The Ben Shapiro Show - David Berlinski | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 78

00:00:00.000 All these guys who proclaim themselves enthusiastic defenders of reason, the Enlightenment, are simply a part of a very long Judeo-Christian tradition.

00:00:10.000 and they are unwilling to see in their own faces the long tendrils stretching back into antiquity.

00:00:26.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.

00:00:27.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.

00:00:29.000 I'm excited to welcome to the program David Berlinski.

00:00:31.000 He's senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

00:00:35.000 He's author of Human Nature, as well as The Devil's Delusion, Atheism, and its Scientific Pretensions, and many more books.

00:00:40.000 He's taught philosophy, math, English at Stanford, Rutgers, City University of New York, University of Paris, so we have a lot to talk about.

00:00:46.000 We'll get to all that in just one second.

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00:01:49.000 David, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:01:51.000 I really appreciate it.

00:01:52.000 You're welcome.

00:01:53.000 So, let's talk a little bit about your book, Human Nature.

00:01:56.000 The 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.

00:02:06.000 That humanity is intensely malleable and completely malleable.

00:02:11.000 How pervasive do you think that feeling is in politics these days?

00:02:15.000 I 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.

00:02:32.000 Yes, there is such a thing as human nature.

00:02:35.000 Obviously so.

00:02:36.000 And it's an essential component of being alive.

00:02:40.000 Can you explain for a second what you mean by essentialism?

00:02:42.000 Because some folks who are watching may not understand the philosophical term.

00:02:45.000 When you say essentialism as compared to other forms of philosophy, what do you mean?

00:02:50.000 Well, let's take a human being. 0.94

00:02:52.000 The 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?

00:03:02.000 One answer is no, there are no essential properties.

00:03:05.000 Human beings are infinitely flexible, infinitely changeable, infinitely malleable.

00:03:10.000 The contrary answer is yes, there are a suite of properties that necessarily define what it is to be a human being.

00:03:18.000 This thesis was part of traditional philosophy.

00:03:21.000 It was rejected in mid-20th century philosophy.

00:03:26.000 It was a very powerful attack launched against essentialism and metaphysics, let's say.

00:03:31.000 Quine has a famous argument.

00:03:34.000 A bicycle rider is essentially two-legged, but a mathematician is not.

00:03:39.000 But the bicycle rider may be a mathematician.

00:03:42.000 Which of those properties are truly essential?

00:03:46.000 It all depends on the way the object is described.

00:03:48.000 That's a powerful argument.

00:03:50.000 That's not a dismissible argument.

00:03:52.000 The question is, is it a valid argument?

00:03:54.000 And that's quite a separate question.

00:03:56.000 Why do you think there's been this attack on essentialism?

00:03:58.000 What's the purpose of the attack on essentialism?

00:04:00.000 The underlying purpose, one is philosophical, which is quite independent of everything else, but the other is political.

00:04:07.000 After 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.

00:04:21.000 This is, after all, what the essence of communism really is, an infinitely perfectible creature.

00:04:28.000 And if it has to be perfected by brute force, we're prepared to exert brute force for the perfectibility of human beings.

00:04:35.000 Without that assumption, many social forms of 20th century life become impossible.

00:04:42.000 We see that every day in the United States, for example.

00:04:45.000 Without the governing assumption that we can change human beings at will, certain tendencies are completely impossible.

00:04:54.000 Completely impossible.

00:04:57.000 A human being is necessarily self-identical, for example.

00:05:00.000 No one is prepared to deny that.

00:05:03.000 Is a man necessarily a man or a woman necessarily a woman? 0.90

00:05:07.000 That immediately provokes a firestorm of controversy and indignation.

00:05:14.000 The principle having been surrendered in the case of self-identity is absolutely incoherent.

00:05:22.000 On 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.

00:05:38.000 So a lot depends on the intrinsic plausibility of the anti- or pro-essential argument.

00:05:44.000 A lot depends on it.

00:05:45.000 It's not a trivial philosophical issue, as we both know.

00:05:50.000 And 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.

00:06:02.000 Tremendous importance.

00:06:04.000 And you have to get the nuances just right.

00:06:06.000 No one knows how to do it.

00:06:08.000 You'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.

00:06:26.000 There's no such thing, maybe even as a human species.

00:06:28.000 There is no such thing.

00:06:28.000 There'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.

00:06:39.000 How could there be a species in Darwinian terms?

00:06:42.000 Darwinian theory holds that there are a continua of animal forms which gradually, imperceptibly, shade one into the other.

00:06:53.000 The dividing line between the dogs, if you go back and back in time, doesn't end abruptly.

00:07:00.000 It merges into what came before the dogs.

00:07:03.000 There's no point where you can say, that one is not a dog, but that one all of a sudden is a dog.

00:07:08.000 That's anathema to Darwinian thinking.

00:07:10.000 It makes no sense in Darwinian terms.

00:07:12.000 It happens to be true.

00:07:14.000 Could 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.

00:07:39.000 You're not looking at, over the course of history, one species evolving into another, you're just looking at how to categorize things now.

00:07:45.000 So, could you accept It's tough.

00:07:51.000 It's tough.

00:07:52.000 You have to go through the contortions you just underwent in that elegant sentence.

00:07:57.000 You have to say, let's stop the clock.

00:07:58.000 Let's look at objects as they are today, Friday, at roughly 11 o'clock.

00:08:05.000 As soon as we say, but, The theory of evolution is a dynamical theory.

00:08:09.000 It's a theory about what changes over time.

00:08:12.000 And you search for a panoramic view of what's happening over time, that sense of sharp boundaries necessarily must disappear.

00:08:21.000 There is no room in Darwinian theory for an essential view of the dog's nature.

00:08:26.000 There's just no room for that.

00:08:28.000 You can say, right now, sure, dogs are dogs and people are people.

00:08:31.000 I could see the difference sometimes.

00:08:35.000 Good.

00:08:35.000 Gesundheit.

00:08:36.000 You can see the difference.

00:08:37.000 But that's not the theoretical question.

00:08:39.000 The question is, is that difference simply an appearance, an artifact of evolutionary drama, or is it something fundamental?

00:08:50.000 Is there something irrevocably dog-like in the dogs?

00:08:54.000 Me, I think there is.

00:08:55.000 So in your book, Human Nature, you launch a series of attacks on widely read evolutionary biologists and philosophers and deconstructionist thinkers.

00:09:03.000 Not attacks, meditations.

00:09:06.000 Harsh meditations on a variety... No, not harsh.

00:09:11.000 Harsh I reserve for my friends.

00:09:16.000 You talk about many of these philosophers and it's sort of an attack on their attacks on essentialism.

00:09:25.000 It'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.

00:09:32.000 So you begin the book by talking Specifically about Steven Pinker, the evolutionary biologist and sociologist over at Harvard University.

00:09:40.000 His 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.

00:09:54.000 I have my own critiques.

00:09:55.000 I 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.

00:10:04.000 But what is your chief argument with Pinker?

00:10:08.000 Let's put it this way.

00:10:09.000 In a certain way, I think Steven Pinker is absolutely correct.

00:10:15.000 Things have gotten better with respect to certain parameters.

00:10:19.000 We live in a time of great material abundance, perfect ease, a good deal of domestic tranquility, appearances notwithstanding.

00:10:28.000 Antibiotics have been an enormous success in medicine.

00:10:32.000 Life expectancy has inched up slightly.

00:10:34.000 There's been a tremendous improvement with respect to poverty in the third world.

00:10:38.000 Just an astonishing improvement.

00:10:40.000 Most of it due to agricultural revolutions, the green revolution.

00:10:46.000 All this is unquestionable, and I have no interest in questioning it.

00:10:50.000 My interest in Pinker and my critique of Pinker depends on what historians call periods.

00:10:57.000 What is the right period to assess the times in which we live?

00:11:01.000 If it's yesterday, I have no argument whatsoever.

00:11:04.000 Things were pretty good yesterday, they're pretty good today.

00:11:06.000 Who am I to complain?

00:11:07.000 Who is humanity to complain?

00:11:10.000 The 20th century, though, has not slipped into the past.

00:11:15.000 A very good English philosopher, Collingwood, said that the chief goal of 20th century philosophy is to explain the 20th century.

00:11:22.000 And we cannot do that.

00:11:24.000 The 20th century is not part of the species present.

00:11:27.000 We don't live in the 20th century.

00:11:29.000 But the period from 1914 to 1945 is extremely somber.

00:11:35.000 And a full assessment of the times in which we live must confront what took place in Europe and the world during those 30 years.

00:11:43.000 It was, in fact, a repeat of the Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 in the 17th century.

00:11:50.000 It was the worst century in human history in terms of excess deaths.

00:11:53.000 But 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.

00:12:05.000 And we have not understood that in any way.

00:12:08.000 We have failed completely or even partially, for example, to grasp the meaning of the Holocaust.

00:12:15.000 And 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.

00:12:32.000 It is not a serious kind of analysis.

00:12:34.000 My 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.

00:12:41.000 First, 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.

00:12:48.000 Yeah, that's illiterate. 0.99

00:12:49.000 And that is foolishness. 0.93

00:12:50.000 He 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.

00:13:04.000 Meaning there's some pretty good stuff about the Enlightenment, namely the American founding, the belief in human freedom from government and all of this.

00:13:10.000 And then there's some pretty dark things about the Enlightenment as well.

00:13:13.000 There's a dark side to the Enlightenment when you completely disconnect it from eternal moral values.

00:13:17.000 And 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.

00:13:26.000 He thinks that religion is wrong.

00:13:27.000 He 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.

00:13:36.000 He 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.

00:13:47.000 I find all of that deeply troubling.

00:13:49.000 In fact, he engages in You might say exactly the form of essentialism that so many people attack.

00:13:54.000 There are many interesting things to say about the Enlightenment, which of course is a very complicated historical and philosophical movement in European thought.

00:14:04.000 And 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.

00:14:21.000 She 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.

00:14:33.000 And that phrase, a child of the Enlightenment, The particular incident that Primal Levy records was that he wanted to lick an icicle.

00:14:42.000 He was so thirsty and his concentration guard said, no, it's forbidden.

00:14:47.000 And he said, why, warum?

00:14:49.000 And the guard said, hier gibt es kein warum, which in German means, there is no why here.

00:14:55.000 He couldn't understand that.

00:14:57.000 And neither do I suspect could you understand it either.

00:15:01.000 And Vivian Gornick simply says, he was a child of the Enlightenment, he was baffled.

00:15:06.000 But the question that never arises is, why did those Enlightenment values prove absolutely useless in the face of those experiences?

00:15:18.000 Why 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.

00:15:27.000 That's a question that Pinker should have asked himself.

00:15:30.000 If he believed so strenuously in the puissance, the power of enlightenment ideas, why were they so useless? 0.94

00:15:37.000 And why do they continue to be so useless? 0.96

00:15:39.000 That's one question. 0.87

00:15:42.000 The other question is the point that you raised, perhaps not a question, a point.

00:15:48.000 I was talking to Christopher Hitchens.

00:15:49.000 We got together for just a few days, and I said, when you look in the mirror, Christopher, to whom do you owe that face?

00:15:59.000 Do 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?

00:16:10.000 He didn't have an adequate answer, but he understood what I was getting at.

00:16:13.000 He probably didn't think it was a particularly penetrating question, but I think it's a very penetrating question.

00:16:19.000 All 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.

00:16:44.000 And this is a historical failure.

00:16:46.000 It's a failure of the imagination.

00:16:48.000 So you've famously critiqued evolutionary Darwinism.

00:16:52.000 Is 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?

00:17:03.000 Which would be the more advantageous answer on my part?

00:17:08.000 Which would trigger a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm in you?

00:17:12.000 I suspect it's both.

00:17:14.000 And that's the real answer.

00:17:16.000 It's both.

00:17:16.000 It's a scientific critique.

00:17:18.000 Let's be honest, there's not a whole lot of science there by the standards of the serious sciences.

00:17:23.000 And it's a critique of the way evolutionary theory is used.

00:17:27.000 I think both are important.

00:17:28.000 Don't forget, the Nazis were great admirers of evolutionary theory. 0.90

00:17:34.000 They adapted it to their own purposes, but there's a clear connecting link.

00:17:38.000 Between 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.

00:17:47.000 They believed in evolution.

00:17:48.000 They believed in evolution very sincerely.

00:17:50.000 They just happened to believe evolution culminated in a master race.

00:17:55.000 Could have happened another way at the end of the war.

00:17:57.000 Hitler said, well, he made a mistake about the master race.

00:18:00.000 It turns out to be the Russians, not the Germans.

00:18:02.000 Superior people of the East.

00:18:04.000 It's a quotation.

00:18:06.000 But you can see these ideas churning again and again and again.

00:18:09.000 I mean, what gave the Nazis that sense of entitlement that they were allowed to exterminate other people?

00:18:17.000 They didn't say it was a whim. 0.98

00:18:19.000 You 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. 0.99

00:18:30.000 They didn't say it was just a good idea to kill the Jews. 0.99

00:18:32.000 We need to kill the Jews because they are parasitical on the body politic. 1.00

00:18:37.000 The imperatives of a purified biology demand their elimination. 1.00

00:18:43.000 That's what they said.

00:18:44.000 Where did they get those ideas from?

00:18:45.000 Well, you can go from 1859.

00:18:48.000 Every single generation, German biologists and doctors and physicians and social workers were saying the same thing.

00:18:54.000 First, they got rid of the mentally ill, the infirm, the crippled, the labored. 1.00

00:18:59.000 And then they went on to the Jews, and they would have kept going on. 0.99

00:19:02.000 This is the sinister thing about Nazism that very few people understand.

00:19:06.000 The Nazis weren't going to stop with the Jews. 0.79

00:19:09.000 They were going to continue with the Slavs. 1.00

00:19:12.000 And when they had finished with the Slavs, the SS wanted to stall on the Germans.

00:19:16.000 This is not well known.

00:19:18.000 At the end of the process, only the SS would remain.

00:19:22.000 That's the real goal of the Nazi state. 0.93

00:19:26.000 They had no hesitation at all about a policy in which the German people themselves would be put to that test. 0.66

00:19:35.000 No doubt about that at all.

00:19:37.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about your scientific critique of evolutionary biology.

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00:20:50.000 So let's talk about your critique of evolutionary biology.

00:20:52.000 This is what's gotten enormous amounts of attention from the press.

00:20:54.000 Nothing better.

00:20:55.000 And 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.

00:21:05.000 Now, 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? 0.73

00:21:13.000 In a nutshell, presumably.

00:21:15.000 Or do we have lots and lots of time?

00:21:16.000 We have plenty of time, but you can nutshell it.

00:21:18.000 In a nutshell, look, you've got evolutionary biologists who say things like, evolution is as assured as the law of gravity.

00:21:31.000 But you never hear a physicist saying the theory of gravity is as assured as the theory of evolution.

00:21:38.000 Why is that?

00:21:40.000 Well, 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.

00:21:53.000 And 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.

00:22:03.000 There is simply no point of comparison.

00:22:06.000 Evolutionary theory is vague, it's incoherent, it's unarticulated, it's imprecise, it doesn't exist in any kind of rigorous or serious form.

00:22:15.000 It's a series of folktales, some very interesting.

00:22:18.000 I like watching those programs on television as much as you do.

00:22:20.000 I know the elephant mating habits, mating habits of the elephant, that sort of thing, the seals, the Antarctic.

00:22:27.000 But that doesn't answer any of the really deep questions.

00:22:31.000 That said, of course there are parts of evolutionary theory that are perfectly respectable because they make local observations undoubtedly true.

00:22:42.000 Certain things seem to have a survival value.

00:22:46.000 You 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.

00:22:56.000 A lion born without teeth or claws needing dentures in a big way is not apt to be a successful lion.

00:23:04.000 Oh, we can all agree on that, that sort of stuff.

00:23:06.000 But 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? 0.81

00:23:15.000 You don't know either.

00:23:17.000 Ask an evolutionary biologist, why are there no roads?

00:23:21.000 Yeah, that's about the standard of explanation you get in biology.

00:23:25.000 And the questions are very real.

00:23:26.000 We can see the questions.

00:23:27.000 There's a very interesting distinction, if I may just go on for a second, when we turn to mathematical or theoretical physics.

00:23:37.000 The models are not terribly interesting.

00:23:39.000 I mean, let's be honest.

00:23:41.000 Anybody 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.

00:23:54.000 But the theories are wonderful.

00:23:57.000 They're rich, complicated, rebarbative, they're full of speculation. 1.00

00:24:02.000 You turn to biology, the theories are primitive, but the models are fascinating.

00:24:07.000 Everyone wants to watch kitten videos on YouTube.

00:24:10.000 Me too!

00:24:11.000 I like to see them too.

00:24:14.000 So 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.

00:24:23.000 And there seems to be a symmetry at work.

00:24:25.000 We have very rich theories in physics and very poor theories in biology.

00:24:30.000 And that seems to me a fact that needs to be appreciated.

00:24:33.000 So you've suggested in the past that you are not an advocate of intelligent design.

00:24:36.000 And 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.

00:24:45.000 But you say that you're not a believer in intelligent design.

00:24:47.000 Where do you stand on the theory of intelligent design?

00:24:49.000 I'm not a believer in a whole lot of things.

00:24:54.000 I think intelligent design certainly should have a seat at the table.

00:24:59.000 And it's a serious idea.

00:25:00.000 It's a very old idea.

00:25:02.000 It goes right back to antiquity, that's for sure.

00:25:05.000 It's an idea that at first blush seems to confront the facts successfully.

00:25:10.000 Look, biological structures do appear as if they were not only intelligently designed, but brilliantly designed.

00:25:19.000 You take a look at any biological system, the level of complexity is so daunting as to be indescribable.

00:25:25.000 We do not have a theoretical description of any level of biological complexity, including the cell.

00:25:32.000 It 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.

00:25:40.000 We don't have a good grasp of that.

00:25:42.000 You know, there's an interesting institute just opening at Harvard, not Harvard, Oxford, for the mathematical study of evolutionary dynamics.

00:25:49.000 And it begins with the admission we don't have a mathematical theory of evolutionary dynamics.

00:25:54.000 And 150 years after Darwin, that seems to me a striking admission.

00:25:57.000 These are one of the kind of anecdotes you come across in evolutionary thinking again and again and again.

00:26:03.000 The theory is perfect.

00:26:04.000 It's irrefragible.

00:26:05.000 It can't be corrected.

00:26:06.000 It's a summit of human achievement, but we're going to go right back to the beginning and see whether we can make it better.

00:26:12.000 And nobody seems to have—Institute at Oxford opening up with a study of mathematical dynamics in evolutionary theory.

00:26:18.000 How come you guys didn't think of that a hundred years ago?

00:26:20.000 Where were you then?

00:26:21.000 And if it doesn't exist yet, how can you say the theory is as good as general relativity?

00:26:25.000 It can't be that good.

00:26:28.000 And that's part of the sociology, the current sociology.

00:26:33.000 You must remember that evolutionary thought, Darwinian thought, is supported by an immense and powerful lobby.

00:26:40.000 It's not only a scientific agenda, but it's a political agenda.

00:26:43.000 He who controls the education in terms of evolutionary theory has a very powerful advantage.

00:26:52.000 The 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.

00:27:09.000 So what is the agenda that's connected to the sort of attempt to dominate the field and prevent anybody else from asking questions?

00:27:18.000 There is a status ranking within the academic world, I'm sure you know about, at the very top are the mathematicians, right?

00:27:27.000 They're at the very top because they're smarter.

00:27:30.000 Let's just admit it.

00:27:31.000 We're among friends.

00:27:33.000 Very, very few people are interested in mathematics and fewer still can do mathematics.

00:27:38.000 Just slightly below are the physicists.

00:27:40.000 The physicists will have another view.

00:27:42.000 They think they're above the mathematicians.

00:27:43.000 That's neither here nor there.

00:27:46.000 In the ranking, the status ranking, the evolutionary biologists are way below the molecular biologists.

00:27:52.000 At least they go into the lab and do something.

00:27:55.000 So there is a strenuous desire for an enhancement of prestige that runs right through evolutionary biology.

00:28:02.000 And 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.

00:28:12.000 And you can understand that.

00:28:13.000 It's very common.

00:28:14.000 Used car salesmen suffer from the same kinds of affliction.

00:28:18.000 I don't think there's anything surprising about that.

00:28:20.000 What 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.

00:28:34.000 That's really remarkable.

00:28:36.000 It's somewhat better now than it was, say, ten years ago.

00:28:39.000 It's improving.

00:28:40.000 The climate is improving.

00:28:42.000 Because people are not indefinitely gullible.

00:28:44.000 You 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?

00:28:57.000 That's not the explanation.

00:28:59.000 A few facts, it fits a few facts, but there must be a profound level of explanation with respect to life.

00:29:05.000 We don't even know why such a thing exists in the universe, which is otherwise bleak, boring, and very big.

00:29:12.000 So you've got this bleak, boring, very big place, and you've got the Earth.

00:29:15.000 Remarkable, right?

00:29:17.000 Why is it there?

00:29:18.000 Is 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?

00:29:29.000 Does anyone really believe that?

00:29:31.000 Is it just the outworking of a blind chemical process or a blind physical process?

00:29:36.000 It may well be.

00:29:37.000 I'm not speaking authoritatively on that.

00:29:39.000 I don't know.

00:29:40.000 But it doesn't seem likely.

00:29:41.000 There seems some level of explanation is called for, and we cannot even successfully express the problem.

00:29:49.000 We just feel it.

00:29:50.000 Life is mysterious.

00:29:52.000 Life is grand.

00:29:52.000 Life is magnificent.

00:29:54.000 Life is full of mystery.

00:29:56.000 But what's really the scientific way of stating that, the mathematically precise way of stating that?

00:30:03.000 We know that life seems to have evolved in an uphill direction from every point of view.

00:30:09.000 But beyond saying that, it's like a little bit about language.

00:30:14.000 You and I are talking in English.

00:30:16.000 We could be talking in any other language.

00:30:19.000 The question that most linguists will not ask is, why is there a language?

00:30:23.000 And why do human beings possess a language and no other species?

00:30:26.000 What good is a language?

00:30:28.000 Don't give me a lot of complicated stories about survival, adventure, we could cooperate in hunting wildebeest or something like that.

00:30:36.000 That's beneath us.

00:30:37.000 We're not going to indulge in that kind of childish fantasy.

00:30:40.000 But it is a fact.

00:30:42.000 Human beings have a suite of properties which are very mysterious.

00:30:47.000 What good does language do?

00:30:48.000 What good does mathematics do?

00:30:49.000 So we can count one, two, three, and we know the numbers go on.

00:30:53.000 So, why is it there?

00:30:55.000 Why is it there?

00:30:57.000 My dog can't count.

00:30:59.000 Cats can't count.

00:31:01.000 That's really remarkable when you think about a cat.

00:31:03.000 A quarter inch more cortex and an opposable thumb, they would rule the world, but they can't count.

00:31:10.000 The 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.

00:31:18.000 It'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.

00:31:26.000 And that shifted my worldview.

00:31:28.000 I think the governing word is stumble.

00:31:32.000 It seems more, from a broader perspective, as though the actual motivating factor is not adherence to evolutionary biology, but adherence to atheism.

00:31:42.000 Meaning 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.

00:31:49.000 Once 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.

00:31:58.000 Like actually just read them out of human existence.

00:32:00.000 That 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.

00:32:14.000 We've now become the drunk stumbling underneath the lamppost for the car keys.

00:32:19.000 And if the car keys aren't there, then I guess we decide that the car keys never existed in the first place.

00:32:24.000 Well, I think you should never underestimate the attraction of a primitive worldview.

00:32:30.000 I 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.

00:32:45.000 The 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?

00:33:05.000 I mean, certainly there is a connection between reproductive success and the flourishing of certain patterns of behavior.

00:33:15.000 Nobody doubts that.

00:33:18.000 But 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?

00:33:34.000 We all know that.

00:33:36.000 It's not an explanation.

00:33:37.000 It's part of a much larger picture.

00:33:40.000 So what do you see as the essential features of human nature?

00:33:42.000 We'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?

00:33:51.000 The ancients would say reason.

00:33:52.000 You say in the book that it seems like that has gone by the wayside in recent decades.

00:33:57.000 When you look at a human being, what is it that we all ought to be looking at as the feature that unifies us all?

00:34:04.000 I'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.

00:34:16.000 Dr. Johnston was asked for a defense of the doctrine of original sin by his biographer.

00:34:22.000 And 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.

00:34:39.000 I think that's something that should be remembered, especially anyone paying attention to the 20th century.

00:34:45.000 Not only the 20th century.

00:34:46.000 The horrors slop over into the 21st century.

00:34:49.000 As we all know, what's taking place in the Middle East right now is not an exuberant demonstration of Enlightenment values.

00:34:57.000 I know you do.

00:34:57.000 Surely you agree.

00:35:01.000 I would say that any view of human nature, the essential human nature, cannot entirely be optimistic.

00:35:08.000 It must be balanced.

00:35:10.000 Certainly, human beings are extraordinary in many ways.

00:35:14.000 Essential 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.

00:35:22.000 I cannot imagine human beings without a profound ability to love one another.

00:35:27.000 That's certainly a part of human life.

00:35:29.000 And I cannot imagine human beings without the capacity to be miserable misfits, unpleasantly violent individuals.

00:35:38.000 I cannot imagine human life without the separation of the sexes into two distinct genders. 1.00

00:35:44.000 Yes, two distinct genders.

00:35:46.000 I'm the last traditional upholder of the gender binary.

00:35:50.000 You can count on that.

00:35:54.000 These are all part of what I would regard as a traditional understanding of human life and human nature.

00:36:00.000 And I think if you want a very rich explanation, go to the novelists.

00:36:03.000 Go to Dostoevsky.

00:36:04.000 Go to Tolstoy.

00:36:05.000 Go to Turgenev.

00:36:06.000 Go to James Joyce.

00:36:08.000 Go to Thomas Mann.

00:36:09.000 They'll tell you what the essential aspects are, and they speak with pretty much the same voice, do they not?

00:36:14.000 Why 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?

00:36:23.000 To 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.

00:36:34.000 All of these premises are, on their face, logically self-defeating.

00:36:37.000 They contradict each other in a variety of ways.

00:36:39.000 They do not hold together as a cohesive whole.

00:36:42.000 And 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. 1.00

00:36:57.000 They're idiots. - Good. 1.00

00:36:59.000 That's my explanation.

00:37:01.000 And that's a remarkably widespread successful explanation, isn't it? 0.99

00:37:07.000 There's a wonderful proverb in German, which means, against stupidity even the gods are helpless. 0.96

00:37:16.000 Is there anything that you would reject in that rebuttal? 0.96

00:37:20.000 I 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. 0.75

00:37:37.000 But you seem to object to that.

00:37:39.000 Oh, completely.

00:37:40.000 Completely.

00:37:41.000 I share none of your libertarian persuasions in that regard.

00:37:45.000 I think society has a duty to enforce certain taboos.

00:37:50.000 In certain respects, the health of the whole demands, in many respects, the fact that certain individuals cannot satisfy all of their desires.

00:38:02.000 It's very unhappy, but we're all in that position.

00:38:05.000 We all obey the rules of society in some respect or other.

00:38:10.000 Somebody who has a tremendous desire to wear women's clothing, that's fine. 0.98

00:38:18.000 We used to call it transvestism.

00:38:21.000 Nobody really objects to a man who wants to wear a dress every now and then.

00:38:26.000 The question is the justification in society itself has now reached a transcendental stage where metaphysical issues are put into play.

00:38:37.000 It's not that certain men would like to wear dresses.

00:38:40.000 It is that they are claiming a philosophical entitlement to be considered women.

00:38:48.000 Legitimately.

00:38:49.000 You've given up your libertarian principles so quickly?

00:38:54.000 No, because libertarianism to me has to do much more with the government intervention or the idea that I'm going to control the behavior.

00:39:01.000 So you sound libertarian when it comes to women and men can wear dresses.

00:39:05.000 Sure.

00:39:06.000 Again.

00:39:06.000 That's about as far as I go.

00:39:07.000 Right.

00:39:08.000 I'm just saying that they're not women. 1.00

00:39:09.000 So I think we may agree on that.

00:39:10.000 Yeah.

00:39:11.000 It'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?

00:39:19.000 At once.

00:39:20.000 See, this is where we have a distinction.

00:39:22.000 I would not.

00:39:22.000 And I don't think any physician who values the Hippocratic Oath should participate.

00:39:27.000 Well, I agree with that.

00:39:28.000 But it's when you get into the government forcing adults not to engage in behavior that has no externalities that I have a problem with.

00:39:34.000 Why?

00:39:36.000 Because once the government can participate in forcing behavior that has no externalities, then there is no limiting principle.

00:39:43.000 Sure.

00:39:44.000 So?

00:39:46.000 Well, you slide into charity pretty quickly that way, it seems.

00:39:48.000 True.

00:39:51.000 But you haven't given me an argument yet.

00:39:53.000 I mean, I understand the sentiment, but I don't think there's a serious argument behind the sentiment yet.

00:39:58.000 But the point is, it need not be a government decision.

00:40:04.000 But a social decision, for example, in terms of the ancient structure of violation and taboo.

00:40:10.000 And what we're seeing now in the West is a crumbling of any number of taboos, some silly, but some very important.

00:40:17.000 We talked about transgendered issue, but equally interesting and very little discussed is, for example, the ancient taboo against tattooing, which I find fascinating.

00:40:28.000 I mean, there are people now covered from head to foot in tattoos and flaunting them proudly.

00:40:33.000 And 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.

00:40:43.000 Only primitives who repaired automobiles wore tattoos.

00:40:47.000 Now it's a sign of a certain kind of social refinement, which is very interesting.

00:40:53.000 You see the taboo crumbling.

00:40:54.000 That's not terribly important.

00:40:56.000 Who cares if women are covered from head to foot in tattoos? 1.00

00:40:58.000 You don't have to get near them if you don't want.

00:41:01.000 But 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.

00:41:14.000 For example, free speech.

00:41:18.000 I don't know whether you're aware of it, but free speech is relentlessly under attack.

00:41:23.000 I see that you are aware of it.

00:41:25.000 Well, 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.

00:41:35.000 I'm the last defender of hate speech in the Western world, by the way.

00:41:38.000 I'm all in favor of hate speech, as you may have learned from reading my book. 0.98

00:41:43.000 But the taboo goes up in one place, it crumbles in another place.

00:41:47.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about your own religious perspective, because you call yourself a secular Jew.

00:41:51.000 I'm an Orthodox Jew, so I'm very curious about this.

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00:42:58.000 Okay, so let's talk about your own religious viewpoint.

00:43:01.000 So 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.

00:43:14.000 What's your own religious perspective?

00:43:17.000 You mean in terms of my own religious practice?

00:43:20.000 Well, practice and belief.

00:43:22.000 Practice, there is none.

00:43:23.000 Lira, I'm tempted to say, unfortunately.

00:43:27.000 It's not entirely any kind of decision that's under voluntary control, as you must know.

00:43:32.000 In my own case, any endeavor or attempt to come closer to either a religious way of life or religious experience has been a failure.

00:43:42.000 I 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.

00:43:49.000 I gave it a few tries, didn't get what I was asking for, and gave it up as a bad deal.

00:43:53.000 That may be a shallow, emeritricious point of view, but nonetheless it has been governing in my life.

00:44:01.000 So I can't say that my life has been a particularly flamboyant exhibition of religious commitment.

00:44:09.000 On 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.

00:44:20.000 But 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.

00:44:42.000 I mean, there are no comparable words to express in the beginning was the word.

00:44:47.000 That seems to be a profound truth in some way.

00:44:50.000 If I could tell you more about that profound truth, I would, but I can't, so I won't.

00:44:56.000 But on that level, I think religion and the religious writings of mankind are a tremendous source of richness.

00:45:05.000 Tremendous.

00:45:06.000 When 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.

00:45:18.000 Do you see any I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.

00:45:23.000 because 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.

00:45:34.000 I would like to give you a very sophisticated answer, but I don't think I'm able to.

00:45:39.000 In 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.

00:46:04.000 There 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.

00:46:16.000 And that's a fact that should be kept in mind.

00:46:20.000 We talk about the decline of religious beliefs, say, in the United States.

00:46:24.000 It's far advanced in Europe.

00:46:26.000 But it's not a worldwide phenomenon by any means.

00:46:32.000 I 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.

00:46:39.000 Doesn't he talk about that stuff all the time?

00:46:41.000 Yeah, he's a Buddhist, I think.

00:46:43.000 He believes in merging his mind with the eternal cosmos or something like that.

00:46:47.000 Me, 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.

00:47:07.000 So 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.

00:47:23.000 Early 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.

00:47:31.000 Do 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?

00:47:40.000 I would ask to be forgiven for not answering that question, because I don't know how to answer it.

00:47:45.000 I 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.

00:48:07.000 Most successful bureaucracy in all of recorded human history.

00:48:10.000 Don't place your bets against it.

00:48:13.000 But 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.

00:48:28.000 I'm very skeptical about those ameliorative schemes for the future.

00:48:34.000 Artificial intelligence or mind-machine hybrid.

00:48:41.000 You've been very critical, I mean, in the book you're very critical of sort of the futurists who foresee this sort of thing.

00:48:46.000 You're very critical of Yuval Harari and his discussions of the future of humanity being inside your laptop, as you say.

00:48:54.000 Why is that?

00:48:55.000 Well, 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.

00:49:14.000 They were not on the event horizon.

00:49:17.000 To 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.

00:49:30.000 It is such a terribly narrow point of view.

00:49:34.000 It'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.

00:49:41.000 We can do certain things technically now that are interesting.

00:49:44.000 There's no question that they're interesting.

00:49:46.000 No question that artificial intelligence, deep learning are very interesting.

00:49:50.000 But 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.

00:49:58.000 I'm very skeptical of what they do.

00:50:00.000 I think the technology is being used because it's usable.

00:50:03.000 Exactly the same reason I use a portable telephone, which I happen to detest.

00:50:09.000 You'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.

00:50:16.000 In fact, they're held in wide disdain at the universities.

00:50:20.000 What happened to the universities?

00:50:22.000 Why are the universities the way that they are, do you think?

00:50:24.000 You 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.

00:50:34.000 And it's also happening in English universities, that's for sure.

00:50:39.000 For some reason, within, say, 20, 25 years, one of the noblest American institutions has been absolutely gutted, revealed to be hollow at its core.

00:50:52.000 The principles that are supposedly defended, not defended at all, for example, free speech, free inquiry, free exchange of ideas.

00:51:01.000 The relationship between the faculty and students, completely transmogrified, so the students are now calling the shots.

00:51:09.000 The serious intellectual commitments outside of the core disciplines, say physics and mathematics, rendered entirely insupportable and nonsensical.

00:51:19.000 And 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. 1.00

00:51:38.000 But why all this has happened, I don't know.

00:51:40.000 I saw it happening in the 60s.

00:51:42.000 Forgive me for boasting of my age.

00:51:46.000 It used to drive me crazy when my father did that, but now I find it just superb to be curmudgeon and address you as young fella.

00:51:54.000 You don't remember the 60s.

00:51:56.000 You couldn't.

00:51:57.000 But I was a senior figure in the 60s.

00:51:59.000 I was born in 42, 45, which was slightly before the baby boomers.

00:52:03.000 And I saw the collapse of institutional authority at Berkeley, at Stanford, and at Columbia.

00:52:10.000 And at Columbia, these were people I deeply admired, like Dean David Truman.

00:52:14.000 In the face of student protests, he just collapsed.

00:52:16.000 He didn't know what to say.

00:52:18.000 He didn't know how to defend himself.

00:52:20.000 And that's true, I think, throughout the American university system.

00:52:23.000 The people who should be defending the universities did not know what to do.

00:52:28.000 I remember at Columbia, they ransacked the university.

00:52:31.000 I was right there.

00:52:32.000 They 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.

00:52:42.000 And 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.

00:52:56.000 And I said, Sidney, that's what they're for.

00:52:57.000 There's a riot. 1.00

00:52:58.000 Go club them on the head. 1.00

00:52:59.000 Drag them out by the heels. 1.00

00:53:02.000 That's what the police are for, making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.

00:53:06.000 That's what you're doing right now.

00:53:09.000 And he couldn't see the point.

00:53:12.000 He was willing to be a part of the collapse of authority.

00:53:15.000 And we've seen the collapse of authority across the board.

00:53:18.000 Scientific authority, we talked a little bit about transgenderism, but also intellectual and institutional authority.

00:53:26.000 A university has a right to defend himself.

00:53:28.000 It has the right to call the police and get rid of the miscreants.

00:53:31.000 Why not?

00:53:32.000 Let's talk about the statement that you made that you are in favor of hate speech.

00:53:35.000 So, I know my own defenses of hate speech.

00:53:37.000 My own defenses of hate speech is that that is a principle that does not exist.

00:53:40.000 Again, there's no limiting principle to what you decide is hate speech.

00:53:43.000 Hate speech can be anything you disagree with and historically has been used for exactly that rationale.

00:53:50.000 What's your attack on hate speech?

00:53:53.000 I don't have an attack on hate speech.

00:53:56.000 I rather like it.

00:53:59.000 It invigorates me to find a good hater.

00:54:02.000 And I always have more faith in a good hater than I do in a mealy-mouthed individual.

00:54:09.000 But remember the great lines from Robert Frost, some say the world will end in fire, some say ice.

00:54:16.000 From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.

00:54:21.000 But 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.

00:54:40.000 And there is no such thing remotely as a principled argument, for example, to justify the claim that certain crimes are hate crimes.

00:54:50.000 Very often, an attack will be promoted in seriousness on the grounds that the person doing the attacking was hateful.

00:54:58.000 Well, obviously, he was attacking somebody.

00:55:00.000 He must have disliked them.

00:55:02.000 But, en revanche, on the other hand, suppose he was attacking and he was suffused with a loving sense.

00:55:08.000 He just simply wanted lovingly to club someone into the urine-stained pavement.

00:55:13.000 Would that be a lesser crime?

00:55:18.000 You need to make that argument if you believe seriously in hate speech.

00:55:22.000 To look into sort of the divide between right and left in the United States right now, what do you think is the most threatening?

00:55:28.000 You speak about these very deep issues of philosophy.

00:55:31.000 I don't think anybody in the United States actually understands these issues of philosophy.

00:55:34.000 It seems like everybody's arguing on the surface of the iceberg and yet is very angry about all this.

00:55:40.000 How much do you think people even understand the issues that they're arguing about?

00:55:44.000 Not at all, but the remedy lies close at hand.

00:55:47.000 I 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.

00:55:57.000 That having been said, the question really is an interesting one.

00:56:03.000 I 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.

00:56:21.000 I mean, there's a very long litany and a very long list, and become animating principles.

00:56:27.000 People act on them.

00:56:28.000 If 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.

00:56:38.000 I dare say you've been in some way affected by that.

00:56:42.000 I really don't know exactly your background, but I suppose that people try to stop you from speaking.

00:56:51.000 Yes.

00:56:51.000 No?

00:56:52.000 Last night at Stanford, yes.

00:56:53.000 Something like that.

00:56:55.000 On the grounds that you're hate-filled, or you're, to use the rhetorical phrase that's badly overused, spewing hate.

00:57:04.000 I don't know why these strange physiological terms have entered politics.

00:57:08.000 You cannot express hate, you have to spew hate, as if it's a rainbow arc.

00:57:15.000 Like projectile vomiting, which I observed when I worked in a hospital.

00:57:20.000 And only something that vigorous is adequate to the degree of distemper that hate speech provokes.

00:57:28.000 And of course, it has nothing to do with the content whatsoever.

00:57:31.000 It's just a convenient psychological strategy.

00:57:37.000 But 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.

00:57:51.000 Cheap 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.

00:58:04.000 And people acted on that.

00:58:06.000 They acted very, very effectively, chiefly by killing a lot of people, which is what happens.

00:58:13.000 One of the little known facts about the French Revolution, it was the first serious genocide in Europe since the end of the 17th century.

00:58:24.000 That is, in the Vendée, which is the southwest region of France, estimates now are that 40,000 people were killed in an act of genocide, specifically killed, and many more.

00:58:36.000 Those estimates, by the way, go up to a quarter of a million, but it's very hard to make sense of the estimates.

00:58:42.000 Many, many aspects of the French Revolution are quite similar to things that are taking place today.

00:58:47.000 In terms of the rhetoric, the propaganda, the level of indignation, the synthetic anger.

00:58:53.000 Most anger that we experience in the United States or in Europe is synthetic.

00:58:56.000 It's the product of a confection.

00:58:58.000 It's like taking an egg white and beating it up.

00:59:02.000 It may increase in volume, but not in substance.

00:59:06.000 What are people terribly angry about?

00:59:08.000 A beautiful country, a high level of prosperity, but yet there's a rabidity to popular discourse that I myself find Invigorating.

00:59:22.000 That wasn't the verb I expected at the end of that sentence.

00:59:24.000 No, but it's a l'amour juste.

00:59:27.000 So in a second, I wanna ask you one final question.

00:59:29.000 I'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.

00:59:38.000 But if you wanna hear David Berlinski's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:59:41.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe.

00:59:44.000 Makes sense?

00:59:44.000 And you can hear the end of our conversation there.

00:59:46.000 Well, David Berlinski, thank you so much for stopping by.

00:59:48.000 His book is Human Nature.

00:59:49.000 Go check it out.

00:59:50.000 It should be available everywhere, right?

00:59:51.000 I mean, Amazon, bookstores, wherever you can get it.

00:59:53.000 And they make great gifts.

00:59:54.000 They do.

00:59:55.000 Christmas is coming.

00:59:56.000 Human nature.

00:59:57.000 David, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:59:58.000 I really appreciate it.

00:59:59.000 You're very welcome.

01:00:00.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:00:11.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.

01:00:13.000 Associate producer, Colton Haas.

01:00:15.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:00:17.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.

01:00:20.000 Editing by Donovan Fowler.

01:00:22.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Peromino.

01:00:24.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:00:26.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:00:28.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 24, 2019

David Berlinski | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 78

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