Sam Harris, the author of Waking Up and the host of the Waking up podcast, joins me to talk about his new book, On God and the Universe and why we should all be worried about getting life insurance if we don t have it. We also talk about the dark web, the dark side of the media, and how we can all be friends with people who disagree with us on a wide variety of topics, including religion, politics, philosophy, and philosophy, but are willing to put their thoughts on the line and engage with the best version of their opponents. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve read the book or watched the video, and some parts may make sense only if you ve listened to the podcast. If you haven t checked out the book and/or the podcast, you should definitely do so. It's worth the read, and it's well worth the listen. You won't want to miss this one. Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius. They make life insurance, and they make it easy to compare quotes and find the best deal for you. Check out their website here. And if you need life insurance but you ve been putting it off because it's too confusing or you think you don't have time, check out their site here. You can compare quotes while sitting on the couch watching TV or while you're listening to this podcast. Just try it, just try it! Just pay it just five minutes, and you'll be fine. Just like it's free, right? just like a baby seal on the ice, right like that's dead like that. . That's right there, baby seal right like you can do it and you're not going to die like that, right right like a big baby seal like that s dead like a cubicle it's not even getting any better than that, like a real baby seal until you're dead like you're in the next episode of the ice cream truck that s going to be dead like it s dead, like that or it s gonna be a baby s in the ice cube like a baby seal, right by the ice Cube is a baby , right like the ice seal is dead like this ?
00:00:00.000What are the principles whereby we can navigate in the space of all possible experience and experience better and better lives and a better and better world?
00:00:17.000So today's Sunday special featuring Sam Harris, the author of Waking Up and the host of the Waking Up podcast, will begin in just a second.
00:00:23.000First, I want to remind you that you're going to die.
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00:01:28.000And, you know, there are certain weird things that happen in your life where you think, I'll never end up being friends with that guy.
00:01:33.000And then you and I have ended up becoming pretty friendly, which is really kind of interesting.
00:01:36.000So Sam Harris, for those who don't know, is not only perhaps the foremost atheist philosopher on planet Earth, he's also the host of the Waking Up podcast.
00:01:43.000He's a neuroscientist and philosopher.
00:01:47.000You should check out his podcast, it's just terrific, and all of his books are really worth the read.
00:01:50.000I disagree with them strenuously, and they're really intelligent and really fun to read, and he's not trying to hide the ball.
00:01:56.000So, Sam, thanks so much for stopping by.
00:01:58.000So, let's just jump right in with the fact that you and I are now sitting together, because that in and of itself is a weird thing.
00:02:03.000What has happened in the country that we're now part of this kind of deviant conversation from the mainstream that seems to be growing in audience size?
00:02:13.000Well, you and I are both part of this wing of the media where we're having long-form conversations on podcasts and on YouTube videos where we're reaching a surprisingly large audience.
00:02:25.000And because of the format, we're not put in these weird rhetorical boxes where we have to struggle to make
00:02:32.000The other guy looked bad in the 45 seconds remaining, you know, on CNN or wherever it is.
00:02:37.000And so we really can unpack an argument and we can search for
00:02:44.000There's a possibility of convergence in real time together.
00:02:49.000You might not notice the difference if you're listening to this in any 30 second bit of conversation, but over the course of an hour or two hours, you notice that you're hearing a conversation that you're not hearing elsewhere.
00:03:03.000We don't agree, as you say, about many things, but we're in the same media channel and we're approaching these conversations in a similar spirit of just
00:03:12.000Being willing to put our thoughts on the line and, based on a principle of charity, engage with the best version in our opponents.
00:03:21.000I think that's really important because, as you say, when you spend your life in cable news, it's always finding the worst version of the argument and then bashing it with a club until it's dead like a baby seal on the ice.
00:03:30.000But, you know, it's really interesting because the intellectual dark web, which is a coined term by our friend Eric Weinstein, at your podcast, where we were doing a taping of your podcast in San Francisco, and that, of course, is a conversation between three people who disagree on a wide variety of topics.
00:03:42.000What do you think sort of characterizes this?
00:03:50.000If so, what are the sort of common factors you think that unify the widely disparate viewpoints therein?
00:03:56.000Well, I think it's what I just mentioned.
00:03:58.000The fact that these conversations are happening in the dark with respect to the mainstream media.
00:04:03.000I don't think most people at the New York Times or on CNN understand how big your audience is or how big Joe Rogan's audience is or my audience is.
00:04:12.000Uh, would surprise them, and the fact that people are listening with that level of engagement would surprise them.
00:04:19.000And, yeah, ideological commitments aside, or beliefs aside, we're having conversations that are not really yet on the radar of the mainstream media, and yet we have analogous large audiences.
00:04:35.000And, again, it's a spirit of intellectual honesty and adventure where we're not
00:04:41.000We're not stuck simply trying to win points.
00:04:44.000I mean, you and I will debate many topics, and I think I'm right, you think you're right, and it will have the character of a debate, but in reality, as hard-hitting as any of those exchanges could ever be,
00:04:57.000I'm not approaching it the way you approach a formal debate at a theater.
00:05:01.000You get to turn it over and look under the other side of the rock and look at these viewpoints all the way through.
00:05:06.000And one of the things that I think has happened that's driven this group of people together is the fact that the hard left has become so ensconced in identity politics.
00:05:16.000I know that you obviously got into a very well-publicized exchange with Ezra Klein at Vox over this.
00:05:24.000I thought it was deeply intellectually dishonest and then his suggestion that you were saying identity politics is bad is in and of itself a form of identity politics.
00:05:32.000What do you make of this whole identity politics rising tide and what do you think the backlash to that's going to be?
00:07:05.000to have a credible opinion on any of the most important topics of our time, right?
00:07:11.000You're either just part of the problem with respect to all of these variables, and you're mansplaining or you're, you know, cultural appropriation or you're, you know, wading in here.
00:07:23.000I mean, so this is what happened with Ezra Klein.
00:07:26.000At one point he said, you know, we're two privileged white Jewish guys who shouldn't be talking about race at all, right?
00:07:32.000Like, this is not something we can weigh in on.
00:07:36.000And then when I changed the topic to anti-semitism it got no better for some reason.
00:07:43.000It's a problem because clearly if we want to get to a post-racial society, if we want to get to a society where human beings can simply be identified as human beings, the endgame can't be taking things like race and gender and gender difference and sexual orientation
00:08:06.000These can't be just the ineradicable variables that define a person's position on important topics for all time.
00:08:15.000If we get to Mars and we're still worried about skin color, in a Martian colony, we've done something wrong.
00:08:22.000I think we need to reverse engineer what we think the
00:08:27.000The end state should be and clearly identity politics is not the game we should be playing.
00:08:31.000Agreed and I mean obviously it's destroying the capacity to even have these conversations because there's no way to have a conversation with someone who is spending the entire time assessing whether your point of view is even worth being taken seriously as opposed to the rational nature of what you're saying.
00:08:43.000And I think that's one of the factors I think that's unifying those of us who are having these conversations.
00:08:48.000I think another factor that's unifying
00:08:55.000Now, I know that you, obviously, are a deep believer in data and science.
00:09:01.000I'm quite fond of data and science myself, although you would argue, obviously, that as a religious person, I'm not fond quite enough of data and science, and we'll get to some of that in a little bit.
00:09:08.000But it seems to me that one of the downsides of the identity politics is the attempt to paint into a corner science as though science is an outgrowth of a particular
00:09:18.000Culture and is therefore irrelevant to general swaths of people.
00:09:21.000So in the Ezra Klein interview, for example, when you suggested that group differences in IQ exist, and you weren't even saying that those group differences in IQ are attributable to environment or genetics.
00:09:31.000You were saying, we don't know the answer to that.
00:09:33.000If I don't want to mischaracterize your view.
00:09:35.000And he was immediately coming back with, well, you can't say that.
00:09:38.000And I'm not sure how we're supposed to have conversations when you legitimately can't cite data before you even start having a conversation.
00:09:45.000So, you know, in defense of people who worry about this kind of thing, you know, it's obviously possible for data to be wrong and the conversation continues even once you have data, but what we should all be anchored to is a good faith, intellectually honest, non-smear merchant approach to analyzing what we think we know and why we think we know it.
00:10:12.000and an empirical engagement with reality simply are not susceptible to an identity or even a political interpretation.
00:10:23.000This is why reason is the only thing that scales.
00:10:26.000If I have a good enough argument based on clear enough evidence, it should persuade you if you are being reasonable no matter what your background, no matter who your parents were, no matter how you were mistreated or not as a child,
00:10:58.000This is why prototypical, prototypically reasonable or reason-based topics are so easily divorced from politics and things like mathematics.
00:11:09.000Anyone who's going to argue that mathematics or philosophical logic is just a tool of political ideology and oppression just knows nothing about those topics.
00:11:22.000Virtually every other place that we really care about facts, and being right or wrong, has that character.
00:11:29.000It should be true, ultimately, of journalism.
00:11:32.000It's either Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy or he didn't, right?
00:11:37.000It's a fact about a human being holding a gun, right?
00:11:40.000And we either get access to the data or we don't.
00:11:44.000So, the fact that so much of our discussion about what's going on in terrestrial reality is based on, or is filtered through the lens of people's political commitments is just highly dysfunctional.
00:11:59.000It's just not something to be maintained.
00:12:00.000We should be cutting through it wherever we can.
00:12:02.000So where do you think that the United States is going?
00:12:04.000Because obviously we've seen, you know, the rise of your audience is enormous.
00:12:09.000I think a lot of folks, you mentioned Joe Rogan has an enormous audience.
00:12:11.000Jordan Peterson obviously has a very big audience.
00:12:13.000A lot of these people have a very big audience.
00:12:15.000Do you think that the rise of these new conversations is... Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
00:12:19.000Do you think that these new conversations are going to...
00:12:22.000Turn into a new sort of brand of politics that ends up saving the country?
00:12:25.000Or are you pessimistic and you think that the identity politics machines that are now operating at seemingly full blast on all sides, you think that those end up winning the day for the moment?
00:13:57.000And I'm, as you point out, or as we'll discover, I'm on the left on virtually every relevant question, except the ones we've been talking about, which is the virtues of identity politics and victimology.
00:14:11.000So let's talk about your political viewpoint a little bit.
00:14:13.000So you say you're on the left on a bunch of different issues.
00:14:15.000Are you more on the left socially, as far as being libertarian?
00:14:19.000Because, I mean, the truth is that you and I probably agree on the government's role in a lot of those particular areas.
00:14:24.000Probably not on abortion, but on same-sex marriage, for example.
00:14:28.000I think we probably agree the government should not be involved in these sorts of decisions.
00:14:32.000But as far as economics, are you also on the left?
00:14:34.000Are you more in favor of redistributionism?
00:15:09.000I think waiting around for the market to get that perfectly right, which might only happen if we just run out of oil, I think that's waiting too long.
00:15:24.000The oil industry is already subsidized.
00:15:27.000So if you got those subsidies out, then there would be a clear competition with renewables.
00:15:31.000But I think it would be rational for the government to, quote, pick a winner in that space.
00:15:38.000Not a winner with respect to a specific company, but recognize that there are certain things we want to incentivize.
00:15:45.000And one of them would be, say, to get off of oil, right?
00:15:48.000Forget about global warming for a second.
00:15:52.000So if we wanted to incentivize clean air, the market isn't necessarily the best way to do that.
00:15:57.000Because if you are burning something horrendous in your factory,
00:16:02.000Uh, you can't adequately compensate me for, for the smoke that, you know, blows over the fence.
00:16:06.000Right, their externalities, obviously.
00:16:08.000Uh, so I think, I think the externalities, uh, uh, in many cases are, I think libertarians ignore them, or they think that, that far too blunt an instrument would correct for them.
00:16:21.000Something like a, you know, a boycott.
00:16:23.000You know, so if you're a massive polluter, you know, and I don't like it, I can organize a boycott against you, and in the fullness of time, that's gonna do its work.
00:16:31.000Uh, I think that's getting truer and truer, right?
00:16:33.000I think the power of a boycott now with social media is probably as sharp as it can get or has ever been.
00:16:43.000It's easy to look back 20 years to see just how ineffectual those efforts might have been against big corporations.
00:16:49.000I do wonder whether the government interventionism in environmental issues particularly is, in fact, a blunt instrument given that there are technological changes that take place that radically change the nature of many of these industries.
00:17:02.000I'm a believer that in the next 20 to 30 years, very few people are actually going to commute to work.
00:17:05.000I mean, the internet has made it essentially possible for you to work wherever you want.
00:17:08.000It's made it possible for me to work wherever I want.
00:17:10.000There's still factories out there, but that's a shrinking percentage of the American workforce.
00:17:15.000I mean, you're seeing major retailers go out of business specifically because people are sitting home.
00:19:10.000Okay, so, let's talk a little bit about some of the kind of root issues that I think people want us to get into, which is gonna be all the religion versus atheism, and rationality, and all the deep stuff that is actually more fun to talk about than politics, in my view.
00:19:24.000And I get the pleasure of talking about it with you here, because I don't usually have the pleasure of talking about it on a daily basis when I'm covering politics.
00:19:29.000So, since we get to do this, let's do it.
00:19:31.000So, let's talk about where you think morality comes from.
00:19:38.000There are certain things that I believe are capable of understanding by any sentient human being.
00:19:44.000So I don't believe that all human beings in the absence of religion are immoral people who go around murdering their neighbors and raping their sisters.
00:19:53.000Pretty well-embedded in even Judaic philosophy, the idea that there is a sort of natural law theology where you, as just a normal person, know not to kill people and know not to steal and know to set up courts of law.
00:20:03.000This is what they call the Seven Commandments to Noah.
00:20:06.000But the idea is that anyone can basically discover these things.
00:20:09.000And there are universals across culture about you're not supposed to murder your brother.
00:20:13.000The biblical reading is that to reach a more sophisticated level of morality that leads to a sort of right-based society we see here, you at least need the catalyzing enzyme of a Judeo-Christian religion in order to get here.
00:20:27.000That would, I think, be the most rationalistic argument on behalf of Judeo-Christian values.
00:20:33.000Here would be a civilization that values individual rights above the values of the collective, that says that people are to be treated, to use the biblical phrase, as made in the image of God, that we should treat individuals as made in the image of God.
00:20:47.000That does not happen in the absence of a Judeo-Christian value system.
00:20:58.000It's a rationalistic argument because the deeply religious argument would be God said so, so do it, right?
00:21:02.000But that's not the argument that I think is the most compelling because that only works if you believe in God and if you believe in Revelation.
00:21:08.000So that's not the argument that I tend to make because I don't find it intellectually convincing.
00:21:11.000It's an argument from authority, which of course is not particularly convincing.
00:21:14.000So I tend to make the historical argument, which is that history
00:21:44.000One, I'm not convinced by that historical argument.
00:21:46.000I think you can cherry pick the data either way and come up with a different conclusion.
00:21:52.000And even if I agreed with it, it wouldn't make the case I think you want to make, because it would be an instance of what's called the genetic fallacy, which is
00:22:03.000Even if we granted that our respect for individual rights, say, came from a Judeo-Christian tradition, it doesn't mean that it can only come from there or that it even is best gotten from there.
00:22:16.000I would say that it actually hasn't come principally from there.
00:22:22.000That Christianity, in particular, was responsible for, in part responsible, for the fall of the Roman Empire.
00:22:28.000So Christianity undermined the notion that the Roman Emperor was a god.
00:22:35.000It made it harder to recruit true soldiers, and they had to farm it out to mercenaries.
00:22:41.000And it eroded what you might call traditional Roman values.
00:22:46.000And then the Western Empire fell, and we ushered in the Dark Ages.
00:22:52.000And insofar as there was a reboot to civilization at that point, it was largely the result of classical, the learning and philosophical insight of antiquity being preserved by, of all people, the Muslim community.
00:23:07.000So, I think you can have it any way you want looking at history, but it just doesn't get you there in terms of the moral content and, in this case, the political or social content coming from the Bible or any other religious text.
00:23:26.000Meaning, like, why in Judeo-Christian civilization, but not Islamic civilization?
00:23:29.000Because you mentioned rediscovery of Aristotle and reuse of Aristotle in the 10th and 11th centuries was really beginning, you know, in the Islamic world long before Aquinas really repopularized it in the 13th and 14th centuries.
00:23:42.000Well, one, I think it's, you know, from my point of view, it's impossible to ignore the influence of Islam.
00:23:48.000I mean, Islam is its own ideology instead of dogmatisms that are inflexible and at odds with the spirit of science fundamentally.
00:23:58.000And despite the fact that there was a brief period where there seemed to be some, you know, happy convergence between scientific and mathematical insight and Islam, for the most part, Islam has been hostile to, you know, real intellectual life and
00:24:14.000In a way that Christianity was hostile, even when the scientific worldview was struggling to be born in the 16th century and the 15th century.
00:24:25.000What we have historically is a real war of ideas.
00:24:32.000It can be crystallized in the moment where Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and put under house arrest.
00:24:40.000By people who refuse to look through his telescope, right?
00:24:43.000I mean, so that was the genius of religion paired with the emerging genius of science in that room.
00:24:49.000Well, to be fair, I mean, Galileo was originally sponsored by the church and so was Copernicus, but there's no question there was a backlash from the church to this stuff.
00:24:56.000Yes, and the backlash makes sense because there is a
00:25:01.000Intellectual progress on questions of how the cosmos is organized or where it came from or how life began.
00:25:09.000All of these questions, the scientific answers to which are in zero-sum contest with the doctrines found in the books.
00:25:19.000Now, it's true that there are religious people
00:25:22.000And now even the Pope, who have relaxed their adherence to tradition enough to make room for something like evolution, right?
00:25:28.000But it's still, it is still a problem.
00:25:33.000Aquinas was talking about this in the 13th century and 14th century, the idea that if it was in science and it was contradicted by the book, then you're misreading the book, right?
00:25:59.000So those two great lights of the Catholic Church gave us the Inquisition and gave us more than a century.
00:26:06.000I think it's also fair to say that they were rather instrumental in the development of modern science.
00:26:09.000So the Dark Ages, first of all I think the Dark Ages are a bit of an exaggeration in terms of the Dark Ages themselves saw a massive
00:26:18.000A massive growth in technology and architecture, for example.
00:26:20.000I mean, Gothic cathedrals are built during the Dark Ages.
00:26:23.000But the scientific world is, well, virtually every major university in the Western world was sponsored by the Catholic Church.
00:26:30.000And I'm not a great Catholic defender, right?
00:26:33.000But virtually all major universities were sponsored by the Catholic Church, which saw consonance between science and religion as a reason to actually investigate the natural world.
00:26:41.000Well, no, I mean, again, I think that's backwards.
00:26:43.000I think the reality is there was no one, I mean, everything that was good that was done anywhere at any time prior to, you know, pick your year, was done by some religious person.
00:26:53.000I mean, there was just nobody else to do the job, right?
00:26:55.000So you could make the argument that, you know, Catholics built every bridge in Europe until the Protestants came around and they built their half of the bridges.
00:27:02.000I mean, so there was just no one else to do the job.
00:27:49.000So there was often a real science at the back of a lot of merely mortal confusion where people were trying to work things out, you know, I would argue very much under the shadow of religious commitments that they need not have had and were not actually serving their ultimate ends.
00:28:09.000And this for me is true in the moral sphere as well, because to take
00:28:14.000This is why the Bible, in my view, can't be the real repository of our moral wisdom in any sense, because when you go to read it, you are forced to ignore certain passages or reinterpret them rather aggressively.
00:28:29.000To conform to what you now, in the 21st century, have every reason to believe is good or a direction worth going, socially.
00:28:36.000So, you know, it is just an inconvenient fact that slavery is endorsed in the Bible.
00:28:42.000It's explicitly endorsed in the Old Testament and it's certainly not repudiated in the New, right?
00:28:47.000And, you know, Jesus told slaves to serve their masters and to serve their Christian masters especially well.
00:28:56.000Where you can get a truly compelling case against slavery, because the creator of the universe clearly expected slavery to be a human institution.
00:29:05.000Well, except for abolitionists finding enough inspiration in the Bible to use it as their main text.
00:29:10.000But they did that despite what's in the Bible.
00:29:12.000Well, I think that that is... I mean, I don't want to... This shouldn't sound insulting, because it's not meant as an insult.
00:29:18.000I think that, from a religious point of view, that's a simplistic reading of the Bible's role in human affairs.
00:29:24.000Meaning that when any written document is given to any group of people, it has to be given to people in a way that they can understand.
00:29:32.000It's not that slavery was endorsed by the Bible.
00:29:34.000It's that slavery is universal among human civilization until modern times.
00:29:39.000There are religions that have different points of view on all these questions, right?
00:29:43.000So it was possible in the 5th century B.C.
00:29:47.000to have a take on ethics with respect to something like slavery or the killing of combatants or non-combatants that was quite a bit more modern and ethical and civilized
00:30:03.000uh... then was founded that we is found in the bible so you need to take take a minute you might not like some of their other commitments but take something like jane ism the jane is amit gandhi got his non-violence from jane ism jane ism is just in truth a religion of peace unlike islam which is is uh... you know that the word peace is a euphemism for the word surrender there uh... or submission uh...
00:30:27.000It's possible for people 2,500 years ago to wake up one day and even write a book which suggests don't harm anyone or anything, even a cricket.
00:30:39.000Right, well that's fine, but the question is...
00:31:06.000This is why I think Judaism is particularly kind of unique in this respect, because that's been an ongoing dialectic for literally thousands of years.
00:31:13.000I mean, there's legitimately, you know, thousands of pages of tractates of just people arguing about these particular issues.
00:31:18.000You would say that the argument should have started from the point of there was no text for them to argue about, and they should have just argued from sort of apriori reason, maybe.
00:31:27.000I respect text, but I think the principle of revelation is a problem.
00:31:30.000But just to back up for a second, I think it's certainly problematic for you as a Jew to argue that the legitimacy or success of religion is best measured by the number of adherents in the year 2018.
00:31:43.000No, but the point of Judaism also is that, I mean, it says in the Bible itself that God is going to make, you know, great peoples of all of Abraham's sons, for example.
00:31:51.000And as Maimonides put it in the Jewish belief, even the growth of Islam and Christianity, which are obviously based on a certain Judaic root, I think Islam less so, because there's an actual rewriting of the Old Testament.
00:32:23.000The basic principle, the bottom line is the basic principles of Judaism, those have been embraced in a way that the basic principles of Jainism have not across time, and they've shaped civilizations in a way that is significantly better than the principles of Jainism have shifted any number of small people.
00:32:37.000Or small group of people, not small people, obviously.
00:32:43.000The fact that you and I could improve the Bible with very little thought, just by taking out... If we just took out the worst passages that have no possible redeemable content this year, or I would argue any other year, the Bible's already improved.
00:32:59.000So the fact that we could edit it to anyone's advantage is a problem for the idea that this was written by an omniscient being
00:33:24.000as the product of human minds, brilliant or not, and every shelf in the bookstore or library has the same status with respect to the merely mortal provenance of these ideas, then it's fine.
00:33:37.000Then you can pick and choose the best ideas.
00:33:40.000Then you can be slavishly attached to Plato's Republic, and that can be your favorite book.
00:33:49.000What revelation gets you is this notion that, no, no, this isn't just a book, right?
00:33:53.000This is the product of omniscience on some level.
00:33:58.000And that ties your hands intellectually, because then you are forced to make these acrobatic contortions around passages which clearly have no good application now and didn't even have a good application then.
00:34:13.000And when you view it from the other side, when you think about just how good a book would be if an omniscient being wrote it.
00:34:21.000It's very easy to see what could be in there that would still astonish us.
00:34:29.000It's very easy to see what could be in there that would prove, just based on the time of its emergence, that this couldn't have been the product of merely human minds.
00:34:38.000And there's nothing like that in the Bible.
00:34:39.000To respond to some of those points, I think that there's a lot there, so I'm going to try and parse it as we go.
00:34:46.000I think that one of the arguments that is made, certainly in the Talmud, is the idea that human reason was generated in order to help
00:35:49.000Can take you in any number of horrible places that are significantly worse in virtually every way than the places that Judeo-Christian religion brought you for 2,000 years.
00:35:59.000My argument is not that Judeo-Christianity itself, Judaism on its own is everything that you need, right?
00:36:04.000As an Orthodox Jew, my argument is not that.
00:36:06.000My argument, which if it were, then I wouldn't be out there caring about science or about nature, as you say.
00:36:10.000People who are fundamentalists don't care about any of those things.
00:36:12.000They think everything you need to know is found in this particular book.
00:36:16.000I don't think I know how to fix my car from the Bible.
00:36:18.000But what I do think is that in the Straussian view, there's a tension between Athens and Jerusalem.
00:36:23.000There's a tension between revelation and reason.
00:36:25.000And that without either one of these things, that reason without revelation ends up in utopias of our own creation that can end up in
00:36:47.000Omniscience matters is because if there is no belief in an objective level of moral truth, then everything becomes subject to interpretation.
00:36:56.000Up to and including, if you were intellectually honest enough, laws like murder.
00:36:59.000Because maybe murder doesn't apply to people who are outside my tribe, maybe it doesn't apply to people who are outside my family, or people I just want to kill for my own benefit.
00:37:05.000So this is where we get into the alternative morality.
00:37:07.000This is where I'm going to ask you about your moral basis.
00:37:09.000Let me respond to some of that though, because there's a lot there.
00:37:12.000So, it's not going to surprise you that I disagree with that summary.
00:37:35.000It's just human beings talking to one another at any point in history, thinking internally.
00:37:40.000I mean, they've been extraordinary people, and they've had extraordinary insights, and they've shared them, and they've codified them in books.
00:37:46.000So the morality or pseudo morality or barbaric morality that you find in various places in various texts was put there by people, right?
00:37:56.000It's not that it came from some other source and that we need to be anchored to it.
00:38:01.000It is the record of a merely human conversation.
00:38:06.000That, I'll be the first to admit, has, in various parts, real value and real, you know, wisdom in it.
00:38:14.000And that's, and hence, the reason why people are so attached to some of it, certainly.
00:38:18.000But it's just, that's not unique for the Bible, that you can find that in, among Greek philosophers, or in various places in antiquity.
00:38:27.000And you can find it in modern variants.
00:38:29.000I mean, you and I, in one another's presence here, having a conversation that gets recorded,
00:38:35.000We can say something that is highly relevant to the question of how to live a good life.
00:38:41.000And if we were doing this 3,000 years ago and it happened to get written down, it would be one of the lines that people would think had been revealed if they lost track of what its actual source was.
00:38:54.000And so it's people like ourselves that have always done this work.
00:39:17.000The intellectual tools we can get in hand, and that includes whatever is good in religion, right?
00:39:22.000So if there's something that is in Ecclesiastes that is better put there than any place else in the canon of all of human knowledge, well then of course we want to keep that, right?
00:39:32.000So how do you decide what is the good?
00:39:35.000Because right now you're essentially playing Cottie under the tree, right?
00:39:38.000You get to sit there and say, here's a good moral standard, here's a bad moral standard, and you and I will sit here and our conversation will be better than a conversation a thousand years ago.
00:39:47.000This is a question that I asked you actually last time we spoke publicly.
00:39:51.000And the question is, okay, so if that's the case, you and I tend to agree, I would think, on probably 95% of our central values about what it is that makes for a good life, right?
00:40:02.000I think that we both believe in individual freedoms.
00:40:04.000I think we both believe in the ability to
00:40:07.000Live as you choose, so long as you're not hitting anybody else in the face, as a general rule.
00:40:11.000I think that we both agree on all of these things, and so what I asked you last time is, why do we agree on these things?
00:40:16.000Is it because we just both happen to be super unreasonable, like we are just the most reasonable people who ever lived, and we just happen to be here at this time, and why didn't people a thousand years ago know this?
00:40:24.000Or is it, you know, back to my original argument, the fact that we grew up probably ten miles from each other in a city that was built in a country that was built by people who believed all of these things that
00:41:33.000We're running a software program that is morally relevant to us, that is riddled with bugs, but that predates our humanity.
00:41:44.000And so largely what civilization is, the good parts of culture that will lead to something that is durable at the level of civilization, largely correct for our merely hominid, merely evolved, merely
00:42:02.000So, for instance, you and I have, as front and center in our moral hardware, a sense of disgust, right?
00:42:11.000And disgust has roots below anything that could be considered moral.
00:42:15.000It's just, you know, you could smell something bad and you feel like vomiting and that's... But the truth is, in terms of the evolution of the brain, the brain doesn't evolve new modules that can do fundamentally new things.
00:42:30.000capacities that are predicated on the old hardware that was anchored to things like, you know, I'm going to vomit based on that smell, right?
00:42:42.000And much of our moral thinking about the world is disgust-based or fear-based and it gets applied to things like how you feel about gay marriage, say.
00:42:59.000fundamentalist Christian context where you can find people who are just adamant that gay marriage is wrong, this discussed circuitry is tuned up through the lens of that social question.
00:43:09.000And that's a... so I view conversation about ethical truth and progress in ethical space being more a matter of
00:43:23.000Reasoning and unhooking our reflexive, in this case, disgust-based intuitions from our sense of what is ultimately good.
00:43:34.000I mean, there are things that you and I might not be comfortable with the first time we consider them, that we can get comfortable with by thinking it through or imagining things from other people's perspectives.
00:43:45.000Or at the very least, that we think are immoral but still think that we have no business in doing anything about.
00:44:16.000Now, everyone recoils from that, right?
00:44:19.000But it's not, if you actually think about it, it's not something that, like, there's kind of a magical superstition intruding there, where you think there's something that's been deposited in the sweater, even though, you know, we dry-cleaned it, you know, 450 times, right?
00:44:35.000So it's, and maybe a sweater is too charged, but to take something that, where there would be absolutely no question that his DNA, it's not covered with this creepy guy's DNA, it's something that you just, in order to recoil from it, you are thinking superstitiously, right?
00:45:11.000What you just referenced, this biological, evolutionary, descriptive story of how we got here.
00:45:17.000Why is it that we're the sort of apes that feel these sorts of ways about social interactions?
00:45:22.000And why is our moral thinking anchored to those properties?
00:45:29.000Then there's a completely separate question, which is the question that interests me morally, which is, given what we are, given where we are right now, what is possible for us?
00:45:43.000And what are the principles of neurobiology and everything else, economics and sociology and genetics, anything that can be brought to bear to change human experience?
00:45:56.000Whereby we can navigate in the space of all possible experience and experience better and better lives and a better and better world.
00:46:04.000And so that is a very different question because it presupposes, just on its face, that we have to, most of our job is to fly the perch that has been prepared to us.
00:46:16.000And I think you and I agree on this, but I'm not sure why.
00:46:18.000Okay, so here are the, I think, the two big questions that I have.
00:46:23.000Where does your concept of the good come from and why is it universal?
00:46:28.000And two, you just spelled out sort of your differentiation from the socio-biological explanation for morality that we evolved over time and that our brains are evolved to perform certain tasks and we sort of naturally came to a level of morality.
00:46:42.000But you're not a believer in free will.
00:46:43.000So when you talk about reason, and you talk about the importance of reason, you and I fully agree on this, but my question is that, as a neuroscientist, if we are just pure material and we're just a bunch of neurons firing outside of our own control, obviously, because every...
00:47:24.000What is the foundation of value and morality specifically?
00:47:27.000And how does free will or its absence interact here?
00:47:36.000And this connects to other questions where our intuitions probably divide and the questions about what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of life, those are questions that people ask where religious people by and large feel like you need an answer, like there's a meaning shaped hole in the world and we should fill it.
00:47:54.000And I, given how I view things, think it's the wrong question.
00:47:57.000What I see us as having is an opportunity.
00:48:25.000We don't know how good things can get.
00:48:28.000And yet, we know the general direction where we want to head.
00:48:34.000We know that if the world becomes more and more characterized by love, and joy, and creativity, and compassion, and insight, and fun, and we know that's all, that whole suite of, and you could list those characteristics
00:49:13.000Seeming paradoxes, which we could both point to occasions where suffering has led to something good, right?
00:49:19.000There's a silver lining to certain kinds of pain, right?
00:49:22.000Or if you want to become a Navy SEAL and experience all the empowerment that comes with that, you have to go through the hell of becoming a Navy SEAL, and that's a test and a trial and
00:49:35.000And yet, there's a massive silver lining for people who come out the other side of that.
00:49:37.000And yet, if you could sample a person's experience in each moment through that ordeal, it might be indistinguishable from torture, right?
00:49:45.000So, that's just to say that the frame around which we put certain sensory experiences matters, right?
00:49:51.000If I tell you that, you know, the pain in your bicep is because you've been lifting weights so much and you're making so much progress,
00:49:58.000Uh, you know, you'll feel one way about it.
00:50:00.000If I said to an identical pain, well, you actually unfortunately have arm cancer.
00:50:04.000It's a very rare cancer, but you've got it, right?
00:50:06.000You'd be, you would feel the suffering attendant to that.
00:50:09.000So, but all of this, these are all statements about what it's like to have a human mind and, and again, these are, I view us as having a navigation problem.
00:50:20.000There's a foundational claim here that need not even be argued for, that is far more defensible than a claim about revelation or anything else where you might try to anchor morality, is that all I need is the acknowledgement that
00:50:39.000If we imagine a universe where every conscious mind suffers as much as it can, for as long as it can, with nothing good ever coming of it.
00:51:04.000Now, if you're going to say it doesn't apply there, if you're going to say, well, yeah, that's kind of bad, but there are things that are worse, I don't know what you're talking about.
00:51:11.000Because by definition, this is the worst possible misery for everyone, right?
00:51:16.000So, as long as you are going to acknowledge that other states of the universe are better than that,
00:52:14.000And I think you're, I feel like you're playing a little bit of a trick when you sort of presuppose that we share a common definition of suffering.
00:52:23.000I think there are certain things where we share a definition.
00:52:39.000And I say, well, how do you like that?
00:52:42.000So one thing that is implicit here, although it's not a defeater if it's not so, but I have an expectation that you and I will converge, perhaps not
00:52:55.000on every specific state as our favorite or our least favorite.
00:52:59.000But there'll be whole families of states there that you and I will acknowledge.
00:53:12.000And this is just based on the similarity.
00:53:14.000So how do you not end up, if you're pursuing the ultimate, if there is such a thing as the ultimate possible good and this good is what you are, how do you not end up, number one, in sort of the brave new world
00:53:22.000You're drugging yourself the whole time for pleasure.
00:53:26.000And number two, this does bring to mind an essay by George Orwell that he wrote in 1940 about the rise of Nazism, and what he basically suggested was, why is it that everything is so good in the West?
00:53:37.000Like, everything is much better in Britain than it is in Germany, and yet people are willingly joining up with this monster to go and fight.
00:53:44.000And he said, because it turns out that a lot of people don't want freedom, a lot of people don't want
00:53:48.000A lot of people are willing to forego those things in favor of a higher pursuit.
00:53:52.000And you see that now with literally billions of people who, I think that the bush line that every human soul yearns for freedom, I don't think that's true.
00:53:59.000I think there are a lot of people who misdefine freedom or think that freedom is something that freedom is not.
00:54:03.000Otherwise they wouldn't willingly convert into these systems.
00:54:05.000So I think that it is a little simple.
00:54:08.000You know, no, but none of this contradicts the picture I'm painting.
00:54:11.000It's just that all of these things, all of these differences among people will have explanations, and we don't yet have those explanations in hand.
00:54:18.000But so take the simplest case, you know, you and I each put our hand on a hot stove, right?
00:54:23.000Now, given our similarity neurologically, I would expect if the stove is hot enough, you and I will have indistinguishable responses, right?
00:54:30.000And if you don't, if one of us doesn't have that response, there's something wrong with our nervous system.
00:54:36.000So, but let's just say we met somebody who had a different enough response that we even couldn't converge on the question of, you know, hot stoves are not worth touching, right?
00:55:13.000In Lawrence of Arabia, you know, apparently that's a true story about him.
00:55:17.000But that's, you know, it's a, you can train yourself to feel a different way about certain kinds of unpleasant, classically unpleasant stimuli.
00:55:24.000But again, all of this fits in a complete picture that we don't yet have about just why it is certain minds are the way they are.
00:55:34.000So the macro question for me is, given all the minds as they are, where
00:55:56.000Given a million years to talk about it, we might not be able to distinguish which is better or worse.
00:56:02.000Is Chinese food better than Thai food?
00:56:06.000There's a range of differences there which don't matter for better or worse, it's just different.
00:56:11.000And yet, at the end of the day, if you really preferred one and I really preferred the other,
00:56:17.000We could find some reason why that's the case.
00:56:19.000I mean, you might be a super-taster of certain tastes genetically, but then it's still coherent to ask, if we could really intrude in the brain and change our intuitions about better and worse, right?
00:56:34.000If I could change your sense of the rightness of certain actions or the wrongness, we could ask this additional question of,
00:56:42.000Whether that would be good because that would be a new way of navigating the space and this brings you to your brave new world question so like if it's possible to let's say we had a
00:57:15.000But you could imagine someone who's just so destroyed by the experience of grief that they just can't get their life back on track.
00:57:21.000Everyone in their life is worried about them.
00:57:23.000They're, you know, on the virtue of suicide.
00:57:25.000At a certain point you'd say, well, let's just give you this pill and just see if we can bring a little daylight in there.
00:57:30.000Even if you were against using it for yourself, right?
00:57:33.000But presumably, you wouldn't want to take it 30 seconds after your kid was run over by a bus.
00:57:38.000You know, you just see the worst thing that's ever happened in your life happen, and then you just pop this pill and you don't feel anything, you know, one way or the other about it, right?
00:57:46.000You're ready to go to Starbucks, right?
00:57:49.000That would be a complete fragmentation of who you are with respect to the love you feel or felt for your child, right?
00:57:58.000Like, what does loving your child mean if
00:58:01.000upon uh... immediately upon his or her death you want to cancel your grief and you feel great right so that we don't know what we did it'd be hard to find the right answer but and you know that this kind of thing is very likely coming by the way right it's it was very likely we will one day have a cure for grief and we'll have to figure out how to use it and there will be wrong ways to use it but i think what we want i think the intuition that that causes you to ask this question about Aldous Huxley and Brave New World is that we we have a
00:58:29.000We're right to want to be anchored to reality in some sense.
00:58:32.000And if we were ever faced with an opportunity of uploading ourselves into a simulation where just the world is a video game and nothing is real, right?
00:58:41.000So like our states of happiness are totally divorced from the reality of our lives, right?
00:58:47.000And our actual relationships and the conscious experience of other people, that would be a bad thing, right?
00:58:52.000And yet, we could imagine a circumstance of maximizing pleasure in a way that's divorced from reality.
00:58:58.000And that's an interesting argument to have, ethically, because I think our intuitions about that could change to some degree, and I think that there are ways in which we're already in something very much like a simulation.
00:59:13.000To talk about what is real in this context is interesting.
00:59:29.000But I think you can adjudicate that based on
00:59:34.000Other possible experiences in the landscape of all possible experiences that are clearly better.
00:59:40.000And you would make an argument based on evaluating those experiences.
00:59:43.000Okay, so this is one of those episodes where it's just, I'm going to be devastated that we don't have a second hour to actually go into all of these issues.
00:59:50.000Because we basically scratched the surface on all of this.
00:59:53.000But sort of final parting question because we didn't even get into rationality or free will exactly.
00:59:58.000A couple places where I'm sure we have more disagreements.
01:00:01.000But I have a very short answer to that piece.
01:00:09.000Rationality is not a... Successful moments of reasoning are not examples where freedom of will is even tempting to ascribe.
01:00:18.000So it's... If I give you an argument, if you strongly believe one thing, and I give you an argument that persuades you, that just knocks down the row of dominoes in your mind, that leads you to think... Right, no, I understand your argument, which is a naturalistic response to a reasonable argument, and you don't have any control over that.
01:00:53.000Yes and no, because you see people who clearly resist the impact of a reasonable argument on themselves.
01:00:58.000Yes, but the resistance is what it is to be unreasonable or to be under the sway of wishful thinking or confirmation.
01:01:04.000Right, but the bottom line is that, from my perspective, if the idea is that reason is basically just eliciting a particular response, then people
01:01:50.000I can imagine a lot of ways to convince people of things that don't involve me making arguments to them and that historically have been used to great success with horrible, horrific human carnage, obviously.
01:01:59.000Well, you're not necessarily convincing them in that case, you're just... Forcing them, right.
01:02:15.000So, when you make the argument for reason, are you saying that reason is morally better?
01:02:18.000And if so, why is reason morally better than, for example, the appeal of passion, which has obviously motivated millions of billions of people over time?
01:02:25.000Well, again, I don't think they're as separable as many people think.
01:02:29.000I think you can't reason, and there's neurological evidence to back this up, and Antonio Damasio did this work decades ago, where if you have certain neurological injuries in the orbital medial prefrontal cortex, you can't
01:02:43.000You can't be moved by the products of your, quote, reasoning.
01:02:47.000Because, I mean, reason has to be anchored to emotion in a very direct way.
01:02:51.000And, I mean, you can actually feel this in yourself.
01:02:53.000So, if I say something that starts to sound like bullshit to you, right, that feeling of doubt, you know, the feeling that you have detected errors in my chain of reasoning, that feels like something.
01:03:04.000And if you couldn't feel that, you know, if it was all just cold and calculating and just... That's why sociopaths, you know, can't reason their way to virtually anything.
01:03:11.000Well, they can, well... Or they can't reason their way to everything.
01:03:18.000They just don't care about other people's experience.
01:03:20.000So they're very manipulative in ways that you and I wouldn't... The reason itself doesn't arrive at a moral answer in any case.
01:03:28.000Well, so for me, reason is the only thing that, as we talked about at the top of this, it's the only thing that takes us out of who we are and scales to some universal point of view.
01:03:41.000It's not, you're not reasoning, if you're actually reasoning,
01:04:08.000Again, reason and scientific rationality, generally, is the thing that explains why, if you're colorblind, you don't see colors the way I do.
01:04:16.000It's not that we can't get at what's actually real.
01:04:20.000We can, because we can explain divergences of opinion.
01:04:24.000Otherwise, you just have those divergences.
01:04:25.000Well, we are definitely gonna have to have you back for a much longer conversation.
01:04:29.000It's really a pleasure to have you here.
01:04:50.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Caromina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
01:05:04.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.