David Berlinski is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He s author of Human Nature, as well as The Devil's Delusion, Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, and many other books. He's taught philosophy, math, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, and the University of Paris, and he's been a regular contributor to the New York Times and the New Republic. In this episode, he talks about his new book, "Human Nature," and why he thinks there's no such thing as a fixed human nature. He also talks about the role of essentialism in modern politics, and why it's important to have a good argument to argue that there's not a "fixed" human nature at all. And he explains why the argument against essentialism is so powerful and why we should all be prepared to defend it. Ben Shapiro is the host of the podcast The Ben Shapiro Show, a podcast that examines the intersection of politics and philosophy, and how they intersect in our everyday lives. The show is a must-listen for all things political, social, and psychological, and cultural. If you're looking for a political philosopher, you won't want to miss this special Sunday special of The Ben Show. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes or wherever else you get your news and information. Enjoyed the show? Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscriber choices and other links to our social media accounts. Send us your thoughts and comments about the show recommendations. Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special! and we'll be looking out for more episodes like this and more in the future episodes of the show! Thanks again, Ben Shapiro and more like this on Monday, coming soon! Timestamps: 5 stars! 5 stars is much more than you can v=1_a3m_t=1p&referenced_a&qid=8q8m3m3a7m&q&qref=a&t=8s&q=3q8s Thank you, Ben's Note: Thank you for the podcast is a big thank you for your support is much appreciated, Ben is looking forward to listening to this episode. Ben says so much of what you guys sent me out on the show and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much!
00:00:00.000All these guys who proclaim themselves enthusiastic defenders of reason, the Enlightenment, are simply a part of a very long Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:00:10.000and they are unwilling to see in their own faces the long tendrils stretching back into antiquity.
00:00:27.000This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
00:00:29.000I'm excited to welcome to the program David Berlinski.
00:00:31.000He's senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
00:00:35.000He's author of Human Nature, as well as The Devil's Delusion, Atheism, and its Scientific Pretensions, and many more books.
00:00:40.000He's taught philosophy, math, English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, University of Paris, so we have a lot to talk about.
00:00:46.000We'll get to all that in just one second.
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00:01:53.000So, let's talk a little bit about your book, Human Nature.
00:01:56.000The basic premise of the book is that there are a lot of folks across the political spectrum, it seems, who are very invested in the idea that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature.
00:02:06.000That humanity is intensely malleable and completely malleable.
00:02:11.000How pervasive do you think that feeling is in politics these days?
00:02:15.000I couldn't tell you about politics, but certainly as an intellectual tendency, I would put the percentage of people prepared to deny essentialism at roughly 99.999%, leaving a minuscule minority to affirm the obvious.
00:02:32.000Yes, there is such a thing as human nature.
00:02:52.000The question is, are there any properties such that those properties are necessarily true of a human being in virtue of his or her being a human being?
00:03:02.000One answer is no, there are no essential properties.
00:03:05.000Human beings are infinitely flexible, infinitely changeable, infinitely malleable.
00:03:10.000The contrary answer is yes, there are a suite of properties that necessarily define what it is to be a human being.
00:03:18.000This thesis was part of traditional philosophy.
00:03:21.000It was rejected in mid-20th century philosophy.
00:03:26.000It was a very powerful attack launched against essentialism and metaphysics, let's say.
00:03:56.000Why do you think there's been this attack on essentialism?
00:03:58.000What's the purpose of the attack on essentialism?
00:04:00.000The underlying purpose, one is philosophical, which is quite independent of everything else, but the other is political.
00:04:07.000After all, the governing axiom of the 20th century has been, human beings are infinitely malleable, and we who hold the power are prepared to exert that power to change them at will.
00:04:21.000This is, after all, what the essence of communism really is, an infinitely perfectible creature.
00:04:28.000And if it has to be perfected by brute force, we're prepared to exert brute force for the perfectibility of human beings.
00:04:35.000Without that assumption, many social forms of 20th century life become impossible.
00:04:42.000We see that every day in the United States, for example.
00:04:45.000Without the governing assumption that we can change human beings at will, certain tendencies are completely impossible.
00:05:03.000Is a man necessarily a man or a woman necessarily a woman?
00:05:07.000That immediately provokes a firestorm of controversy and indignation.
00:05:14.000The principle having been surrendered in the case of self-identity is absolutely incoherent.
00:05:22.000On the other hand, if you maintain there are some necessary properties of a human being, you're on very weak polemical ground when you try to draw the line, say, at sexual identity, or at racial identity, or at personal identity.
00:05:38.000So a lot depends on the intrinsic plausibility of the anti- or pro-essential argument.
00:05:45.000It's not a trivial philosophical issue, as we both know.
00:05:50.000And it's a very, very interesting phenomenon that a relatively obscure issue, say, analytic philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s, turns out to be of tremendous importance.
00:06:08.000You've linked the attack on essentialism in some ways back to the wholehearted belief in evolutionary biology and Darwinism, the idea that because human beings supposedly evolved from prior species and are evolving into future species, that there are no actual hard boundaries around what constitutes a human nature.
00:06:26.000There's no such thing, maybe even as a human species.
00:06:28.000There's no such thing as human nature, there's no such thing as a dog's nature either, if you're a committed believer in Darwinian evolution, because there's no such thing, au fond, at the bottom, as a species.
00:06:39.000How could there be a species in Darwinian terms?
00:06:42.000Darwinian theory holds that there are a continua of animal forms which gradually, imperceptibly, shade one into the other.
00:06:53.000The dividing line between the dogs, if you go back and back in time, doesn't end abruptly.
00:07:00.000It merges into what came before the dogs.
00:07:03.000There's no point where you can say, that one is not a dog, but that one all of a sudden is a dog.
00:07:08.000That's anathema to Darwinian thinking.
00:07:14.000Could you make the argument, if you're an evolutionary biology defender, you're a Darwinian defender, Could you make the argument that, sure, over the course of time, there's evolution from one species into another, there's an origin to species, and then there's not really a terminus of species, it evolves into further species, but at any given point, if you stop the clock right now and you looked at species, you could actually draw distinctions between the species, because you're not looking at now a time-bound phenomenon, you're looking at today.
00:07:39.000You're not looking at, over the course of history, one species evolving into another, you're just looking at how to categorize things now.
00:08:55.000So in your book, Human Nature, you launch a series of attacks on widely read evolutionary biologists and philosophers and deconstructionist thinkers.
00:09:16.000You talk about many of these philosophers and it's sort of an attack on their attacks on essentialism.
00:09:25.000It's at least a contemplation of their attacks on essentialism from a variety of angles and I want to go through some of those and talk about exactly what your critiques are.
00:09:32.000So you begin the book by talking Specifically about Steven Pinker, the evolutionary biologist and sociologist over at Harvard University.
00:09:40.000His argument seems to be that since the end of World War II, really since the Enlightenment, he has a new book called Enlightenment Now in which he argues that since the Enlightenment human beings are getting better, we're constantly getting better, and this is reliant on our own ability to change ourselves.
00:09:55.000I find his argument both incoherent and historically illiterate in terms of his willingness to read out of history some pretty awful things in history that have happened over the past few centuries.
00:10:04.000But what is your chief argument with Pinker?
00:11:29.000But the period from 1914 to 1945 is extremely somber.
00:11:35.000And a full assessment of the times in which we live must confront what took place in Europe and the world during those 30 years.
00:11:43.000It was, in fact, a repeat of the Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 in the 17th century.
00:11:50.000It was the worst century in human history in terms of excess deaths.
00:11:53.000But beyond any of that, terrible as those things were, the 20th century introduced a new principle into political and social life, a principle of terror.
00:12:05.000And we have not understood that in any way.
00:12:08.000We have failed completely or even partially, for example, to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust.
00:12:15.000And to say, well, things have improved since 1950, certainly true in certain measures, and ignore the rest of the 20th century, which is part of our living past, as the 19th century no longer is, seems to me a profound historical mistake.
00:12:34.000My problem with Pinker that I've talked about in my own book with regard to his view of the Enlightenment is that it seems incoherent in a couple of ways.
00:12:41.000First, he dismisses religious background of the Enlightenment as though it never existed, as though the Enlightenment sprang full-blown out of people's heads with no background.
00:12:50.000He also tends to dismiss the fact that the Enlightenment that he loved so much Also had to do with the French Revolution, which didn't go particularly well, and had to do with many of the movements that would end up destroying most of the globe in the 20th century as well.
00:13:04.000Meaning there's some pretty good stuff about the Enlightenment, namely the American founding, the belief in human freedom from government and all of this.
00:13:10.000And then there's some pretty dark things about the Enlightenment as well.
00:13:13.000There's a dark side to the Enlightenment when you completely disconnect it from eternal moral values.
00:13:17.000And my problem with Pinker is that all the stuff about the Enlightenment that he requires to actually be the gas in the tank for the Enlightenment, Is the gas tank that he has already emptied, meaning he doesn't like religion very much.
00:13:27.000He doesn't believe in free will, but he relies greatly on the idea that we can change ourselves and that we have changed ourselves in line with higher philosophical thinking.
00:13:36.000He defines things like increase in human flourishing by terms that would really be relevant and noticeable only to people who already believe in a Judeo-Christian worldview and are basically rejected by most of the rest of the world.
00:13:49.000In fact, he engages in You might say exactly the form of essentialism that so many people attack.
00:13:54.000There are many interesting things to say about the Enlightenment, which of course is a very complicated historical and philosophical movement in European thought.
00:14:04.000And it can't be summarized too neatly, but Vivian Gornick, writing in the New Yorker, reviewing a book by Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, She confronts the experience of Auschwitz with all the innocence of a woman who simply cannot understand what she's discussing.
00:14:21.000She says, and I mention this in my book, in Primal Levy, a child of the Enlightenment could not grasp the fact that he was being treated as he was.
00:14:33.000And that phrase, a child of the Enlightenment, The particular incident that Primal Levy records was that he wanted to lick an icicle.
00:14:42.000He was so thirsty and his concentration guard said, no, it's forbidden.
00:14:57.000And neither do I suspect could you understand it either.
00:15:01.000And Vivian Gornick simply says, he was a child of the Enlightenment, he was baffled.
00:15:06.000But the question that never arises is, why did those Enlightenment values prove absolutely useless in the face of those experiences?
00:15:18.000Why didn't they prevent either side From committing the atrocities, I'm talking about the fascists and the communists, committing the atrocities that they were so willing to commit.
00:15:27.000That's a question that Pinker should have asked himself.
00:15:30.000If he believed so strenuously in the puissance, the power of enlightenment ideas, why were they so useless?
00:15:37.000And why do they continue to be so useless?
00:15:42.000The other question is the point that you raised, perhaps not a question, a point.
00:15:48.000I was talking to Christopher Hitchens.
00:15:49.000We got together for just a few days, and I said, when you look in the mirror, Christopher, to whom do you owe that face?
00:15:59.000Do you think it was just created just for you, a special act of creation, or is there 2,000 years of the Judeo-Christian tradition behind your face?
00:16:10.000He didn't have an adequate answer, but he understood what I was getting at.
00:16:13.000He probably didn't think it was a particularly penetrating question, but I think it's a very penetrating question.
00:16:19.000All these guys who proclaim themselves enthusiastic defenders of reason, the Enlightenment, the progress, the forward march of humanity, the infallible nature of Their own moral sentiments are simply a part of a very long Judeo-Christian tradition, and they are unwilling to see in their own faces the long tendrils stretching back into antiquity.
00:16:52.000Is your critique more based on the science of evolutionary Darwinism or based on the misuse of evolutionary Darwinism as a sort of catch-all for explaining human behavior and a catch-all for explaining human change?
00:17:03.000Which would be the more advantageous answer on my part?
00:17:08.000Which would trigger a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm in you?
00:17:28.000Don't forget, the Nazis were great admirers of evolutionary theory.
00:17:34.000They adapted it to their own purposes, but there's a clear connecting link.
00:17:38.000Between what Darwin was saying in the middle of the 19th century and what Himmler was proclaiming in the middle of the 20th century, or the first three decades of the 20th century.
00:18:19.000You look through the entire literature about Nazi Germany, read what these guys were saying themselves, they never said, well, we got together at the Wannsee conference, we decided it would be a good idea to kill all the Jews.
00:18:30.000They didn't say it was just a good idea to kill the Jews.
00:18:32.000We need to kill the Jews because they are parasitical on the body politic.
00:18:37.000The imperatives of a purified biology demand their elimination.
00:19:37.000So in a second, I want to ask you about your scientific critique of evolutionary biology.
00:19:41.000But first, maybe you've thought about investing in some different assets, like for example, cryptocurrency.
00:19:45.000Well, that might sound scary, but all crypto really is, is just a solid asset, meaning that it's not going to be something that is manipulated by governments because government doesn't control it.
00:19:53.000It's protected by blockchain, you invest in it, and then the value is determined by how many people are buying into and out of the crypto market, not by centralized governments with different interests.
00:20:01.000So, for example, last week, China devalued its currency and the markets tanked.
00:20:05.000One consequence was that Bitcoin prices rose.
00:20:07.000Well, it's time to seriously consider including some crypto in your portfolio, just like gold or real estate.
00:20:55.000And every time somebody steps out of line with the sort of catechism of evolutionary biology, they're immediately hit with a wave of You don't believe in science, you're actually just a religious fanatic.
00:21:05.000Now, you're secular, you're a secular Jew, as you say, and we'll get to that in a little while, but what's your biological or scientific critique of evolutionary biology?
00:21:40.000Well, in a nutshell, my critique or my suggestion is that by the standards of the serious sciences, by the serious sciences I mean mathematics, the rich Incomparably rich body of mathematical science.
00:21:53.000And the great theories of physics, Newtonian mechanics, Clark Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.
00:22:03.000There is simply no point of comparison.
00:22:06.000Evolutionary theory is vague, it's incoherent, it's unarticulated, it's imprecise, it doesn't exist in any kind of rigorous or serious form.
00:22:15.000It's a series of folktales, some very interesting.
00:22:18.000I like watching those programs on television as much as you do.
00:22:20.000I know the elephant mating habits, mating habits of the elephant, that sort of thing, the seals, the Antarctic.
00:22:27.000But that doesn't answer any of the really deep questions.
00:22:31.000That said, of course there are parts of evolutionary theory that are perfectly respectable because they make local observations undoubtedly true.
00:22:42.000Certain things seem to have a survival value.
00:22:46.000You don't see a lot of albino antelopes wandering around the African desert for the obvious reason they get eaten up right away by the lions.
00:22:56.000A lion born without teeth or claws needing dentures in a big way is not apt to be a successful lion.
00:23:04.000Oh, we can all agree on that, that sort of stuff.
00:23:06.000But if I ask a little more penetrating question, why, for example, I'm asking you this, aren't pigs born with wheels mounted on ball bearings?
00:23:41.000Anybody really interested in the universe or the stars or the galaxies or black holes, no matter how many times they appear on television with gestures of astonishment, I always turn off the tube and switch to something else as soon as one of those Nova shows comes on.
00:24:14.000So there's this radical disjunction between what's interesting in physics, which are the theories, and what's interesting in biology, which are the organisms.
00:24:23.000And there seems to be a symmetry at work.
00:24:25.000We have very rich theories in physics and very poor theories in biology.
00:24:30.000And that seems to me a fact that needs to be appreciated.
00:24:33.000So you've suggested in the past that you are not an advocate of intelligent design.
00:24:36.000And whenever somebody is critiquing evolutionary biology, they're immediately hit with, well, that's just because you're a Bible believer who is trying to invest the meaning of the Bible in science.
00:24:45.000But you say that you're not a believer in intelligent design.
00:24:47.000Where do you stand on the theory of intelligent design?
00:24:49.000I'm not a believer in a whole lot of things.
00:24:54.000I think intelligent design certainly should have a seat at the table.
00:25:02.000It goes right back to antiquity, that's for sure.
00:25:05.000It's an idea that at first blush seems to confront the facts successfully.
00:25:10.000Look, biological structures do appear as if they were not only intelligently designed, but brilliantly designed.
00:25:19.000You take a look at any biological system, the level of complexity is so daunting as to be indescribable.
00:25:25.000We do not have a theoretical description of any level of biological complexity, including the cell.
00:25:32.000It seems to be a closely caused system that behaves in very mysterious ways, influenced by the organism as a whole, the organism as a whole influenced by its cellular structure.
00:25:42.000You know, there's an interesting institute just opening at Harvard, not Harvard, Oxford, for the mathematical study of evolutionary dynamics.
00:25:49.000And it begins with the admission we don't have a mathematical theory of evolutionary dynamics.
00:25:54.000And 150 years after Darwin, that seems to me a striking admission.
00:25:57.000These are one of the kind of anecdotes you come across in evolutionary thinking again and again and again.
00:26:28.000And that's part of the sociology, the current sociology.
00:26:33.000You must remember that evolutionary thought, Darwinian thought, is supported by an immense and powerful lobby.
00:26:40.000It's not only a scientific agenda, but it's a political agenda.
00:26:43.000He who controls the education in terms of evolutionary theory has a very powerful advantage.
00:26:52.000The idea that these people are motivated entirely by the fear that right-wing evangelical Christians are going to seize the reins of power and imprison women and otherwise enforce a biblical regime on the rest of us, that's just wishful thinking.
00:27:09.000So what is the agenda that's connected to the sort of attempt to dominate the field and prevent anybody else from asking questions?
00:27:18.000There is a status ranking within the academic world, I'm sure you know about, at the very top are the mathematicians, right?
00:27:27.000They're at the very top because they're smarter.
00:27:46.000In the ranking, the status ranking, the evolutionary biologists are way below the molecular biologists.
00:27:52.000At least they go into the lab and do something.
00:27:55.000So there is a strenuous desire for an enhancement of prestige that runs right through evolutionary biology.
00:28:02.000And when you get some guy coming out and saying, well, I've just read Leviticus and I have an objection to evolutionary thought, that's an infringement on prerogatives.
00:28:14.000Used car salesmen suffer from the same kinds of affliction.
00:28:18.000I don't think there's anything surprising about that.
00:28:20.000What I do think is surprising is the success with which the evolutionary biologists have co-opted the media worldwide into acting as an extended propaganda arm for Darwinian theory.
00:28:42.000Because people are not indefinitely gullible.
00:28:44.000You know, the common reaction to the idea that this brilliant blaze, this efflorescence of complexity we see in the biological world is random variation and natural selection, most people say, you've got to be kidding, right?
00:29:18.000Is there something in the nature of chemicals that induces within a chemical arena a desire to form something as noble and as lovely as yourself?
00:31:01.000That's really remarkable when you think about a cat.
00:31:03.000A quarter inch more cortex and an opposable thumb, they would rule the world, but they can't count.
00:31:10.000The story that you hear so often from folks who are, we've interviewed many of them on the program, who are big advocates of the idea that evolutionary biology explains morality.
00:31:18.000It's always, well, you know, I grew up in a home where people sometimes read the Bible, sometimes not, and then I stumbled upon evolutionary biology and explained everything.
00:31:28.000I think the governing word is stumble.
00:31:32.000It seems more, from a broader perspective, as though the actual motivating factor is not adherence to evolutionary biology, but adherence to atheism.
00:31:42.000Meaning that once you've decided that God can't be any part of the picture, you now have to reduce everything to pure scientific materialism.
00:31:49.000Once you've reduced it to pure scientific materialism, you're now forced to reduce all of the essential, that you say, aspects of human nature down to nothingness.
00:31:58.000Like actually just read them out of human existence.
00:32:00.000That consciousness is a myth, that free will is a myth, that language is basically us clicking at each other for purposes of being able to form large social groups, that love is simply a biochemical reaction.
00:32:14.000We've now become the drunk stumbling underneath the lamppost for the car keys.
00:32:19.000And if the car keys aren't there, then I guess we decide that the car keys never existed in the first place.
00:32:24.000Well, I think you should never underestimate the attraction of a primitive worldview.
00:32:30.000I mean, if it is tedious to develop a sophisticated worldview, simply appealing to Darwinian theory as a justification for your anterior prejudices is a very successful strategy.
00:32:45.000The idea that there is a kernel indubitable kernel by which we can explain the panorama of human moral decisions, emotional decisions, commitments, and that it has to do with reproductive success is abysmally primitive, isn't it?
00:33:05.000I mean, certainly there is a connection between reproductive success and the flourishing of certain patterns of behavior.
00:33:18.000But the full grandeur of human life is certainly far bigger, far greater, far more significant scope than anything that can be explained in terms of the desire, the vagrant male desire to get laid, isn't it?
00:33:40.000So what do you see as the essential features of human nature?
00:33:42.000We've talked about why it's wrong for people to reject that there are essential features of human nature, but what do you think are the actual essential features of human nature?
00:33:52.000You say in the book that it seems like that has gone by the wayside in recent decades.
00:33:57.000When you look at a human being, what is it that we all ought to be looking at as the feature that unifies us all?
00:34:04.000I'm not sure I have an answer that would commend itself to your attention, but I think that it's a great mistake to overlook original sin.
00:34:16.000Dr. Johnston was asked for a defense of the doctrine of original sin by his biographer.
00:34:22.000And he said, concerning original sin, the inquiry is not necessary because men are so avowedly and confessedly corrupt that all the laws of heaven and earth are unable to prevent them from the commission of their crimes.
00:34:39.000I think that's something that should be remembered, especially anyone paying attention to the 20th century.
00:35:10.000Certainly, human beings are extraordinary in many ways.
00:35:14.000Essential aspects of human beings, I cannot imagine human beings without a language, and I have no explanation for the fact that they possess a language.
00:35:22.000I cannot imagine human beings without a profound ability to love one another.
00:35:27.000That's certainly a part of human life.
00:35:29.000And I cannot imagine human beings without the capacity to be miserable misfits, unpleasantly violent individuals.
00:35:38.000I cannot imagine human life without the separation of the sexes into two distinct genders.
00:36:09.000They'll tell you what the essential aspects are, and they speak with pretty much the same voice, do they not?
00:36:14.000Why do you think it is that so many scientists have put themselves in the service of what appear to be overtly anti-rational, anti-science positions?
00:36:23.000To take the perfect example, the rejection of the gender binary, the suggestion that a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man, that everybody exists on a gender spectrum, that gender is entirely disconnected from biology.
00:36:34.000All of these premises are, on their face, logically self-defeating.
00:36:37.000They contradict each other in a variety of ways.
00:36:39.000They do not hold together as a cohesive whole.
00:36:42.000And yet, you will see people who purport to be scientists, either overtly say that the science ought to be ignored, we've had people do that on this program, or proclaim loudly that the science actually backs this idea, even though they have yet to provide any study that suggests that gender is separate from biology.
00:37:01.000And that's a remarkably widespread successful explanation, isn't it?
00:37:07.000There's a wonderful proverb in German, which means, against stupidity even the gods are helpless.
00:37:16.000Is there anything that you would reject in that rebuttal?
00:37:20.000I mean, just to take the devil's advocate view, I guess the most humane devil's advocate view would be, if they have no other solution for whatever gender dysphoria they are suffering with, my sort of libertarian sensibility suggests you're an adult, do what you want, if that's the best solution for you to live your life according to you, have at it.
00:37:41.000I share none of your libertarian persuasions in that regard.
00:37:45.000I think society has a duty to enforce certain taboos.
00:37:50.000In certain respects, the health of the whole demands, in many respects, the fact that certain individuals cannot satisfy all of their desires.
00:38:02.000It's very unhappy, but we're all in that position.
00:38:05.000We all obey the rules of society in some respect or other.
00:38:10.000Somebody who has a tremendous desire to wear women's clothing, that's fine.
00:39:11.000It's the idea that you were proposing before that, I mean, would you be in favor of a government stepping in and preventing transgender surgery for adults?
00:39:51.000But you haven't given me an argument yet.
00:39:53.000I mean, I understand the sentiment, but I don't think there's a serious argument behind the sentiment yet.
00:39:58.000But the point is, it need not be a government decision.
00:40:04.000But a social decision, for example, in terms of the ancient structure of violation and taboo.
00:40:10.000And what we're seeing now in the West is a crumbling of any number of taboos, some silly, but some very important.
00:40:17.000We talked about transgendered issue, but equally interesting and very little discussed is, for example, the ancient taboo against tattooing, which I find fascinating.
00:40:28.000I mean, there are people now covered from head to foot in tattoos and flaunting them proudly.
00:40:33.000And I must be the only person left in the Western world who remembered when that was a class marker and it wasn't considered a commendable class marker.
00:40:43.000Only primitives who repaired automobiles wore tattoos.
00:40:47.000Now it's a sign of a certain kind of social refinement, which is very interesting.
00:40:56.000Who cares if women are covered from head to foot in tattoos?
00:40:58.000You don't have to get near them if you don't want.
00:41:01.000But one tattoo crumbles in one part of the social world, another taboo crumbles in another part of the social world, and the structure, far from being free of taboos, puts the taboos in a different place.
00:41:25.000Well, the ancient taboo that you have no right to impede someone's free expression of his or her own ideas, that's now crumbling in the name of a defense against hate speech.
00:41:35.000I'm the last defender of hate speech in the Western world, by the way.
00:41:38.000I'm all in favor of hate speech, as you may have learned from reading my book.
00:41:43.000But the taboo goes up in one place, it crumbles in another place.
00:41:47.000So in a second, I want to ask you about your own religious perspective, because you call yourself a secular Jew.
00:41:51.000I'm an Orthodox Jew, so I'm very curious about this.
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00:42:58.000Okay, so let's talk about your own religious viewpoint.
00:43:01.000So you've taken what sounds like the perspective that, I mean, you've cited to original sin, you've cited to religious principles that precede, ancient religious principles that precede the Enlightenment by several thousand years.
00:43:14.000What's your own religious perspective?
00:43:17.000You mean in terms of my own religious practice?
00:43:23.000Lira, I'm tempted to say, unfortunately.
00:43:27.000It's not entirely any kind of decision that's under voluntary control, as you must know.
00:43:32.000In my own case, any endeavor or attempt to come closer to either a religious way of life or religious experience has been a failure.
00:43:42.000I say in one of my books—I forgot which one—I cannot pray, although I haven't made a very assiduous effort at prayer either.
00:43:49.000I gave it a few tries, didn't get what I was asking for, and gave it up as a bad deal.
00:43:53.000That may be a shallow, emeritricious point of view, but nonetheless it has been governing in my life.
00:44:01.000So I can't say that my life has been a particularly flamboyant exhibition of religious commitment.
00:44:09.000On the other hand, I'm very intrigued by religious ideas, and I take them as seriously as I take anything, which may not be as seriously as you would wish.
00:44:20.000But I do take them seriously because I think there is a certain profundity, a level of truth in religious doctrine which cannot be expressed in my preferred terms, say mathematically or in terms of a scientific theory, but which is nonetheless very resonant.
00:44:42.000I mean, there are no comparable words to express in the beginning was the word.
00:44:47.000That seems to be a profound truth in some way.
00:44:50.000If I could tell you more about that profound truth, I would, but I can't, so I won't.
00:44:56.000But on that level, I think religion and the religious writings of mankind are a tremendous source of richness.
00:45:06.000When you look at the future of the civilization, where religion seems to be falling away in droves, I mean, this is really the pattern of the last, really since the Enlightenment, but accelerating in the aftermath of World War II when nihilism became the way of the world.
00:45:18.000Do you see any I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.
00:45:23.000because in the absence of some of the religious principles you've talked about, including the essentialism of human nature, it seems like we may be sliding inevitably toward a morass that is going to be worse than things are now.
00:45:34.000I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.
00:45:39.000In all of these discussions, it's terribly important to remember that what we talk about, the slide into an ill-defined morass of primitive relativism and moral self-indulgence, decadence, bestial indulgence of the appetite, as the Arab scholar bestial indulgence of the appetite, as the Arab scholar Al-Ghazali remarked, is only a local, a transient phenomenon in the West.
00:46:04.000There are a billion people out there who take the Muslim faith very, very seriously, and they seem largely to be exempt from the secularizing trend that we're talking about.
00:46:16.000And that's a fact that should be kept in mind.
00:46:20.000We talk about the decline of religious beliefs, say, in the United States.
00:46:26.000But it's not a worldwide phenomenon by any means.
00:46:32.000I can't speak with any degree of authority about Chinese religious practices or Buddhist religious practices, but that's why you got Sam Harris on.
00:46:39.000Doesn't he talk about that stuff all the time?
00:46:43.000He believes in merging his mind with the eternal cosmos or something like that.
00:46:47.000Me, that doesn't interest me particularly, but I would be very skeptical about, you The forthcoming elimination of what is plainly an aspect of human life, that is, an interest, a curiosity, a commitment to transcendental values that go beyond the finite lifetime of each individual.
00:47:07.000So that does raise the question as to whether the future of humanity is going to come from or a decent future for humanity is going to come from either a revivification of some sort of religious understanding in the West or whether it's going to come from some sort of re-bursting of enlightenment in other parts of the world.
00:47:23.000Early Islam was obviously a lot more I would ask to be forgiven for not answering that question because I don't know how to answer it.
00:47:31.000Do you see a liberalization in more religious parts of the world, or a revivification of religion in more liberal parts of the world as sort of the direction that you'd perceive?
00:47:40.000I would ask to be forgiven for not answering that question, because I don't know how to answer it.
00:47:45.000I can tell you that I do believe that what we're undergoing now in the West, say France, Germany, Sweden, to a certain extent Spain, possibly Italy in the United States, is a I would strongly encourage you not to bet against the Roman Catholic Church simply because it's been around for 2,000 years.
00:48:07.000Most successful bureaucracy in all of recorded human history.
00:48:13.000But what human beings will discover when they are profoundly disappointed by schemes of artificial intelligence or personal immortality or merging their intellects with an Apple laptop That remains to be determined.
00:48:28.000I'm very skeptical about those ameliorative schemes for the future.
00:48:34.000Artificial intelligence or mind-machine hybrid.
00:48:41.000You've been very critical, I mean, in the book you're very critical of sort of the futurists who foresee this sort of thing.
00:48:46.000You're very critical of Yuval Harari and his discussions of the future of humanity being inside your laptop, as you say.
00:48:55.000Well, if you go back to 1912, and you would ask a sophisticated observer of the European scene what he would see in the next 50 years, the last thing on earth he would have predicted was the First World War, the Interregnum, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, and the rise of Soviet Communism.
00:49:17.000To take a few technological A few technological civilities, things that seem to work in an interesting way, like a computer, and say, this is the future of the human race, seems to me abysmal.
00:49:30.000It is such a terribly narrow point of view.
00:49:34.000It's again, to come back to the analogy used of a drunk looking for his keys under the lamplight because that's where the light is, it's not where the keys are.
00:49:41.000We can do certain things technically now that are interesting.
00:49:44.000There's no question that they're interesting.
00:49:46.000No question that artificial intelligence, deep learning are very interesting.
00:49:50.000But whether they answer the right kinds of questions or whether we know what the right kinds of questions really are, that remains to be determined.
00:50:00.000I think the technology is being used because it's usable.
00:50:03.000Exactly the same reason I use a portable telephone, which I happen to detest.
00:50:09.000You've taught in major universities all around the United States, and the sort of deep ideas that you're talking about here on the program don't get taught at all at these universities.
00:50:16.000In fact, they're held in wide disdain at the universities.
00:50:22.000Why are the universities the way that they are, do you think?
00:50:24.000You know, I've been asking that question again and again, and I wish I could give you a coherent, a real answer, because what's been happening is a major tragedy in American life.
00:50:34.000And it's also happening in English universities, that's for sure.
00:50:39.000For some reason, within, say, 20, 25 years, one of the noblest American institutions has been absolutely gutted, revealed to be hollow at its core.
00:50:52.000The principles that are supposedly defended, not defended at all, for example, free speech, free inquiry, free exchange of ideas.
00:51:01.000The relationship between the faculty and students, completely transmogrified, so the students are now calling the shots.
00:51:09.000The serious intellectual commitments outside of the core disciplines, say physics and mathematics, rendered entirely insupportable and nonsensical.
00:51:19.000And a huge administrative cohort, largely female-dominated, interestingly enough, imposing a kind of dreary ideological conformity on the university itself, which no self-respecting man would wish to have any part of.
00:51:38.000But why all this has happened, I don't know.
00:52:32.000They went into the president's office, helped themselves to his cigars, a good idea at the time, I thought, drank his brandy, scuffed up his table, and caused a riot.
00:52:42.000And I was outside on the street and speaking to some of the faculty I admired, like Sidney Morgenbosch, a professor of philosophy, and he said his great anxiety was that the university would call in the police.
00:52:56.000And I said, Sidney, that's what they're for.
00:53:59.000It invigorates me to find a good hater.
00:54:02.000And I always have more faith in a good hater than I do in a mealy-mouthed individual.
00:54:09.000But remember the great lines from Robert Frost, some say the world will end in fire, some say ice.
00:54:16.000From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
00:54:21.000But if it had to perish twice from what I know of hate, I think that ice is also great and would suffice." You have to make a principled argument about the emotions or the attitudes in order to justify the suppression of speech on the grounds that it expresses hate.
00:54:40.000And there is no such thing remotely as a principled argument, for example, to justify the claim that certain crimes are hate crimes.
00:54:50.000Very often, an attack will be promoted in seriousness on the grounds that the person doing the attacking was hateful.
00:54:58.000Well, obviously, he was attacking somebody.
00:55:18.000You need to make that argument if you believe seriously in hate speech.
00:55:22.000To look into sort of the divide between right and left in the United States right now, what do you think is the most threatening?
00:55:28.000You speak about these very deep issues of philosophy.
00:55:31.000I don't think anybody in the United States actually understands these issues of philosophy.
00:55:34.000It seems like everybody's arguing on the surface of the iceberg and yet is very angry about all this.
00:55:40.000How much do you think people even understand the issues that they're arguing about?
00:55:44.000Not at all, but the remedy lies close at hand.
00:55:47.000I would encourage everyone within the sound of my voice to repair to their bookstore and see what the truth really is between the covers of a paperback edition.
00:55:57.000That having been said, the question really is an interesting one.
00:56:03.000I don't think there's ever been a time, maybe 18th century France to a certain extent, which That's some suggestive parallels where a series of abstract ideas seems to have percolated downward into popular consciousness, for example, essentialism, gender rights, transgenderism, hate speech.
00:56:21.000I mean, there's a very long litany and a very long list, and become animating principles.
00:56:28.000If somebody is convinced that you, for example, are an advocate of hate speech, God forbid me, I deplore hate speech, as you well know, They're apt to act on it.
00:56:38.000I dare say you've been in some way affected by that.
00:56:42.000I really don't know exactly your background, but I suppose that people try to stop you from speaking.
00:56:55.000On the grounds that you're hate-filled, or you're, to use the rhetorical phrase that's badly overused, spewing hate.
00:57:04.000I don't know why these strange physiological terms have entered politics.
00:57:08.000You cannot express hate, you have to spew hate, as if it's a rainbow arc.
00:57:15.000Like projectile vomiting, which I observed when I worked in a hospital.
00:57:20.000And only something that vigorous is adequate to the degree of distemper that hate speech provokes.
00:57:28.000And of course, it has nothing to do with the content whatsoever.
00:57:31.000It's just a convenient psychological strategy.
00:57:37.000But if you look at, say, France from 1791 to 1794, and you look at the periodicals that were being published left and right everywhere in Paris, not so much in the provinces but in Paris, the same sort of thing.
00:57:51.000Cheap Enlightenment ideals about citizenship and the rights of citizenship, the abolition of the feudal system, the destruction of the clergy, had percolated downward to the level of common bromides.
00:59:27.000So in a second, I wanna ask you one final question.
00:59:29.000I'm gonna ask you to do a little bit of vulgar politics, and I wanna ask you what your thoughts are on President Trump, who, of course, is the lodestar pound, which everyone apparently revolves these days.
00:59:38.000But if you wanna hear David Berlinski's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:59:41.000To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe.