:18:33.760What do you think—we have to resort to individualism as opposed to cultural, national movements?
00:18:39.440You have to say, that individual's crazy, but that state and that state's actions—
00:18:43.180I would first say that very few of these people are crazy.
00:18:45.540So let me just break this down a little bit, because there are many different types of violence.
00:18:50.660There are crazy people who are just crazy in the more clinical sense of that term, which is to say they're suffering some thought disorder.
00:18:59.740They're suffering from some kind of delusion, right?
00:19:02.640So, you know, many of these people are schizophrenic, but there are probably other ways we want to class a thought disorder here.
00:19:38.920Now, there are people who do horrific things for no ideological motive, no rational animus, but purely because they're crazy.
00:19:49.060So you take, like, one example would be probably this guy, Adam Lanza, who went into the school in Newtown and killed 20-some-odd children and half a dozen teachers, right?
00:21:20.880The worst case is there are people who are as good, who are as moral and as ethical and as committed to the well-being of themselves and others as you and I are who still go in and shoot up schools and kill everybody and hope to die in the process because they think they can get into paradise that way.
00:21:39.940So when members of the Taliban went into a school in Pakistan and killed, I think it was 137 kids and burned their teacher alive in front of them, you have to ask yourself, well, do you think all members of the Taliban who did this and then all of those in the Taliban who endorsed this were all just psychopaths or mentally ill?
00:21:59.600Well, no, no, if you listen to what they're saying, if you listen to what they believe, if you read the texts that they think are the verbatim word of the creator of the universe, it all falls into place.
00:22:10.060This is perfectly rational behavior given the requisite beliefs, and that is what is so horrible about this kind of dogmatism.
00:22:16.340But even that process, that sort of extreme example of the execution of children in schools, it would be sort of an elective reading of even that particular doctrine.
00:22:23.860There would be particular passages you go, oh, here's the passage.
00:22:46.420My general feeling is that the Quran holy is like most religious scripture.
00:22:52.000The intention is to create a social environment where people are benevolent and cohesive, which ultimately became a tool for social control as a result of the way the power structures.
00:23:07.880I think, again, I wouldn't deliberately misread the metaphor.
00:23:10.860For me, life after death, and this is a person that spent two years in a silent retreat.
00:23:14.360I would gather you would dig this, is that beyond the life that is determined by primal desires and biographical wants and your imagination of yourself, there is a life after the death of that individual.
00:23:28.740After that individual dies and you recognize that the temporal can never provide fulfillment, you gain access to a sort of a second life, an afterlife.
00:23:38.140The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth and man sees it not.
00:23:41.640The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the life after the death of your ego.
00:23:46.340I would say, if it's not talking about that, I don't know what it's talking about and what the value of that would be as a manual for being human.
00:24:04.680Go on, do your flag, and then we're going back to the schools.
00:24:06.500I just want to acknowledge that whatever you're reading is, most people most of the time think that the afterlife is a literal place you go after you die, that consciousness survives the death of the body.
00:24:20.340And in the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Christian and the Islamic tradition, it really matters whether you believe the right thing or not.
00:24:28.380In fact, this life doesn't matter at all, and that's what's so corrosive about this belief system.
00:24:32.500Sure, but let's look at some of the alternatives.
00:24:36.240Now, we just there devised a barometer of degrees of madness and the worst types of madness and the worst way to have your kids murdered in a school by which particular type of madman.
00:24:45.960But we should probably bring into the mix from the sky by a drone.
00:24:49.400For me, I don't want my kids killed in a school for any ideology, whether it's grounded in rationalism and economics or whether it's a book that's a bit older and more, I don't know, esoteric or colorful or imaginative.
00:25:08.000But what I suppose what I suppose the heart of what I want to get to is whilst undoubtedly religion has been used to justify violence from all types of angles in different historical moments and, you know,
00:25:23.920Buddhist violence in Burma and Christian violence in, you know, like in the Middle East or secular violence underwritten by Christianity,
00:25:31.800resourced entirely from Christianity and sort of Christian dualistic notions undertaken by far right Christian presidents and whatever.
00:25:40.480Or, you know, sort of the more lucid, livid and obvious and contemporaneous far right extremist Islamic violence.
00:25:50.460It's like, how do we see that as distinct from rational violence, political violence, particularly when that is far more potent, far more widespread and is, I would say, is the violence of the dominant culture.
00:26:04.360What interests me, Sam Harris, is power and the powerful.
00:26:07.480Like, and for me, I'm interested in who gets to decide who the other is, who gets to decide by what metric rationalism and religion is evaluated.
00:26:17.960And it seems to me that the kind of violence that's focused on in a lot of your work is the violence of desperate people, desperate and possibly subjugated people.
00:26:29.380And I would say to this, I know that you don't do this, but I want you to educate me on this, but to dismiss the colonial aspect, the economic aspect, the occupation of Middle Eastern countries, the historical.
00:26:41.900I mean, for me, it seems like how how can you conduct that extraction?
00:26:46.200How can you divorce those different types of violence?
00:26:48.640They seem to me to be part of one narrative.
00:26:50.760Well, I can do it very simply because you have examples, just to dissect out the variable of colonialism or oppression from the outside, you have examples of people who have been oppressed, as oppressed as any other people who don't resort to this kind of violence because they don't have the same belief structure.
00:27:07.240Here's an almost perfect scientific experiment.
00:27:10.500You have Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims living in the same occupied territories, right?
00:27:19.200Before the Israelis put up the wall, who was blowing themselves up in pizza parlors and discotheques, right?
00:27:31.440You have Coptic Christians in Egypt being murdered by their Muslim neighbors by suicide bombings who don't resort to their own suicide bombings in return, right?
00:28:13.380Because tomorrow morning, someone in Orange County will be converted to this belief system and want to fight in the name of this cause, and it's purely a matter of belief.
00:28:22.920It's as much a matter of belief as you wanting to go on a diet or learning to meditate or maybe I'll go to Hawaii this year for my vacation.
00:28:30.860I know that a belief is just a thought that you like having.
00:28:33.840But luckily, you know, you and I, we live in a sort of a secular society and our beliefs seldom come into opposition with the dominant philosophy.
00:28:48.600I think ideas are the most powerful things we've got.
00:28:51.960Ideas are the operating system for human life and human culture.
00:28:55.120And if we fail to build a civilization that works, it will be because of the failure of ideas or our failure to communicate good ideas to one another in such a way that's persuasive.
00:29:06.260So, I mean, how do you get 7 billion strangers to peacefully collaborate with one another?
00:29:11.560It is a matter of conversation that ultimately gets people to converge on common projects and common values.
00:29:20.180And when conversation fails, all we have is violence.
00:29:23.920There's really just two modes, conversation and violence.
00:29:26.220And what you're talking about, when you're talking about power and its misuses, you're talking about state violence or state coercion that you deem to be illegitimate.
00:29:36.960Now, I'll grant you, if we took a list of all of these cases, you know, CIA run coups in other countries.
00:29:43.600You know, you and I may just check the same boxes like, well, that looks illegitimate or that had consequences that could have easily been foreseen.
00:29:50.200Lots of people suffered and died there that shouldn't have.
00:29:54.660But when I'm looking at, when I prioritize shining the light of my criticism on specific ideas and specific human behavior, I'm looking by and large for the craziest and most dangerous ideas that should be, I mean, this is really the low-hanging fruit for bad epistemology.
00:30:14.300The human behavior that should seem impossible.
00:30:41.940When you're talking about the possibility of something like nuclear terrorism or biological terrorism that, you know, where someone tries to weaponize smallpox and kill 100 million people.
00:30:52.400Well, let's just mention that nuclear terrorism is not hypothetical.
00:31:20.160Just because perhaps there are narratives, Sam, that supersede the apparent narrative of nationalism and geopolitics where there is an economic determinant-
00:31:42.260Yeah, to see themselves in non-zero-sum arrangements with everyone else?
00:31:47.600And what will have to change to make that possible?
00:31:51.240And my concern with religion, religious fundamentalism, and not all religions equally, but my concern is that these are the beliefs that are held most closely.
00:32:03.240I mean, they're by definition non-negotiable.
00:32:05.220My faith-based beliefs are the beliefs that if you challenge them by whatever evidence or whatever argument, I will take that as a personal insult.
00:32:14.080And I will want to resort immediately to violence or the threat of violence.
00:32:31.860But when you say a suicide bomber, I admit that it's extraordinary and it's difficult for us to understand.
00:32:38.140But what I'm curious about, Sam, is what are the prerequisite conditions for suicide bombing even to be relevant?
00:32:45.380And I also can't help but thinking when I sort of feel – when we sort of recall events like Waco or any disruption or anything that sort of ruptures the sort of like the American mainframe – well, not American because I think this goes beyond nation.
00:32:58.520If you find yourself in opposition to the state, the means by which the state will deploy violence doesn't need to resort to sort of lurid, livid, blatant, clumsy acts like suicide bombing because the power is so evident.
00:33:12.720The ability to exert power and control is so total that it doesn't need sort of like almost the sort of graphic and horrific whimsy of something like a suicide bombing, albeit underwritten by something that looks peculiar to people like us that value life and value fire and don't have a belief system that's like, oh, I'll be in some sort of Valhalla subsequently.
00:33:34.660You were using Waco as an example of state oppression or suicidal sacrifice?
00:33:39.840I'm using it as an example of that if you – that the kind of violence that interests me is the violence of the truly powerful.
00:33:49.920And the kind of – so for me, like suicide, but I can see that it's kind of – it's gratuitous and sort of – and therefore an appealing form.
00:33:58.520But for me, when analysing 9-11, to focus on the perpetration of that event and the motivation of the individuals involved as opposed to the geopolitical circumstances and what happens generally when two narratives come into conflict with one another, shortchanges us and means that we focus –
00:34:21.420My sole interest, Sam, is who – like when you talk about how are we going to get these 7 billion people to cooperate and form communities based on mutual values, which for some reason I believe is a possibility.
00:34:33.280My own spirit – my own spiritual pursuits have led me to the point where I have a basic optimistic view of humanity.
00:34:39.120My own personal experience with Muslims has led me to believe that Islam is essentially a positive thing, essentially a positive thing.
00:34:47.700But that's a bad way to take its temperature because how many Muslims have you had a personal experience with?
00:34:52.240I'll grant you – I'll be very generous.
00:34:53.180Well, I know, but you're taking the temperature on the basis of bloody suicide bombers.
00:35:07.300Look, I didn't imagine that we'd have this conversation and there'd be a bit where you went, yeah, no, Islam's not that bad.
00:35:12.360I didn't come into this room thinking that.
00:35:14.580But it's worth connecting a few of these dots because it's not just a matter of the killing of people.
00:35:19.780I'm talking about how people want to live.
00:35:21.580So if you ask yourself – and this is just a thought experiment – if you ask yourself if you gave perfect power to any one group so they could impose their way of life on every other group.
00:35:32.000So you gave them – this is a magic wand argument that I use in my first book.
00:35:35.120You give Dick Cheney a magic wand, Dick Cheney, the prototypical evil mustache-twirling bastard who gave us the Iraq war and is as demonized on the left as anyone.
00:35:47.200What would he have done if he had the power just to make life in the Middle East and in Afghanistan any way he wanted it?
00:35:54.120It would have been overstated. It doesn't need – we did not need to conjecture.
00:35:56.540They said we want to remove the ability of our opponents to respond.
00:36:01.780It's in the public sphere. That's what they said to Cheney and Bush.
00:36:04.260We want to annihilate the possibility of response.
00:36:06.120Let's go a little further in our imagination.
00:36:09.420Do you actually think – and maybe Dick Cheney has been so demonized that he's the wrong case here.
00:36:14.320I don't have a strong opinion about Dick Cheney. It might be all right. He likes golf, no matter how you spell that word.
00:36:19.480This is what I would guess, right? Someone like Dick Cheney, if given unlimited – again, just magic, the resources of magic.
00:36:26.060We don't need magic. He said remove the ability for them to respond.
00:36:30.560You're doing a too narrow reading of that, right? Yes, we don't want these people to be able to attack us, right?
00:36:34.840That's the goal of the war. I'm saying –
00:36:36.480Or to oppose our objectives in the Middle East. We want to do whatever we want.
00:39:18.980The imposition of our heterogeneous, hegemonic ideas of how masculine and feminine relationships work might not be universally applicable.
00:39:29.920No, something is universally applicable.
00:39:32.800If it's not universal, we can understand those differences.
00:39:35.220So if there's a culture where they like spicy food and we don't, but eating spicy food is just another way to be happy as an ape, we can understand those differences biologically and culturally.
00:39:46.640The idea that it just may be as good a solution for how to maximize human well-being to put half the population in bags and not let them learn to read – I mean, I'm taking Afghanistan.
00:40:00.920I'm taking the local case of Afghanistan under the Taliban, actually Afghanistan currently as well.
00:40:07.000You're talking about women who have almost the worst possible life on planet Earth.
00:40:12.040I mean, we're talking about maternal mortality rates that are off the charts.
00:40:15.400You're talking about illiteracy that is – you have to go back 200 years in the West to find that level of illiteracy.
00:40:20.240I think this is precisely the kind of reasoning that's used to justify the bombing and commercial colonization of those territories.
00:40:30.860I don't think we're in a position to make those judgments.
00:40:33.380So then tell me how you would react to this.
00:40:35.860I have two daughters, and if I were thinking the way you were thinking about this issue, what if I thought it would be a great idea to have a cultural exchange program where I just sent my daughters over to Afghanistan to live with a Taliban family?
00:40:48.080So rather than go to summer school here and get prepared to go to an Ivy League college or whatever it is, I send them to live with the Taliban.
00:40:54.860You don't need to explain all this to me.
00:41:05.840So you're saying there's no right or wrong here, really.
00:41:08.020I don't think that there's – I'm not in a position – I think it's very different, me saying I've been born in the West, I've grown up in the West, my daughter's born in the West, now impose upon her a totally different set of values.
00:41:18.160I wouldn't want her to go to the Deep South either, like there's all sorts of things.
00:41:22.440I wouldn't want her to go to places in Britain.
00:41:24.420You don't think it's unlucky to be born a girl in Afghanistan five years ago?
00:41:28.240I think that these kind of sort of theoretical tableaus are used to create a false hierarchy and a moral superiority by a dominant culture that subsequently uses thinking of this nature to underwrite the modern-day colonization and subjugation of these people on a massive scale.
00:41:52.380And as barbaric and disgusting as 9-11 was, a daily 9-11 since then so that a state system can perpetuate itself using rationalism, using comfortable means of executions that glide slyly by all white in the sky is no better than the 9-11 that was a riposte too.
00:42:40.020But the language is important and who decides what language is used and who decides what is powerful and who decides what's rational violence and who decides what religion is even?
00:42:48.780Okay, but so let's treat these things point by point.
00:42:59.780So there's a fundamental claim that you have just made, at least implicitly, that I disagree with and that I wrote my third book to rebut.
00:43:08.000My third book, The Moral Landscape, is an argument that we can talk about questions of right and wrong and good and evil in universal terms.
00:43:16.300These are not merely cultural or personal affectations, right?
00:43:20.520It's not that we're not free to just make up-
00:43:22.000You can do one of your thought experiments in a minute.
00:43:35.400But this idea that it's all a matter of personal taste or all a matter of culture, right, it suggests that all cultures, therefore, the moment you make the link between questions of good and evil and the well-being of conscious creatures, like questions of happiness and suffering, right?
00:43:57.080I mean, that's a separate conversation we could have.
00:43:58.460But I think the only intelligible morality has to focus on human suffering, human well-being, and even more broadly to the suffering of any conscious system.
00:44:08.420If we're torturing pigs so as to get bacon, we have an ethical obligation to not do that, do that less, find a better way of doing that so that it's no longer torture, breed pigs that don't suffer, whatever it is.
00:44:23.660And the moment you grant that, you have to grant that not every culture and not every society and certainly not every family, right, has perfectly solved the human well-being problem, right?
00:44:39.520So if you find a family over here that's forcing their children to live in a basement for 20 years and to interbreed and not showing them the light of day, okay, this is a problem that society has an interest in.
00:44:51.680Now we're talking about power dynamics.
00:44:53.520The society has an interest in rescuing those children from their deranged and evil parents, right?
00:44:59.700This could be true just in a single city like Los Angeles, right, as happened very recently.
00:45:48.600When we interchange that with sort of subjugation of a family and keep people in the cellar.
00:45:53.900There's different levels of complexity.
00:45:55.300Now I'd like to, if I may, shift gears a little, Sam, because one of my great interests in you is your immense intellectual capacity and your, what do I want to call it, without being deliberately provocative, zeal and love of ethics and morality.
00:46:11.200And I would like to know how that relates to your personal spiritual life.
00:46:21.080Well, I mean, I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and I don't find it easy.
00:46:23.800I mean, for me, this stuff is the answer.
00:46:27.180Now, what, the reason I meditate, the reason that I embrace a spiritual life is because I believe, I have experienced, I've experienced that for me personally to become a valuable member of society, whether that's on the micro level of my family or, and hopefully on a broader level, I have to take personal responsibility for the fact that I'm a complex individual, that I, within me, all of the things I would condemn over the course of a podcast, talking to a brilliant man like yourself.
00:46:51.760Maybe one minute I'll condemn violence, another minute I'll condemn egotism and self-centeredness, that I am victim to all of these.
00:46:58.660I'm perpetrator of self-centeredness and egocentricism.
00:47:01.820And the tool that has helped me most to overcome these personal problems has been a kind of a spiritual Weltanschauung.
00:47:09.060And I planned to use that word with you today.
00:47:17.720So, like, so my spirituality has been my personal vehicle for carrying me away from sort of selfishness, self-destruction.
00:47:24.880And like I'm talking as a person that's overcome, you know, through the help of others and to a degree faith, I must say to a huge degree faith, my own addiction.
00:47:44.220No, neither of you have got no addiction background.
00:47:45.780No, Dan Harris had, Dan Harris, who's also, he's a friend, he's not, there's no relation, but he wrote the book 10% Happier and it was a big bestseller about mindfulness.
00:47:56.540And so he's had issues that he's talked about.
00:48:00.080So my personal experiences have been that sort of spirituality and a faith that is determined resolutely by, as best as possible, non-judgmentalism, benevolence, kindness, being of service to others, principles that, broadly speaking, don't require me to enter into conflict, but to be of service.
00:48:24.440This, for me, I think, is an incredibly valuable resource.
00:48:28.700And these things, and ethics in general, are drawn, not ultimately, because who knows what preceded religion, some form of theatre and ritual.
00:48:38.060Who knows what they're doing down deep in the dank of the forests, what gods they devise there.
00:48:44.660Well, precisely, where consciousness is a little more open.
00:48:47.540I suppose what I want to understand is, like, how does your personal spirituality serve you ethically?
00:48:54.160And where does that intersect with, beyond tolerance, because tolerance suggests that there's something to tolerate, where does it lead you to compassion and love?
00:49:04.100And what solutions do you think can be derived from your personal experiences of mysticism and spirituality?
00:49:11.900Well, I would say, first, that it really, while it may seem different from what we've been just talking about, it's of a piece with what we've just been talking about.
00:49:19.600And the reason why I have such passion for criticizing this particular species of bad ideas, the religious ones, is because I see the baby in the bathwater that everyone is afraid of losing.
00:49:29.500And I see that it doesn't require any divisive bullshit to be saved, right?
00:49:37.200You don't have to believe that a book was written by the creator of the universe.
00:49:40.120You don't have to believe that hellfire awaits people who don't call a historical person by the right name.
00:49:45.640You don't have to believe any of those things.
00:49:47.460And all of those things are absolutely integral to the doctrines of these religions.
00:49:51.760And there's many separate religions on offer that are incompatible.
00:49:55.660I'll stop you, because I think there's a point where religion and politics intersect, and it's not always clear where that line is drawn.
00:50:00.860And I would say that the point where spirituality stops being about kindness, love, fun, remember early in this podcast, you did a list of things that are difficult to quantify scientifically.
00:50:09.160And I would wonder how valuable and useful those image scans and neuro image scans are when dealing with fun and love.
00:50:18.420I'm sure they're a great service, I'm sure.
00:50:20.240But these things, the way that we access them, the way that we increase them, and to your earlier point, the way that we, as best as possible, eliminate suffering, for me, this is the function and the role of spirituality.
00:50:34.360And I think some of the furniture and ornamentation that religions have variously acquired due to the cultural inflections of the times in which they were conceived, for me, are less important and less relevant, whilst I acknowledge that I'm a relatively unique case.
00:50:47.360And some of the extreme issues that you're addressing, they're not imaginary.
00:50:56.060But this baby bathwater issue, I'm interested in the baby.
00:50:59.000And you're always on about the bathwater.
00:51:00.560Well, so what you just described about your own spiritual life and ethical life, it is obvious to me that there are universal principles there.
00:51:10.980That what you just described about the consequences of paying attention to certain things, so meditation, getting off certain substances that are not good for you, so breaking with addiction.
00:51:21.100These are universal features of what it's like to have a human mind that is based on human neurochemistry.
00:51:32.640And this is not something we just made up.
00:51:36.020It's not something that's purely a product of our time.
00:51:47.480It's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan.
00:51:51.120I'm not talking about, again, I'm not talking about the voluntary use of...
00:51:54.480You shouldn't use incendiary language.
00:51:56.220If you're here to convey love, then why use that?
00:52:00.140No, because how can you pretend to love girls if you're not as concerned as I am about this mistreatment of them?
00:52:06.140Because I don't pretend to understand complex historical and cultural issues from a very particular perspective of an American or an English white man.