The Ben Shapiro Show - Michael Shermer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 6

00:00:00.000 It shouldn't matter what religion you are. 1.00

00:00:02.000 Whatever works.

00:00:02.000 If it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.

00:00:16.000 So joining us on today's show is Michael Shermer.

00:00:18.000 Michael is the founder of Skeptic Magazine.

00:00:21.000 He's also the author of a couple of books, which I'll introduce in just a second.

00:00:23.000 I'm really excited to talk to him.

00:00:25.000 But before we get to any of that, first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at stamps.com.

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00:01:29.000 OK.

00:01:29.000 Well, Michael Sherman, thanks so much for coming on the show.

00:01:31.000 First, I want to pump your books a little bit, because they are both fantastic.

00:01:34.000 These are the two most recent.

00:01:34.000 You've written more than this, but these are the two most recent.

00:01:37.000 The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice and Freedom.

00:01:41.000 And this one, which just came out and was favorably reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia.

00:01:49.000 And I've really been looking forward to this conversation, Michael, because I know there's a lot that we disagree on.

00:01:53.000 I think people are going to be shocked to find there's a lot that we actually agree on as well.

00:01:57.000 Michael is a

00:01:58.000 Probably one of the foremost atheists in America, if not the world.

00:02:02.000 And obviously, I wear the funny Jew hat. 0.83

00:02:03.000 So, we have a lot to get to.

00:02:05.000 So, thanks for stopping by.

00:02:06.000 I really appreciate it.

00:02:07.000 Oh, I don't like to define myself by being an atheist, because that isn't anything.

00:02:11.000 Being an atheist, there's no set of doctrines that this is what we believe in.

00:02:15.000 We simply just don't believe in God, full stop.

00:02:17.000 Really, I'm a humanist, or enlightenment humanist, or secular humanist, or something like that, or I'm a classical liberal.

00:02:23.000 So here are the things I do believe.

00:02:25.000 Defining yourself by what you don't believe, I think it was Hayek who said, you know, just defining yourself as an anti-communist is not enough.

00:02:31.000 Yep.

00:02:32.000 What are we for, right?

00:02:33.000 So I think points of agreement might be something like we're in favor of reason, and logic, and empiricism, and things like that.

00:02:40.000 Then we can find some common ground.

00:02:41.000 Perfect.

00:02:42.000 So let's start with that.

00:02:42.000 So you call yourself now a classical liberal.

00:02:45.000 Can you give me sort of the story of your political development?

00:02:47.000 I mean, were you always in line with classical liberalism?

00:02:51.000 Well, I went to Pepperdine University for undergraduate.

00:02:54.000 I was a member of the first graduating class of the Malibu campus, and it was a great, great experience.

00:02:59.000 1970s, everybody's reading Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged on campus.

00:03:02.000 I mean, really, everyone's walking around with this doorstop of a book, and it's like, oh, I just can't get through the first hundred pages.

00:03:08.000 If you get through the first hundred pages, you're in.

00:03:10.000 You know, of course I did.

00:03:12.000 I think the way it works, though, is if the philosophy gels with your temperament, your personality, then you're more likely to adopt it.

00:03:19.000 So in my case, just the way I was raised and by genetics or whatever, I like being an individual.

00:03:25.000 I like autonomy.

00:03:26.000 I like taking personal responsibility for your actions.

00:03:30.000 To me, it's uplifting.

00:03:31.000 You mean I can actually do something about my situation?

00:03:34.000 Yeah, you can.

00:03:34.000 Okay, I'm going to go do that.

00:03:36.000 Uh, and so I think it gelled with me in that.

00:03:39.000 And so, okay, what is that?

00:03:40.000 Well, libertarian, you know, in the seventies, that was sort of Murray Rothbard and Reason Magazine was just getting going.

00:03:45.000 It's like, all right.

00:03:46.000 But as I got older and, and the libertarian party or party and small L libertarian started to adopt more of the fringe elements of society.

00:03:55.000 It's like,

00:03:56.000 I'm not sure I want to be associated with this guy or that movement or the people in Idaho.

00:04:01.000 People dancing naked with the iron crosses on their bellies.

00:04:05.000 Yeah, you get the pornography, pot-smoking libertarians who just want to move to Idaho and be by myself. 0.91

00:04:10.000 Then you get the constitutional libertarians.

00:04:13.000 All right, so I recently decided, I think I'll try a different label.

00:04:17.000 I'd rather not use any labels, you know, but it's a shortcut for thinking that we all use.

00:04:22.000 So okay, classical liberalism, you know, focus on the individual as the primary moral agent.

00:04:26.000 That should be our concern.

00:04:28.000 You know, the human flourishing is our

00:04:30.000 Our moral concern, but flourishing of what?

00:04:33.000 Not groups, not tribes, not races.

00:04:36.000 Races don't vote, genders don't vote, and religions don't vote or protect. 0.96

00:04:42.000 It's individual.

00:04:43.000 So I start there.

00:04:45.000 Even though there's something like an illusion of this self, I think there is a self inside my skin, inside my skull, that we can call an individual unit that can suffer.

00:04:54.000 Not just think, or like Bentham said, not just think and talk, but are you able to suffer?

00:04:59.000 And if you can, that should at least be our starting point.

00:05:02.000 What can we do to reduce suffering of the individual?

00:05:04.000 So there's a ton of us of this to unpack because there's a lot in that basic thesis, that philosophical thesis.

00:05:10.000 But before we get to the actual unpacking of your philosophy, I want to discuss for a second the fact that we find ourselves in the same room.

00:05:16.000 Because one of the things that's been very weird, obviously, is that we've now both been labeled members of the intellectual dark web by Eric Weinstein and Barry Weiss in the New York Times.

00:05:24.000 And how did we find ourselves on the same side of the aisle?

00:05:28.000 I mean, we obviously agree about a lot of the principles that you're speaking about, but it seems to me that there's an entire movement that's happening out there of thinkers from a variety of different backgrounds who suddenly have found themselves in common cause just because the left has become so focused on identity politics and unreason.

00:05:42.000 Yeah, well, it's, you know, this is a driving force, you know, it's just gone too far.

00:05:46.000 And we know from polling data that the center is getting smaller in the left and right.

00:05:52.000 Two humps are getting larger and larger.

00:05:54.000 It's a bimodal curve there.

00:05:56.000 And in the 70s and so on, the centrist was pretty large.

00:06:00.000 And now it's getting smaller.

00:06:02.000 So I think the further that each side goes, the more of us who are sort of on these two sides want to join together.

00:06:09.000 And I think that's what something like this intellectual dark

00:06:12.000 By the way, I thought that watch should be like the official watch of the intellectual dark web.

00:06:16.000 They should try that.

00:06:17.000 We can get y'all some money.

00:06:18.000 We'll talk with our sponsors.

00:06:20.000 I mean, I'm not even sure what it is other than those of us who think we should be able to talk about anything without hysteria, without the tears, without safe spaces, microaggressions, all that stuff, because it's the only way we can find out what the truth is if we've gone off the rails.

00:06:34.000 You know, every one of us is subject to all those cognitive biases we're familiar with.

00:06:38.000 The only way to know is for us to talk.

00:06:40.000 So I push a thesis or an idea and you go, hang on Sherman, that's not quite right.

00:06:44.000 And then I can adjust and come back in a little bit.

00:06:47.000 If you don't talk to anybody outside of your tribe, then you can go down the rails to craziness.

00:06:53.000 And that's just not good.

00:06:54.000 So I think that's what unites us.

00:06:55.000 And obviously what you've spent an awful lot of time in your life doing is talking about reason and science.

00:06:59.000 I mean, you're a monthly columnist for Scientific American.

00:07:01.000 You're approaching the world record for monthly columns in one of these major scientific publications.

00:07:06.000 So let's go back to the philosophy now.

00:07:08.000 So you're talking about human individualism and human individual thriving.

00:07:11.000 Where do you get the basis for this as the basis of human society, the human individual?

00:07:17.000 Because that's obviously a rather newfangled concept in Western thought as far as the Enlightenment.

00:07:22.000 So where is it that

00:07:23.000 Yeah, I've always believed that human meaning has to come in the interaction between individual value and also communal purpose.

00:07:30.000 That if you feel like you're by yourself all the time, you feel isolated, people need other people and people want to feel like they're part of something broader.

00:07:35.000 Right.

00:07:35.000 And that sometimes manifests in really ugly ways.

00:07:38.000 How do we get to the point where the individual is the key component of morality?

00:07:42.000 So for me, I just go back to Genesis and then I say individuals made in the image of God.

00:07:46.000 But for you, because you're not a Bible believer, where does that come from?

00:07:50.000 To me, it really begins, for the modern world, in the rights revolutions of the 18th century.

00:07:55.000 Just the idea that there are individuals who can have rights.

00:07:58.000 Now, the idea that these are inalienable rights, they're self-evident, well, that's not terribly satisfying now, because self-evident for you may not be self-evident for me, so we have to have some kind of argument.

00:08:10.000 I began with evolution.

00:08:12.000 That is, we are

00:08:13.000 Seeing yourself perpetuate, yeah. 1.00

00:08:29.000 Now, it could be that the most selfish thing I could do is hoard all the resources and kill you if you try to compete with me. 0.99

00:08:36.000 But we're a social species, so living in a group, I can't be that way.

00:08:41.000 Oftentimes, the most selfish thing I can do is to be nice with you, or form a coalition with you, or you and I practice reciprocal altruism.

00:08:49.000 I'll scratch your back, you scratch my back. 0.92

00:08:51.000 And so in this case,

00:08:54.000 I think we evolved a moral sense of caring about other people.

00:08:57.000 Now, it's not enough for me to fake being a good person.

00:09:01.000 Like, I really care about you, Ben.

00:09:02.000 You and I are good friends. 1.00

00:09:03.000 But the moment we walk out, I tell my buddy, yeah, that bastard, he's no good. 0.98

00:09:08.000 You're going to know at some point, because we're fine-tuned to our reputations, what other people think about us. 0.98

00:09:13.000 There's always going to be maybe 10% freeloaders, bullies, freeriders, people that are just going to use the system.

00:09:18.000 These are the psychopaths, sociopaths, and so on.

00:09:20.000 The bullies of a society.

00:09:35.000 And we know from research, like Christopher Bohm's research of hunter-gatherer groups today, it's like that.

00:09:40.000 It's like maybe five to ten percent are people that don't play nice by the rules.

00:09:45.000 And all these hunter-gatherer groups have a whole series of sanctions against the individuals who are not cooperating.

00:09:52.000 Anything from, we gossip about you, we sit you down and have a little talk with you, we slap you around a little bit, or they actually practice capital punishment. 0.94

00:10:00.000 They go out on a hunt on the weekend with, you know, Og, and they come back without Og.

00:10:04.000 Right, and this is true for children, too.

00:10:05.000 If you look at the experiments, I mean, you know this stuff better than I do, but if you look at the experiments with children, and even adults, they will seek to punish each other and forego pleasure in order to punish each other if they feel like people are violating the reciprocal rules.

00:10:15.000 That's right.

00:10:16.000 In these common goods games where we all put some money in the pot, with transparency, we know who put what in.

00:10:21.000 Those who are cheating the system are holding a little bit back.

00:10:24.000 I will sacrifice some of my profit just to punish you.

00:10:28.000 So we do have an evolved sense of right and wrong.

00:10:29.000 I think we're born with it.

00:10:30.000 You know, Paul Bloom's research with the little puppets in his developmental psych lab.

00:10:34.000 And, you know, there's the good puppet that helps the other puppet get the ball up and the nasty puppet that pushes the ball back down.

00:10:40.000 And these little kids, you know, they don't even have language yet.

00:10:43.000 You know, they'll go out and slap the bad puppet or not choose the bad puppet, reinforce the good puppet.

00:10:47.000 So I think we're born with this and we have to have it because a social group cannot survive if everybody's too selfish.

00:10:55.000 So we have to evolve a sense of right and wrong and truly caring, whatever you want to call it, altruism or

00:11:02.000 Sympathy, empathy, something.

00:11:04.000 I actually do care about other people.

00:11:05.000 How does that evolve beyond the tribe?

00:11:06.000 Because this is one of the great puzzles of human history is, number one, why this perspective on the human individual only arose in the 17th century?

00:11:14.000 If this is ingrained in human beings that the individual is of value and that we have to work with one another, then why only in a certain place in a certain time did it arise?

00:11:22.000 Was it a spontaneous combustion of human thought in the 17th and 18th centuries?

00:11:26.000 Or was this something that has deeper roots?

00:11:27.000 I obviously would argue this has deeper roots going all the way back to Sinai and Athens.

00:11:31.000 How would you argue on that?

00:11:51.000 Politics, economics, culture, history, and so on.

00:11:55.000 And so the one model I use is, I call this the Ndugu effect. 0.99

00:11:59.000 So in Jack Nicholson's movie about Schmidt, you know, he's a retired insurance guy and he's late night watching and there's one of these infomercials about adopting a little kid, Ndugu in this case, and he gives money to little Ndugu and the whole narrative plot is around that.

00:12:14.000 He doesn't know Ndugu from anybody, but they show him the picture of little Ndugu and here he is with his soccer ball and his brother and sister and here's their little hut they live in and five dollars a day will give them so on.

00:12:26.000 And now if you show a picture of 10,000 starving kids in Kenya, I'm not giving any money or I'll give a dollar whatever you show me little Ndugu. 0.89

00:12:33.000 So really it's kind of tricking our brain into making little Ndugu an honorary member of our tribe, my family, my friend. 0.93

00:12:39.000 I care about it because

00:12:40.000 And that's our evolved brain.

00:12:41.000 We care about people we know or can identify with.

00:12:44.000 So to get beyond that, first of all, you have to get people to care about other people by identifying them as individuals that are like me.

00:12:51.000 So that sort of principle of interchangeable perspectives, that could be me there but for the grace of, in your case, God.

00:12:58.000 That could be me!

00:13:00.000 So how do we do that?

00:13:02.000 Well, beyond getting people to truly care, just having a large society with the rule of laws and democracy where we at least feel like we have some say.

00:13:12.000 But more importantly, I think free trade is one of these things where as long as you and I are both profiting from some kind of exchange we have, I have no desire to kill you and maybe I'll even start to like you a little bit because you're doing something for me.

00:13:23.000 So we know

00:13:24.000 Government, you know, sort of liberal democracies and free trade are these things that provide trust in a society among strangers such that I can go to the Starbucks, somebody waiting for me to wait on me.

00:13:36.000 I don't know them.

00:13:37.000 They take my money.

00:13:38.000 They trust me.

00:13:39.000 I trust them.

00:13:39.000 I don't feel like I'm going to get bonked on the head or hopefully not arrested for not paying and buying a Starbucks.

00:13:47.000 You know, modern society is based on this idea of trust among strangers, and that requires all these extra add-ons.

00:13:56.000 So here I think of economics and politics as tools, social technologies.

00:14:02.000 So my question still remains.

00:14:03.000 Okay, I agree with a lot of your analysis.

00:14:06.000 Why the economics and politics of a particular time in a particular place?

00:14:09.000 Is it accidental?

00:14:09.000 Is it that we're just looking at a single sample size?

00:14:12.000 And why is it that only in Western Europe at a particular time, at a particular place in history, do we get this vision of individual rights that flowers out and then starts encompassing broader and broader groups of people?

00:14:25.000 Again, if this was embedded in human capacity from the very beginning, then why does it only happen as the outgrowth of one particular culture?

00:14:33.000 So you see where I'm going with this, right?

00:14:35.000 Yep.

00:14:35.000 So, well, I think Pinker tries to answer that, and the good social scientist that he is.

00:14:40.000 You know, this is a tangled web of correlations and inter-causal variables that are going up and down, and it's really hard to answer.

00:14:48.000 I mean, you get a number of things going on.

00:14:50.000 You know, the Industrial Revolution, free trade is coming, you know, double entry, bookkeeping, and all these things that kind of drive prosperity to go up, which enhances a bunch of other things.

00:15:00.000 So we can afford better governance and so on.

00:15:02.000 Then we have better educational systems.

00:15:04.000 Also, literacy rates start to go up around the same time.

00:15:06.000 Do you think any of this has to do with the Judeo-Christian system that is undergirding all of this?

00:15:11.000 Yes, that's part of it, of course.

00:15:14.000 Just the Western idea that the Judeo-Christian is sort of founding helps push it along. 0.87

00:15:21.000 Yes, I know we can go back to maybe the 13th century or 14th century and the first humanists in the 15th century, long before the Enlightenment.

00:15:29.000 Yes, okay, so there's

00:15:30.000 Right, Grotius is talking about human rights back in the 1530s, 1540s.

00:15:33.000 Right, yes, yes, right.

00:15:34.000 So I think there's multiple strands.

00:15:36.000 When you write a book, you've got to start the clock somewhere.

00:15:39.000 So I didn't go all the way back to Athens and Jerusalem, you know, like some people do.

00:15:42.000 Okay, so there's some threads there.

00:15:44.000 But the idea that the individual is what counts and we're going to protect the individual's rights

00:15:50.000 You know, like the Bill of Rights, for example, is a perfect example.

00:15:52.000 It's not the group, it's the individual.

00:15:55.000 In fact, these rights are there to protect you from being considered a member of a group that we feel we can discriminate against.

00:16:01.000 No, you can't do that.

00:16:02.000 And those have been expanding.

00:16:04.000 That moral sphere has been expanding more and more.

00:16:06.000 Yeah, no question.

00:16:07.000 And I think that this is where we all end up in the same place.

00:16:09.000 It's really quite fascinating.

00:16:11.000 Again, I've had conversations with, you know, you and Sam Harris, and we're coming at it from a completely different angle as far as the impact of God in all of this.

00:16:17.000 Jonah Goldberg suggests that this is the miracle.

00:16:20.000 And one of my great objections to Jonah Goldberg's terminology in that is that I'm not sure that the miracle happened in 1650.

00:16:25.000 I think the miracle happened a lot earlier and that that was the enzyme, the catalyst that led to this great outpouring of human freedom.

00:16:31.000 But we end up in the same place.

00:16:32.000 So the question becomes, how do we argue for that?

00:16:34.000 Because we actually do agree on a lot of these same values, even if we think the source of those values is different, right?

00:16:38.000 I think the source of those values begins much earlier.

00:16:41.000 I think that it is embedded in certain biblical principles that are evaluated and reasoned through over time.

00:16:48.000 But how do we espouse those?

00:16:49.000 So for me, I can espouse those values in a particular way, starting from the premise that there's a certain absolute morality that was established by God.

00:16:58.000 This is where the God question comes in.

00:17:00.000 And so I'm wondering, without that absolute morality,

00:17:03.000 Where, how do we get to that point where we can convince people?

00:17:06.000 And I'll let you answer the question.

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00:17:59.000 Okay, so back to that really big question that I just posed to you.

00:18:01.000 Wait, you said something about, I'm gonna die?

00:18:03.000 What?

00:18:05.000 See, I don't have to fear a question as much.

00:18:10.000 We'll talk about that too.

00:18:12.000 We'll talk about big issues like life and death in just a second because this entire book on what heaven constitutes is really fascinating.

00:18:19.000 I just started reading Jonah's new book, The Suicide of the West, which is a weird title because it's much more of an uplift.

00:18:24.000 At least the first half is very uplifting.

00:18:26.000 Well, you didn't get to the downside yet.

00:18:28.000 Oh, okay.

00:18:28.000 I haven't gotten there yet.

00:18:31.000 There's no God in this book.

00:18:33.000 And I'm only going to use reason to argue for these principles.

00:18:37.000 Perfect.

00:18:37.000 And the reason that, to me, is good, not just because I'm an atheist, but that it shouldn't matter what religion you are or, in a sense, it doesn't really matter what the roots are, although it's intellectually interesting.

00:18:48.000 Whatever works, if it works to increase human flourishing of more people in more places, then I'm for it.

00:18:55.000 And we should champion those.

00:18:57.000 And make reasonable arguments for why they're working.

00:19:00.000 And full stop.

00:19:01.000 That's all we need to do.

00:19:02.000 So where do you and I get our morals from?

00:19:04.000 How do you know what's right or wrong?

00:19:05.000 I tend to think we probably both get it from the same place.

00:19:08.000 That is, the still small voice within, and then our culture, our parents, our traditions, and so on.

00:19:14.000 But where did those come from?

00:19:16.000 And at some point, if you go back far enough, you're going to, I think, argue there's a supernatural intervention into the system that says, this is what's right or wrong.

00:19:25.000 But my question would be, how do you know?

00:19:27.000 Because we know from biblical scholars that the Bible is something of a wiki.

00:19:30.000 It's an edited volume.

00:19:31.000 We know people wrote it down.

00:19:32.000 And you say, well, maybe God inspired their writings or words or something.

00:19:36.000 But if we just take something like, is killing wrong?

00:19:40.000 We wouldn't ask, is murder wrong?

00:19:42.000 Right.

00:19:42.000 Because murder, by definition, is wrong.

00:19:43.000 But killing is wrong.

00:19:44.000 Well, it depends.

00:19:45.000 And so how do you know?

00:19:47.000 And so this is, as you know, Euthyphro's dilemma that if these moral principles are out there in some kind of

00:19:53.000 You know, platonic space floating around up there.

00:19:58.000 Are they right or wrong because God said so?

00:20:00.000 Or are there reasons?

00:20:01.000 And if we have reasons for why it's right or wrong... Then what do you need God for?

00:20:04.000 Right.

00:20:04.000 You just skip the middleman and just go straight for the reasons.

00:20:06.000 So I actually disagree with... I know I watched your debate with... interview slash debate with Dennis Prager on Dave Rubin's show specifically about this.

00:20:14.000 I'm not somebody who disagrees that you can

00:20:17.000 into it that murder is wrong just without the presence of God.

00:20:20.000 In fact, Judaism basically says that.

00:20:21.000 Judaism essentially says that there are certain principles where if you were born in a wilderness, you would still be held accountable for failing to abide by those principles, and those do include murder, right? 0.81

00:20:29.000 So murder is wrong whether you believe in God, whether you were born in a barn, it doesn't matter, right?

00:20:33.000 There are certain things you can intuit.

00:20:35.000 But some of the higher order morality that we're talking about, the value of individuals, or how far you extend the tribe,

00:20:40.000 I'm not sure that that stuff can be done simply through pure reason.

00:20:44.000 I'm skeptical of that specifically because I think that what we tend to do in the West is we tend to say everything that was good was Enlightenment thinking and everything that was bad was counter-Enlightenment thinking.

00:20:52.000 So this is my criticism of Steven Pinker's new book on the Enlightenment is that what Steven does is he writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and never mentions the French Revolution.

00:21:01.000 He writes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment and he never recognizes that Rousseau was a member of the Enlightenment caste.

00:21:08.000 He didn't call himself counter-Enlightenment.

00:21:10.000 That the French Revolution was happening at the same time as the American Revolution, essentially, in the broad scheme of things, that there's a whole line of thought, including communism and Nazism, that considered itself uber-rational.

00:21:22.000 If you actually look back to the foundations of Marx, Marx is talking about imposing the reason of humanity on the economic system as a whole.

00:21:29.000 So pure reason, I'm not sure can get you there, is the argument that I'm making.

00:21:33.000 Well, first of the French Revolution, in The Better Angels, Steve talks about Burke and Burkean conservatism.

00:21:41.000 And Burke was in favor of the American Revolution against the French Revolution.

00:21:45.000 Why?

00:21:46.000 Because in the American Revolution, you had a balance between, we want to overthrow the systems that are not working, but retain the ones that are still good.

00:21:54.000 Because those are long, hard-fought traditions that work pretty well.

00:21:58.000 Now, unfortunately, slavery got thrown in there, but we eventually got rid of that.

00:22:02.000 The French Revolution was like, let's just blow the whole thing up and start over, including a new calendar. 0.83

00:22:09.000 But they did actually have a cult of reason, right?

00:22:11.000 I mean, they actually took the Notre Dame Cathedral and they actually put an idol to reason in the Notre Dame Cathedral and they had a cult of it.

00:22:18.000 So I guess my contention is that

00:22:20.000 If you're going to make the argument that it's self-evident, these principles eventually are self-evident, I don't think in the absence of... The Burkean argument is, in essence, a religious argument.

00:22:28.000 There is a bunch of stuff that was passed down to us by our forebears, and we have the capacity through reason to evaluate whether we still think that the evidence is on the side of particular rules, or whether these rules have been misapplied.

00:22:39.000 Right.

00:22:39.000 But you have to acknowledge the value of what has been handed down, as opposed to the tabula rasa reason, which might be mandated by the social science

00:22:48.000 Approach that is now being taken up by a lot of folks, people with whom I have great discussions.

00:22:53.000 But whenever I read Sam Harris's books and he says that, you know, throw religion out the window and we can come up with better than that.

00:22:59.000 As I said to him when I was talking to him, well, you grew up five miles from me and we share a lot of the same principles.

00:23:03.000 So I'm happy to have that discussion with you.

00:23:05.000 But if you'd grown up in a society that had a different tradition, I have a feeling you'd be arguing something very different and so would I.

00:23:10.000 Right.

00:23:11.000 OK, so two things.

00:23:12.000 One, I think Pinker makes the point that most of these are counter-Enlightenment Romanticist traditions.

00:23:20.000 The blood and soil of the Nazis, for example, that it's the race that counts and so on. 0.69

00:23:26.000 Now, you may make rational arguments about that and say, I'm using reason, but your reasoning is wrong.

00:23:32.000 And so we can say we're both using reason and these arguments are better than those arguments.

00:23:38.000 So I think those are the two points about that.

00:23:41.000 Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, but I think that the question there about the misuse of reason would be this.

00:23:46.000 Is that your pattern of reasoning is wrong or that your premises are wrong?

00:23:51.000 If your pattern of reasoning is wrong, then we can all spot the flaw in the reasoning and say, OK, here's where you went wrong.

00:23:56.000 But if the premises were wrong, then we're back into my argument, which is that the culture you inherit is a deeply impactful thing on whether you believe in individual rights in the first place.

00:24:05.000 So I guess what I'm trying to get you to, and maybe I'm trying to argue you into it, is acknowledging that Judeo-Christian values are at the very least utilitarian.

00:24:13.000 Even if you don't agree with the source of them, you agree that the legacy that begins with Judaism and through Christianity in the Christian world, that is a necessary, not a contingent part of history.

00:24:26.000 Maybe.

00:24:26.000 But how do you deal with then all the bad side of the Christian tradition before the Enlightenment?

00:24:32.000 Right.

00:24:32.000 You know, the Inquisition, the witch hunts.

00:24:34.000 So the way that I deal with that is what I say is that the Bible was given to a specific group of people.

00:24:39.000 If I were to give you a written document right now, I'd have to speak the language that you and I were speaking.

00:24:42.000 I couldn't use terminology that you didn't know.

00:24:44.000 I couldn't give you rules that were so

00:24:47.000 Deeply radical that they would run counter to anything that you could possibly believe.

00:24:50.000 So, for example, when Maimonides talks about sacrifices, you know, these animal sacrifices that seem really barbaric to us now, what Maimonides is arguing in the 12th century is CE, right, about a document written presumably by Jewish tradition 2,000 years earlier.

00:25:04.000 He's arguing that if you're going to try and convince people away from sacrifice, you have to first change the nature of the sacrifice.

00:25:10.000 You can't just abolish something that people think is completely

00:25:13.000 dependent and necessary.

00:25:15.000 And then over the course of time, there are certain parts of the Bible that speak to eternal human nature, right?

00:25:21.000 So, for example, this is what Judaism and Christianity would say is true about sexual matters, is that human beings are the same regardless of where they are.

00:25:29.000 They always have the same sexual nature.

00:25:30.000 That is non-changing.

00:25:31.000 But what is changing is the necessity to slaughter animals, for example.

00:25:36.000 Or what is changing is the evidence basis for witness testimony.

00:25:41.000 Yeah.

00:25:42.000 Do you mean like when Jefferson said, all men are created equal, but he has slaves?

00:25:47.000 By today's standards, nobody's a racist.

00:25:49.000 But really, he's just trying to get something done, and you can't have everything.

00:25:53.000 So he's saying, look, we have to use what we have now, and we could try to change it later.

00:25:57.000 Essentially, yes.

00:25:57.000 So to me, it feels like modern thinkers looking back at ancient texts saying, well, when Jesus said this in Mark 3, 27, he really meant women should have the vote.

00:26:09.000 Wow!

00:26:09.000 I mean, you're getting this out of that passage.

00:26:12.000 I think we're reading back into it, a lot of it.

00:26:15.000 I think that you can find traditions.

00:26:18.000 To me, this principle of interchangeable perspectives, that is, if we're going to set up a society, I can't know which group I'm going to be in, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. 0.99

00:26:28.000 And I, as an individual, can't convince you to treat me nice just because I'm me and you're not me.

00:26:35.000 And I have a privileged position just because I'm me.

00:26:38.000 So the golden rule is really that.

00:26:41.000 And it's metallic derivatives, as Pinker calls them.

00:26:43.000 And I like that idea because I think the basis of that is in this kind of evolutionary model of

00:26:53.000 Myself, as genes, drive me to just want to hoard all the resources, but you're making the same calculation, so we have to come to some agreement.

00:27:00.000 One way to do that is for me to put myself in your position.

00:27:02.000 How would I feel if I were Ben and I was doing this to him?

00:27:06.000 Well, okay, I would feel bad.

00:27:07.000 So I think religions discovered certain eternal truths about human nature long before there was the Enlightenment or modern Western culture at all.

00:27:19.000 I don't know, maybe by accident or just trial and error, at some point you're going to figure out.

00:27:23.000 Or maybe.

00:27:28.000 Well, but by observation.

00:27:30.000 It's like the point Jordan Peterson makes about novelists having deep insights into

00:27:36.000 I think that's right, and there's a whole branch of evolutionary psych that does evolutionary literature.

00:27:41.000 Like when Shakespeare and Jane Austen write about their characters, they're really getting it right about how people behave, their sexual nature, power structures, hierarchy, the kinds of things that drive conflict in human relationships.

00:27:54.000 They figured it out long before there was anything even called psychology.

00:27:57.000 How did they do that?

00:27:58.000 By observing, by paying attention.

00:28:00.000 So I do think religions get it right a lot of the time just because they're 2,000 years, 4,000 years of observations that get written down.

00:28:12.000 And then what we do is go back and pick and choose the ones that seem right.

00:28:15.000 And the other ones, like capital punishment for X, Y, and Z, we don't practice that anymore.

00:28:20.000 We've rejected those.

00:28:21.000 We accept these.

00:28:23.000 Based on what?

00:28:23.000 Based on modern

00:28:25.000 Standards like these are good arguments.

00:28:26.000 So we'll use those and emphasize those to the flock.

00:28:29.000 Okay, good.

00:28:30.000 That's fine.

00:28:31.000 Okay, so so I want to talk a little bit now about the the Arguments that you make with regard to free will because you're you're libertarian politically or at least classical liberal politically You don't want the government in anybody's business and that presupposes a certain level of responsibility among individual actors because obviously you do something and now you're responsible for the thing that you did and

00:28:48.000 You have the choice to make, but you have a kind of interesting view of free will.

00:28:52.000 So I am a free will, as a religious person, I'm a free will absolutist in the sense that I believe that I don't know how it happens, but I don't think that if you had a giant God machine, right, and the giant God machine had all the information of the universe programmed into it, that you could predict how I'm going to, the next sentence I'm going to say to you.

00:29:09.000 Right.

00:29:09.000 That I think that I have the capacity as an individual actor to, there's something outside the system, in other words, that allows me to make, to subsume my biology and say something different and think something different.

00:29:19.000 I'm an individual.

00:29:20.000 So you, in your scientific view, there are a couple things that you do that seem to cut against libertarianism.

00:29:25.000 And I just want to know how you, how you rectify the breach.

00:29:29.000 So one is that you, you've suggested before that there is such a thing as a self, but there really kind of is not such a thing as the self.

00:29:34.000 That basically are a bunch of firing synapses that identifies as the self.

00:29:38.000 So, without a self and without the capacity to make a free decision, every decision you make is determined, predetermined, how do you get to a libertarian political position?

00:29:48.000 Or even just a libertarian free will position.

00:29:51.000 The modified version of that is called compatibilism.

00:29:54.000 In a survey I like to cite from 2009 of 3,500 professional philosophers and graduate students and so on,

00:30:00.000 59% were called themselves compatibilists.

00:30:03.000 Very few are in the sort of pure free will, like there's a little homunculus in there pulling the levers, and the rest are determinists, say, along the lines of the arguments that Sam Harris makes.

00:30:12.000 So Dan Dennett, I think, makes the best arguments for these, which is that, first, we are

00:30:21.000 That's right, that's right.

00:30:38.000 But first, we're not god machines.

00:30:41.000 We can never know that.

00:30:42.000 Second, we are active agents within the causal net.

00:30:45.000 So you have this causal net, the universe, all these things operating.

00:30:48.000 But we can actually change the variables as we go.

00:30:51.000 As the pathway unfolds, we can push back, we can stop smoking, we can go on a diet.

00:30:58.000 So I want to ask you for clarification on that.

00:30:59.000 But first, sorry, I have to take a break for Lending Club.

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00:31:50.000 I interrupt you right in the middle of the stream of thought, which is the worst thing to do.

00:31:53.000 But where you were, where you left off, was you were talking about we have the capacity to kind of, we still have the capacity to change things.

00:31:59.000 We can still go on a diet.

00:32:00.000 We can still, so how, that's a lot of active verbs.

00:32:04.000 I said it's a lot of active verbs for what is a passive phenomenon.

00:32:06.000 The concept is that Dan Dennett uses the degrees of freedom.

00:32:10.000 That is, within a mechanical system, you have degrees of freedom of how much it can move around.

00:32:13.000 In organisms, say, cockroaches have fewer degrees of freedom than the dog.

00:32:18.000 The dog has fewer degrees of freedom than the chimp, and the chimp far fewer than humans. 0.86

00:32:22.000 And even within human groups, the law already takes into account the fact that, say, murder in an act of rage, or you were drugged up, or somebody held a gun to your head, or something like that.

00:32:35.000 We say, well, that's different than me freely choosing.

00:32:38.000 Well, what's the difference?

00:32:40.000 I think so.

00:32:57.000 He's not choosing like I could choose.

00:32:59.000 So if I actually get drunk and kill somebody, I should be held more accountable than, say, the alcoholic who just can't control himself, although there should be always punishment there.

00:33:09.000 But anyway, that's the idea, that the more degrees of freedom you have, the fact that you can never know all the causal variables anyway, we feel like we are free in the same way we feel we are a self.

00:33:20.000 And if you want to call it, you know, Sam calls that an illusion.

00:33:23.000 Okay, it's a great illusion.

00:33:24.000 It's one of my favorite illusions.

00:33:25.000 It's the one that makes life fun and interesting.

00:33:28.000 But yeah, I think that the reason that, so essentially you're redefining free will to mean free of outside or interior compulsion.

00:33:36.000 Meaning that it's not that you are free to make any decision that you want to, it's that you are free of somebody putting a gun to your head, or you are free of a genetic factor that forces you to do X. I'm not free to be an NBA player, okay?

00:33:47.000 Right.

00:33:48.000 You're constrained.

00:33:49.000 Yeah, we're all constrained.

00:33:51.000 But within the channels that we're going down through life, they're wider than I think most of us intuitively think, and that you can actually tweak the variables.

00:33:59.000 So the compatibilism that you're talking about sounds a lot like, you agree with Sam on principle, but you agree with me in action.

00:34:05.000 That's right.

00:34:06.000 That's right.

00:34:09.000 And this is what's kind of fascinating is that, you know, for people who are arguing the strong non-compatibilist position, right?

00:34:14.000 For people who are arguing the strong determinist position, you end up in this weird place where you wonder why you're doing what you're doing all the time.

00:34:21.000 But people, they don't.

00:34:23.000 Sam doesn't walk around going, well, I wonder where he's going.

00:34:25.000 This is what I asked Sam and he didn't really...

00:34:27.000 I'll ask him again when he comes on.

00:34:29.000 To me all determinists are pragmatic compatibilists.

00:34:33.000 No one walks around going, well I wonder where he's going next.

00:34:35.000 And I think all compatibilists are disguised absolutists because in the end there's what they believe is true and then they're acting completely opposite of that because if you believed everything was determined then you'd sit around navel gazing all day presumably.

00:34:46.000 By the way, the social science tends to demonstrate this, that when you tell kids that they have so many constraints on them that they can't get anything done.

00:34:53.000 This is why victim ideology is really a problem.

00:34:55.000 Victimhood mentality.

00:34:56.000 You tell a bunch of kids society is constraining you, there's vague racism out there, there's vague institutions that are trying to

00:35:03.000 It's terrible.

00:35:18.000 I'm not sure you can teach a child this.

00:35:19.000 It was really interesting.

00:35:20.000 This is the determinist position.

00:35:24.000 When I was talking to Sam on his podcast, we did a thing in San Francisco, and the best part of the evening was a woman got up and she said, I totally agree with you, Sam, about determinism, but I have a seven-year-old kid.

00:35:34.000 What do I teach my seven-year-old kid?

00:35:35.000 I heard that.

00:35:37.000 It was pretty amusing.

00:35:38.000 It was pretty interesting because this is one of the big questions, is what do you teach your kids if you feel that the science is not in confluence with how they should actually

00:35:45.000 Act or move.

00:35:46.000 And the same thing holds true for the self.

00:35:47.000 So I want to get your view of the self and then we can move further in this direction.

00:35:50.000 Just one more point.

00:35:52.000 Social psychologists and clinical psychologists talk about learning self-control, willpower.

00:35:57.000 And we know now there's a lot of research on, you know, the marshmallow experiment.

00:36:00.000 Right.

00:36:00.000 I've tried it on my daughter.

00:36:02.000 I'm that kind of person.

00:36:03.000 You can train yourself.

00:36:04.000 I mean just knowing, okay, I know if I can resist

00:36:07.000 For 15 more minutes than I'm going to be a better person.

00:36:10.000 I'm going to do it and you can do that.

00:36:12.000 You can just buy it.

00:36:13.000 So that's an example of you actively throwing yourself into the causal net saying I am going to tweak the variables.

00:36:20.000 And you know I'm going to I'm going to set my alarm for 6 and I'm going to have my running clothes already out because I know if I don't.

00:36:26.000 Call it what you want.

00:36:27.000 To me, that's a kind of free will or willpower.

00:36:28.000 Use the active verbs.

00:36:29.000 I'm good with active verbs because that is what we do.

00:36:48.000 But it's essentially a faith-based argument.

00:36:49.000 You have faith in yourself that you're capable of acting, even though in reality you may be just a bunch of neurons firing based on stuff that happened several trillion years ago.

00:36:58.000 Probably wouldn't use the word faith, but we bump up against these...

00:37:04.000 Language walls. 0.80

00:37:05.000 I mean, this is part of the problem with talking about God, free will, and consciousness.

00:37:09.000 We use these words, and it's really hard to define them carefully enough to get an answer.

00:37:14.000 So like the consciousness one, for example, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, where what is it like to be you, Ben?

00:37:21.000 Is your red the same as my red?

00:37:24.000 Oh, we've got to work on this problem.

00:37:25.000 This is an insoluble problem, because I can never be in your head.

00:37:28.000 I can't know what it's like to be a bat, Thomas Nagel's famous thought experiment.

00:37:32.000 Because to do that, I'd have to bolt on some wings and the muscles and the neurons.

00:37:35.000 According to modern scientists, you can't know what it's like to be a woman. 1.00

00:37:37.000 You can claim you are one, but... Okay, maybe if you do the surgery and the hormones, but even that's just sort of bumping you closer and closer to that.

00:37:46.000 But if we really did it, all the way, you would just no longer be a man or a human wondering what it's like to be a bat.

00:37:52.000 You'd just be a bat going, well, I'm a bat.

00:37:54.000 I mean, you wouldn't be thinking...

00:37:56.000 So like in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, where the salesman wakes up and he's like, whatever he is, a cockroach or something.

00:38:03.000 That can't happen.

00:38:04.000 You would just be the cockroach.

00:38:06.000 You wouldn't be walking around going, oh, this is what it looks like to be a cockroach.

00:38:10.000 So that to me is one of the, these are called mysterian mysteries.

00:38:14.000 They can never be solved.

00:38:15.000 So that free will, we use these words, determining the free will, they're by definition in conflict.

00:38:20.000 How can you resolve them?

00:38:22.000 We just tried.

00:38:22.000 It's not perfect.

00:38:24.000 And God, the last one, I think,

00:38:25.000 If you mean by God a supernatural agent outside of space and time, well then by definition we can never know that because we're in space and time.

00:38:33.000 It's not falsifiable.

00:38:34.000 No, not falsifiable.

00:38:35.000 So if you mean like a super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence that we can meet one day and go, oh, so you have the power to actually do, even like telekinesis or something, you know, this could be done with computer chips in the brain.

00:38:47.000 It's already done and so on.

00:38:48.000 But that's a natural agent.

00:38:50.000 And I think by God, we've never talked about this, but you probably mean a super outside of space.

00:38:55.000 Yeah, the classical definition.

00:38:57.000 Correct.

00:38:58.000 So how would you know?

00:38:59.000 And the answer is you don't, which is why you're a believer, not a knower, typically.

00:39:04.000 What I've said before is I know in God, meaning that there are certain premises that I use for my politics and my values in my daily life.

00:39:10.000 That I believe spring from the principle that there is an intelligent being that exists outside space and time and that has created a system that is knowable by us, an objective truth that is discoverable by us, and a universe that is understandable to a large degree by us.

00:39:25.000 And that's not falsifiable, but it's no less falsifiable, no less unfalsifiable than the theory of multiple universes because we can never get outside our universe.

00:39:33.000 So there's no way for us to know whether we're a bubble on top of a bubble or whether we are specifically

00:39:38.000 Designed as a as a unique place for life, right?

00:39:41.000 This is this is one of the the arguments that's being made now and it's why Stephen Hawking was so attached to the idea of multiple universes because they're that that weird problem that we exist, which is a very statistically

00:39:53.000 Non-probable event.

00:39:55.000 The way of getting around that is by saying, well, yeah, we're just that series of nines in pi, basically, that when you do 3.14, you go far out enough, you get 60 instances of nine in a row.

00:40:03.000 And so we say, well, right, because pi is sort of randomized beyond a certain point.

00:40:07.000 Well, but there's no way to know that because now you're positing a thing that we cannot falsify to debunk another thing we cannot falsify.

00:40:15.000 Right.

00:40:15.000 Yeah, where's the lever, the Archimedean lever, to stand outside?

00:40:19.000 We can't.

00:40:20.000 Okay, now my physicist friends tell me that the multiverse is a derivative of their models predicting that that would be the case.

00:40:28.000 Now, this is out of my... Right, and mine too.

00:40:30.000 So I'd have to bring in Brian Keating or something.

00:40:33.000 So the question is, when we bump up against these grand mysteries, what do you do with them?

00:40:37.000 To me, it's okay to just say, you know what?

00:40:39.000 I don't know.

00:40:40.000 Like with the heavens on earth, is there an afterlife?

00:40:43.000 I don't know.

00:40:44.000 You're an agnostic, not an atheist.

00:40:46.000 Well, in the sense that Huxley meant it when he coined that word in 1869, unknowable.

00:40:50.000 I think the God, free will, consciousness, as they're phrased, they're unknowable.

00:40:56.000 So they're outside of science.

00:40:57.000 Now we can talk about them and use reason or whatever, but I think we're going to bump up against a wall there.

00:41:02.000 So I was curious, by the way, that the ancient Jews, the Shoal, you don't go anywhere after your death, right?

00:41:07.000 Yeah, the idea of the afterlife is a pretty modern invention in Judaism. 0.98

00:41:11.000 It really only crops up, historically speaking, a little bit in the prophets, and it's usually the late prophets.

00:41:16.000 And it's really maybe as a response to early Christianity or Greek thought.

00:41:22.000 So yeah, in the Bible itself, there's no reference, in the Torah, there's no reference to the afterlife at all.

00:41:27.000 So what do you think happens after the death of your body?

00:41:30.000 I mean, I only have suspicion, because again, unverifiable.

00:41:33.000 My suspicion is that if there is a God, which I believe, who exists outside of time and space, and that what animates me is that I'm made in the image of God, and that what animates my capacity is that I'm made in the image of God, that I reunify with God.

00:41:47.000 Basically, the traditional Jewish take on this has been that there's a cleansing process. 0.70

00:41:51.000 Judaism doesn't believe in eternal hell.

00:41:53.000 So it's instead this idea that there's a cleansing process for

00:41:56.000 So you don't think you're physically resurrected into heaven with God?

00:42:21.000 Something like a soul, or energy, or consciousness, or something like that.

00:42:24.000 Yes, yes.

00:42:25.000 A form, like an Aquinas form, right?

00:42:27.000 But yes, I think that those are actually two different things in Judaism as well.

00:42:30.000 Like the idea of tichayat ha-metim, which is the idea of resurrection of the dead.

00:42:34.000 That's a different idea than what happens after you die, right?

00:42:36.000 Tichayat ha-metim is the idea that eventually the Messiah comes, that we'll all be resurrected back in our physical bodies at a certain point, which

00:42:42.000 You know, honestly, given the nature of how science is moving and the possibilities of cloning, it's actually less crazy than it sounded probably a couple of thousand years ago.

00:42:50.000 Yeah.

00:42:50.000 I debunk most of the modern, you know, the singularities coming.

00:42:53.000 We're going to upload everybody into the cloud.

00:42:55.000 This is not going to happen.

00:42:57.000 No, definitely not.

00:42:58.000 I mean, that's good to know because I just feel like the computer would be really weird.

00:43:01.000 It's weird to live inside a computer.

00:43:03.000 Or that we're living in a computer now, but there's no buffering or, you know, little pixels that are going off.

00:43:08.000 Every so often when I'm just staring off into space, it's because the connection went down.

00:43:10.000 But while I got you here, I want to push you on something.

00:43:12.000 You know, my Christian friends and people that I debate, particularly on the resurrection, you know, they have a whole series of arguments, you know, if you just followed our reason, you would accept Jesus as your Savior.

00:43:23.000 And my answer to this is,

00:43:25.000 The great Jewish rabbis who are smarter than you and I sitting here, they've gone through all these arguments.

00:43:30.000 Why don't they accept Jesus?

00:43:31.000 Why don't you accept Jesus as the Messiah?

00:43:33.000 Okay, so the reason that I don't accept Jesus as the Messiah is because I think that a lot of the arguments in... So, Jesus as the Messiah is a different figure than anything that exists inside Judaism.

00:43:44.000 So when people say that Judaism predicts the coming of Christ, the change in the nature of what Christ is, what a Messiah would be, is different from Judaism to Christianity.

00:43:54.000 So Judaism never posited that there would be God come to earth in physical form, and then

00:44:00.000 So you're not waiting for the Messiah to come?

00:44:27.000 He's not coming in the physical form.

00:44:30.000 I'm waiting for the Messiah to come in the form of a political figure, right?

00:44:32.000 So the Messiah in Judaism is a guy who's going to come back and is going to establish peace in Israel and is going to assure that there's sort of a happier world with a bunch of political aspects to it, as explained by Maimonides.

00:44:46.000 But he's going to die too, right?

00:44:47.000 He's not going to come back and everybody lives forever and any of that kind of stuff.

00:44:50.000 He's a corporeal agent.

00:44:51.000 He's just like us.

00:44:52.000 Right.

00:44:53.000 In the Jewish view, any person could be the Messiah.

00:44:55.000 Any Jew can be the Messiah in the Jewish view.

00:44:57.000 So I could be it.

00:44:57.000 Who knows?

00:44:59.000 I'm not.

00:44:59.000 Well, you're off to a good start.

00:45:01.000 But that's a different view than the Christian view.

00:45:04.000 So the argument typically made to Jews by Christians on this is that it's forecast by the Bible.

00:45:10.000 And for Jews, we have a whole different read when you read the Hebrew about why this may or may not be true.

00:45:15.000 But Christians claim the Old Testament predicts it's going to come.

00:45:17.000 So you disagree.

00:45:18.000 Well, I disagree because, I mean, I think a lot of the verses that are cited are actually misreads of the Hebrews.

00:45:24.000 I read Hebrews, so I think that... But, you know, again, that's not to disclaim, even in the Jewish view, the impact of Christianity on world history, right?

00:45:35.000 Yeah, that's a different question.

00:45:35.000 We're just talking about the ontological question.

00:45:38.000 Is there a God out there, and is there a Jesus, a Messiah, in physical form?

00:45:41.000 Right, so I have actual beliefs that run counter to the idea of God taking physical form as a human being, because I think that that leads to a lot of weird

00:45:48.000 Yeah.

00:45:48.000 Side effects.

00:45:49.000 It sure does.

00:45:50.000 Yeah.

00:45:50.000 Like, to my Christian friends, you know, well, you're resurrected in heaven.

00:45:53.000 Well, how old am I?

00:45:54.000 I mean, physically resurrected.

00:45:56.000 30.

00:45:56.000 Some of them say you're 30, because that was a good... Jesus was 30, you know, and so... But, you know, but I'm 63 now, so what happens to all the memories I have of the last 33 years?

00:46:07.000 Do they go into the brain?

00:46:08.000 Yeah, no, these are definitely puzzling questions, which is why I don't believe in that version of heaven.

00:46:13.000 What's interesting, we can talk about this now, I mean, what's interesting is your version of a heaven, which I want to talk about in just a second.

00:46:19.000 First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Quip.

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00:47:33.000 I'm trying to remember where we were.

00:47:34.000 Well, do you believe there's a soul or something like a soul, a pattern of information that represents who you are that floats off the body and goes, continues on?

00:47:43.000 So, I don't know.

00:47:43.000 I mean, honestly, I don't know.

00:47:44.000 And I don't think anybody has a great verifiable account of that.

00:47:48.000 I have suspicions, but again, they're suspicions less about knowledge.

00:47:51.000 What I do know, and the reason why I'm religious, is that a religious lifestyle that is based on certain fundamental premises, I think, makes life better for people.

00:47:58.000 I think that the rules that are set down,

00:48:01.000 As currently understood, at least, are rules that are likely to lead you to leading a happier and better life than your pure reason alone.

00:48:09.000 Because pure reason alone, unleashed, without even those moorings in Judeo-Christianity, can lead to a lot of really terrible places.

00:48:17.000 But I want to ask you about your version of heaven, because we're talking about heaven.

00:48:19.000 So we can get back to that very controversial statement in just a second.

00:48:21.000 We're good to go.

00:48:38.000 Not just that, though, that really just living a full, meaningful life and being engaged with other people in your society, with your family and friends and so on, that this is it.

00:48:49.000 And we should be doing this anyway, whether there is an afterlife or not, because these are good things to do.

00:48:53.000 So in the last chapter, I deal with, well, if you're an atheist, if there's no afterlife, maybe there is, but whether there is or not, we don't live in the afterlife, we live in this life.

00:49:04.000 We're not living in the here and after.

00:49:06.000 We're living in the here and now, so make the most of it.

00:49:08.000 But not the most of it by just plugging in the morphine drip or sucking down whiskey all night or whatever your pleasures are.

00:49:17.000 It turns out that research shows that that doesn't do it for most people.

00:49:20.000 It's not enough.

00:49:21.000 I mean, there are some just pure hedonists who just get stoned all day or whatever, but most people find that unsatisfying.

00:49:27.000 And so, there's a distinction between happiness and meaningfulness.

00:49:30.000 So, leading a happy life, if this is your goal, the things you do are more short-term, immediate.

00:49:35.000 It's leading a pain-free life.

00:49:37.000 You know, pain-free or it's just fun, like going out for dinner and drinks with family and friends.

00:49:41.000 Okay, that's fun.

00:49:42.000 Three hours later, it's over.

00:49:44.000 It's like, okay, now what?

00:49:47.000 But doing something that's more long-term, either looking back to your past, what have I done with my life that's productive?

00:49:53.000 What am I going to do in the next 20, 30 years?

00:49:56.000 And then doing things that are not fun or pleasurable now, like the example I use in the book is caretaking.

00:50:01.000 I have four parents, step parents, and bio parents, and I was caretaker for two of them, and this wasn't fun at all.

00:50:08.000 It wasn't pleasurable driving my dad around all these hospitals, and then the nursing homes, and the pharmacies, and you know, I'd get home and I'm just exhausted.

00:50:18.000 But I feel better as a person having done that, because I kind of feel like, well, they did this for me when I was little, and I would want somebody to do that for me in the cycle of life and all that.

00:50:27.000 You know, and those kinds of things are something much simpler, like working out in the morning.

00:50:31.000 Like this morning I did a couple hour bike ride with the guys.

00:50:34.000 It's not fun when we're going really hard.

00:50:36.000 I mean, it's kind of painful actually.

00:50:38.000 But when I'm done, I'm like, I feel better about myself.

00:50:40.000 I did that, and then down the line, it's a good thing to do.

00:50:43.000 That's kind of it.

00:50:44.000 And this is the concept of flow also, that when you're ensconced in work, this is the happiest you are, like when you are at one with the work that you're doing.

00:50:50.000 And I totally agree with this, by the way.

00:50:51.000 I think that happiness in life is not utterly disconnected from action in life.

00:50:54.000 I think that the attempt to make a hard break between, okay, so you take a bunch of stuff that you hate during life and you're going to hate it your whole life and then you're going to die and everything's going to get fixed in heaven, I actually don't think that's a very good way to teach religion, number one.

00:51:05.000 Right, right.

00:51:05.000 That's right.

00:51:05.000 Right.

00:51:25.000 Right.

00:51:26.000 Right.

00:51:43.000 Heavily tied in, even from a secular point of view, with a decline in secular happiness for a couple of reasons.

00:51:49.000 One is obviously the lack of community, right?

00:51:51.000 As you fragment communally, there's been attempts to sort of graft on different forms of community in the absence of church, but those have largely failed.

00:51:59.000 And you're seeing people atomized in a new way because of social media.

00:52:02.000 That's a real problem, whereas you see higher levels of communal happiness when you feel like you're part of a group of people who actually have a common worship purpose.

00:52:09.000 Yeah, so I think that we don't have a human need for religion.

00:52:12.000 That's too big a word.

00:52:12.000 We have a need for community, society, for being part of a social group that's doing something that we feel is good and right and gives me deeper meaning.

00:52:24.000 Not just fun.

00:52:25.000 Fun, pleasure, doing something with friends is one thing, but being part of, say, a religious group, a bowling league or whatever in the famous example.

00:52:32.000 I'll challenge you on that a little bit.

00:52:34.000 In the sense that you say that being part of a community is the entirety of it.

00:52:38.000 I'm not sure that a bowling league is quite the same thing as a church.

00:52:40.000 Bowling league is probably not the right example.

00:52:42.000 But it is an interesting one because obviously Robert Putnam uses bowling alone as the evidence of lack of community in American life.

00:52:48.000 And I would say it's probably not going to church is the best example of lack of community because it's not just about being a member of a community.

00:52:54.000 It's about feeling like you're a member of a community with a common purpose that is in fact transcendental and that matters.

00:52:59.000 I think that when you talk about purpose and meaningfulness and living a meaningful life,

00:53:04.000 I think there are people who are capable of generating, self-generating meaning and feeling good about what it is that they do.

00:53:09.000 But I think that human beings by and large, and this is my main case for religion actually, is I think that human beings by and large are really crappy at defining their own meaning.

00:53:17.000 I think when human beings are left to their own devices to generate their own meaning,

00:53:21.000 I'm glad that you and I agree on politics, but people very often find meaning in controlling others.

00:53:25.000 They very often find meaning in making standards for others.

00:53:28.000 They very often find meaning in making a better world.

00:53:31.000 And by that, they mean silencing people they disagree with and shutting them up.

00:53:33.000 And human history is replete with this.

00:53:35.000 And it's replete with religious people who did the same thing.

00:53:38.000 So the idea of a transcendental purpose, I think there is a necessity for people.

00:53:43.000 People do seek the religious, which is why religion is common to literally every culture on planet Earth.

00:53:47.000 So by transcendent, if you mean beyond just ourselves, yes.

00:53:51.000 And beyond our lifetimes, too.

00:53:53.000 Or even, yeah, so like for me, going to Mount Wilson or other observatories where there's huge telescopes and the big dome is just as meaningful as when I go to the, my wife's from Cologne, Germany, so we go to the dome there.

00:54:05.000 It's this, you know, thousand-year-old magnificent, and I love going in there.

00:54:09.000 I feel like this is a transcendent experience in the same way as when I go to the astronomical domes.

00:54:16.000 I think it's the idea of getting us beyond ourselves in some bigger way.

00:54:20.000 Not just beyond our friends and family, but our whole lifespans and so on.

00:54:24.000 Now, the religions that do that, I'm on board with you. 0.99

00:54:26.000 Not all of them do that.

00:54:28.000 The prosperity gospel business, Joel Osteen, these people, Creflo Dollar, all the way back to Reverend Ike, you know, God wants me to be rich.

00:54:35.000 Yeah, I don't believe that.

00:54:37.000 But the ones that are going out to man the soup kitchens and so on and helping the poor, OK, that's good.

00:54:42.000 Whatever it takes to move the needle a little bit to increase human flourishing, reduce human suffering.

00:54:48.000 Which brings us to the question of cosmic impact.

00:54:50.000 So the difference between going and looking at the cosmos and saying, wow, I am a tiny speck of humanity amidst this magnificent thing.

00:54:57.000 Yeah.

00:55:13.000 In the universe.

00:55:14.000 So a religious person would say, I'm having an impact because God wants me to do X, right?

00:55:18.000 God gave me a certain set of rules to live by and everything that I do matters, which is why Judaism is such a ritual-based religion and really takes ritual seriously.

00:55:26.000 Like every time I drink water, before I do that, I'm supposed to bless God and recognize that God is present in my life, which is an attempt, I think, to get to that feeling of

00:55:35.000 Yes, but of course there are religions that do this in a bad way, like my purpose is to get up this morning and become a suicide bomber. 0.98

00:55:41.000 That's the wrong purpose.

00:55:43.000 How do we know?

00:55:44.000 Which is why I'm not.

00:55:44.000 Which is why I don't believe their set of beliefs, yeah.

00:55:47.000 And so we have to have some kind of standards.

00:55:49.000 What are our standards, and where do we get those?

00:55:50.000 Okay, I'm back to the Enlightenment, or wherever you want to start.

00:55:53.000 Using reason to get us there.

00:55:55.000 So religion can do it, but not all of them do. 0.99

00:55:58.000 I think it's reason and religion.

00:55:59.000 And I think that's why we can have a conversation, which is really so great, is that I'm not coming at it and just citing Bible verses at you.

00:56:04.000 I'm saying it's a merger of religious revelation and a reason that takes that and crafts it.

00:56:11.000 And that it's a mix.

00:56:12.000 Religion is an enzyme, it's a catalyst. 1.00

00:56:14.000 And that catalyst is what creates the cheese of civilization, right?

00:56:18.000 You put that enzyme in there, you create the cheese of civilization.

00:56:20.000 You don't have that enzyme in there, that Judeo-Christian enzyme in there, and it just remains a watery way.

00:56:26.000 Yeah, you have to pick and choose, though, from the Scriptures to get the ones that we are now using to, say, contribute to a better society and ignore the other ones.

00:56:36.000 Well, they were picked and chosen, right?

00:56:37.000 I mean, that's why we're here.

00:56:37.000 Yeah, I mean, the passages in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, a lot of them are pretty grim.

00:56:42.000 No question.

00:56:43.000 Yeah, so we do this anyway.

00:56:46.000 Why do I get up in the morning?

00:56:47.000 Well, I have a family that I want to take care of.

00:56:50.000 I like working.

00:56:51.000 I enjoy it.

00:56:52.000 I like being productive.

00:56:53.000 I want to move the needle a little bit, make society a little bit better through my writings or whatever.

00:56:57.000 And I just, you know, I think, I'm not sure I call it cosmically.

00:57:01.000 I'm not sure.

00:57:02.000 That'd be a little egoistic to think I can, you know, change the cosmos or whatever.

00:57:06.000 But you have to feel like that.

00:57:07.000 Everybody has to.

00:57:07.000 A little bit.

00:57:08.000 Yeah.

00:57:08.000 You know, just a little bit.

00:57:09.000 Yeah.

00:57:09.000 Okay.

00:57:10.000 Even when you say you have to move the needle to make things better.

00:57:12.000 I mean, we have to define better.

00:57:12.000 We have to define moving the needle.

00:57:14.000 And all of this has to exist in a context where you feel like you are making a difference.

00:57:19.000 But you don't do it because you're expecting to get rewarded in the afterlife.

00:57:22.000 No, I'm doing it out of duty.

00:57:23.000 And I think there's a difference between duty and reward.

00:57:25.000 You know, religion puts a heavy focus on the idea that it doesn't matter what you want to do.

00:57:30.000 Finding your bliss is a lot less important than you doing what you're supposed to do.

00:57:33.000 Well, here I think we can derive duty from Kant's deontology.

00:57:37.000 There are certain things which really are consequential arguments, ultimately.

00:57:41.000 These are good rules and duties and things we should do.

00:57:44.000 Why?

00:57:44.000 Because it makes society better.

00:57:46.000 And I don't think you have to step out of this world to justify it.

00:57:51.000 You can justify it through pure reason.

00:57:53.000 Now, people are critical of Kant to a certain extent on this, but we can at least get there if we bolt on some utilitarian arguments and maybe some Rawlsian

00:58:02.000 I think it's possible to get there.

00:58:03.000 I don't think it's mandatory to get there.

00:58:05.000 And that's why I think that the argument from pure reason tends to fail, just because pure reason in the absence of culture ends up at the French Revolution.

00:58:13.000 So here we want to throw in empiricism.

00:58:16.000 Okay, what are the actual consequences and results?

00:58:18.000 What can we see?

00:58:19.000 So, for example, we have 50 different states with 50 different constitutions, 50 different sets of tax laws, 50 different sets of gun control laws, and so on.

00:58:27.000 We can look around and see the different experiments as they unfold and go, well, this one's working, this one's not working.

00:58:33.000 There was a news story last night about the rates of homicides in Chicago just went down like 50% because they implemented this police program that we're using here in L.A.

00:58:42.000 We're good to go.

00:58:57.000 Right.

00:58:57.000 The only question becomes at that point, and then we get back into the big question.

00:59:00.000 So what does working constitute?

00:59:02.000 Because one of my favorite shows on TV is Man in the High Castle.

00:59:05.000 Have you seen it on Amazon?

00:59:06.000 I haven't seen it yet.

00:59:07.000 It's really fun, but it's fun in a not in the purest sense.

00:59:12.000 I mean, the story of the show is that there is the Nazis and the Japanese won the war and they divvied up the country.

00:59:18.000 And if you go into Nazi land, everything is beautiful. 0.99

00:59:20.000 The planes work beautifully.

00:59:21.000 It's like 1960 and they have these incredibly advanced technologies.

00:59:26.000 Everything is extraordinarily clean, of course.

00:59:28.000 Everything seems wonderful for the people who are alive.

00:59:30.000 For the people who are dead, not so much.

00:59:32.000 But this is one of the big problems, I think, in Kant's deontology, is that when Kant says, you know, treat everybody as you would have everybody else be treated, which is basically a rewrite of the golden rule, it's slightly different, right?

00:59:43.000 The original golden rule was actually the silver rule, which is don't treat anyone else as you would not want to be treated.

00:59:48.000 Once you get to treat everybody else as you'd want to be treated, well, if you feel you're a superior being, that means you get to treat inferior beings in an inferior way.

00:59:55.000 And so I think that we have to come up with some definitions that are reliant on certain premises.

01:00:01.000 And that's why I keep insisting on the premise.

01:00:03.000 If we can accept the same common premises, then I think that we end up at the same place.

01:00:06.000 And this is why I don't think atheists are, there are people who argue atheists can't be moral.

01:00:10.000 I think that's utter nonsense.

01:00:11.000 But I will argue that a system without

01:00:15.000 Just saying, this is my moral starting point.

01:00:17.000 I can't prove it, but this is where I'm starting.

01:00:29.000 Yes, I think probably we do that.

01:00:31.000 Yes.

01:00:32.000 I mean, I'm trying to make the argument that the individual is the moral starting point, survival and flourishing of sentient beings, something like that.

01:00:39.000 But they're words.

01:00:40.000 I just string together some words and I try to base it.

01:00:43.000 So we're evolved organisms.

01:00:45.000 I don't think it's a proof.

01:00:46.000 I think it's just an argument.

01:00:49.000 But you're calling on, well, I'm going one step further outside of space and time.

01:00:53.000 But still, at some point, you have to tell us how you know what the deity wants.

01:00:57.000 Because again, you know, Muhammad Atta, when he's flying the plane into the building, he's just as sure as you are that, hey, the outside source told me this is the right thing to do.

01:01:05.000 Yeah, and the proof that he's wrong is that he's wrong.

01:01:11.000 It's wonderful to have you.

01:01:12.000 I really appreciate the discussion.

01:01:14.000 One of the most fun things that I get to do every week is talk with folks like Michael Shermer.

01:01:17.000 Folks, go out and get his books.

01:01:18.000 Heavens on Earth is his new one, and his slightly older one, but just as worthy of the read, is The Moral Arc, How Science and Reason Led Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.

01:01:26.000 Michael, thanks so much for stopping by.

01:01:27.000 I really appreciate it.

01:01:34.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:01:37.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.

01:01:39.000 Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.

01:01:42.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

01:01:43.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

01:01:45.000 Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.

01:01:46.000 And title credits by Cynthia Angulo.

01:01:48.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

01:01:52.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 17, 2018

Michael Shermer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 6

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