The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Religious Belief and the Enlightenment with Ben Shapiro

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

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00:00:57.420 Welcome to Season 2, Episode 18 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:05.360 I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator, and reader of podcast ads.

00:01:11.180 Quick life update. Mom is relatively stable at the moment.

00:01:15.080 The post-surgical complication we've been dealing with is still not solved,

00:01:19.360 but at least she feels okay right now, and honestly, she looks a lot better than she did a couple of weeks ago, so that's good.

00:01:26.800 In the hospital room, we wrote a bunch of the messages we've received from people, positive messages.

00:01:34.120 Put them on paper and put them on the walls to make it more cheerful in there.

00:01:38.000 We got a lot of feedback from people who are testing out ThinkSpot, the intellectual platform Dad is a part of,

00:01:43.260 which you can sign up for at ThinkSpot.com.

00:01:45.880 All those messages are currently on Mom's wall, so things are stable theoretically for the next couple of weeks.

00:01:51.360 This week's episode is Dad's discussion with Ben Shapiro, titled Religious Belief and the Enlightenment.

00:01:59.180 Dad will introduce Ben in this episode, so I won't repeat his words.

00:02:02.800 Hope you enjoy.

00:02:04.320 When we return, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, Religious Belief and the Enlightenment.

00:02:09.600 And now, here's my dad with his special guest, Ben Shapiro.

00:02:22.700 I'm pleased today to be talking to Ben Shapiro.

00:02:27.260 Ben, I think, really doesn't need an introduction, at least not to most of you who will be either watching or listening to this,

00:02:33.080 given that he's now one of the most recognized individuals on the American political journalism scene.

00:02:39.660 In any case, Ben's an American lawyer, writer, journalist, and political commentator.

00:02:45.960 He's written 10 books, the latest of which is The Right Side of History, A Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great,

00:02:53.900 which has become a number one New York Times bestseller.

00:02:57.580 I think it's at number four right now.

00:02:59.160 Now, I think Ben just mentioned to me that he's sold about 150,000 copies since it was released,

00:03:04.360 and that was only a couple of weeks ago, so that's going very well.

00:03:08.120 He became the youngest nationally syndicated column in the U.S. at age 17.

00:03:12.540 He's also one of the most recognized current commentators on the new media, YouTube, and podcasts.

00:03:18.000 Serves as editor-in-chief for The Daily Wire, which he founded,

00:03:21.040 and is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, which runs daily on podcast and radio.

00:03:26.020 So he's managed to transform himself into a one-man media empire, and it's quite the accomplishment.

00:03:34.160 He's also an extraordinarily interesting person, I think, to follow, to watch in his interactions with people publicly,

00:03:40.960 because he's an unbelievably sharp debater and one of the fastest, verbally fastest people that I've ever met.

00:03:47.220 So it's good. We're going to talk about his book today.

00:03:51.020 That's The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.

00:03:56.600 And I can tell you right there, there's four reasons for social justice types to be irritated just at the,

00:04:02.780 just at the, what would you call it, the daring of the title.

00:04:07.900 So let's talk about it.

00:04:09.560 Tell me about your book. Tell me where you wrote it.

00:04:13.780 The reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016, I kind of looked around,

00:04:18.580 and for the record, I didn't vote for either of the presidential candidates in 2016.

00:04:22.220 Neither of them met my minimum standard to be president based on the evidence.

00:04:25.440 And I looked at the sort of attitude that had changed in America.

00:04:29.220 It used to be that we'd have elections and they were really fraught.

00:04:32.340 People were angry at each other. People were upset at each other.

00:04:34.640 But the rage seemed almost out of control in the last election cycle in 2016.

00:04:39.480 I was personally receiving enormous number of death threats for my positions on politics.

00:04:45.440 I was receiving enormous amount of hatred from the alt-right.

00:04:49.040 I know that there are some of the media, like The Economist, who have falsely labeled me alt-right,

00:04:52.620 which is hilarious to me since I've been their most outspoken critic for several years at this point.

00:04:56.840 And that year in 2016, I was their number one target, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

00:05:00.240 Well, maybe you're just one of those guys that's tricky enough to be part of the alt-right and also their enemy.

00:05:07.260 Right. You know, we Jews, man.

00:05:10.460 Yeah, yeah. Well, you guys are sneaky.

00:05:12.420 You're nefarious. It's all about the Benjamin's.

00:05:15.000 So in any case, I was receiving all sorts of blowback for that.

00:05:20.180 At the same time, I was going on college campuses and being protested to the extent

00:05:23.920 that I was requiring hundreds of police officers to accompany me at certain college campuses.

00:05:28.860 And I started to think, there is something deeply wrong here.

00:05:32.020 And it's not just that we are disagreeing with each other.

00:05:34.260 It's that there's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics

00:05:38.280 that I hadn't really seen before.

00:05:40.240 There was a feeling like, even back as late as 2009, that America was moving in the right direction.

00:05:46.360 Post-Obama's election, there was a feeling like, okay, well, we have the same fundamental principles.

00:05:51.200 We're trying to perfect those principles.

00:05:52.620 We may disagree over the ramifications of those principles.

00:05:55.700 Some of us may want more government involvement in health care.

00:05:57.400 Some of us may want less. Some of us may want more regulations in markets.

00:06:00.640 Some of us may want less to redistributionism or non-redistributionism.

00:06:04.560 But the fundamental principles, things like free speech, things like the inherent value of the individual,

00:06:10.120 things like the idea that I'm supposed to generally respect your right to your own labor.

00:06:14.660 These were all things that we sort of agreed on.

00:06:17.840 And then we were trying to broaden that out to encompass further groups.

00:06:20.880 And as time moved on, it seemed like we were moving away from a lot of those fundamental assumptions.

00:06:26.260 You started to see rises in the opioid epidemic, in suicide rates.

00:06:30.460 You started to see a general level of unhappiness crop up that was reflected in the political tribalism I was feeling,

00:06:35.800 but was reflected more generally in actual lowered life expectancy in the United States for the first time in decades.

00:06:43.580 And I started to think there's an actual deeper problem wrong here than just we disagree on politics.

00:06:48.860 There's something deeply wrong here.

00:06:50.220 We don't trust our institutions anymore by poll data.

00:06:52.860 Most of us don't know or trust all of our neighbors.

00:06:56.080 All of this stuff speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric.

00:06:59.980 So why is that happening?

00:07:01.160 And this is nearly unjustifiable.

00:07:03.820 I mean, if you look at us just from a material prosperity level, it's unjustifiable.

00:07:07.940 If you look at us from a political freedom level, it's unjustifiable.

00:07:10.560 We are the freest, most prosperous people in the history of the world.

00:07:13.060 And yet we're totally pissed off at each other all the time.

00:07:16.060 And we're filling that hole with anger and with social mobbing online and with woke scolding.

00:07:23.880 And where's all this coming from?

00:07:25.580 And that led me to write the book, which essentially argues that we've forgotten the foundations of our civilization.

00:07:31.880 The principles we used to hold in common have deep roots.

00:07:33.980 And when we forget those roots, we tend to move away from the principles themselves.

00:07:37.540 And this is manifested in what I think is the great debate over Western civilization right now.

00:07:41.520 One side which says Western civilization was rooted in good, eternal, immutable truths that were not always perfectly realized.

00:07:48.580 And that over time we have moved toward greater realization of.

00:07:52.380 And that's why the West is great.

00:07:53.380 That's why the West has provided material prosperity to the vast majority of the globe.

00:07:57.140 It's why 80% of people have been raised from abject poverty since 1980.

00:08:00.720 It's why you've seen this massive increase in the number of people who are living in decent conditions.

00:08:06.420 It's also why you see a rise in democracy, a rise in political liberalism, small L kind of classical liberalism.

00:08:13.020 All of this is the result of the West.

00:08:14.680 And so we ought to thank the West and we ought to look back to the roots and see what is there worth preserving.

00:08:18.740 And then there is-

00:08:19.300 And that seems, I would say, to be a viewpoint that would have broadly characterized both conservatives and classic liberals, as far as I'm concerned.

00:08:29.200 That's right.

00:08:30.200 And then there's the second point of view.

00:08:31.580 And the second point of view has cropped up and become very prominent in the West in the last couple of decades, particularly since the 1960s.

00:08:39.060 And that perspective is that Western civilization is really just a mask for hierarchy.

00:08:43.420 That basically there's a bunch of power hierarchies and subjugate, not natural hierarchies, forcible oppressive hierarchies.

00:08:51.560 White people against black people, rich people against poor people, the powerful against the non-powerful, the 1% against the 99%.

00:08:57.560 And all of these institutions, things like the family, things like free speech itself, things like free markets, these are actually just excuses for domination and subjugation.

00:09:08.440 They're not actual principles we hold to.

00:09:10.300 They're not important principles.

00:09:11.400 In fact, those principles have to be rooted out so that we can have a better humanity bloom in the wake of all of this.

00:09:18.020 Now, in my perspective, this takes for granted all of the prosperity.

00:09:20.980 It seems to assume that the natural state of man is prosperity and freedom, when in fact the natural state of man is misery and short life stands.

00:09:27.800 Okay, so that's an interesting thing right there that I've been thinking about quite a bit.

00:09:31.960 It's as if the radical left, I mean, there's a denial on the radical left of, let's say, biological differences between men and women, right?

00:09:42.180 Everything's socioculturally constructed.

00:09:44.180 That seems to me to be rooted in an even deeper denial of biology and nature in a more fundamental sense.

00:09:52.000 I mean, the left worships nature as something intrinsically positive.

00:09:57.380 You see that reflected in the more radical forms of environmentalism and some of the more toxic anti-humanism that goes along with that,

00:10:05.000 like the idea that we're a cancer on the face of the planet or that the world would be better off if there weren't human beings on it.

00:10:12.000 But what seems to not be part of that, which is quite surprising to me, is any recognition that although nature is, let's call it at least awe-inspiring, which also includes the positive,

00:10:26.680 it's also an unbelievably deadly force.

00:10:29.180 And the truth of the matter is that the natural state of human beings is privation and want right from birth.

00:10:37.660 And to blame what seems to happen so often on the radical left is that that's ignored entirely.

00:10:43.840 It's as if the natural state of human beings is plenty and delight in existence.

00:10:52.580 And that all of the terrible things that happen to people in their lives are actually can be laid at the feet of faulty social institutions.

00:11:03.600 It seems like it's such a strange position, given that the evidence that nature is trying to do us in on a regular basis is overwhelming.

00:11:12.040 I don't know if the left is so positively inclined in a romantic manner towards the idea of nature because that strengthens their position that all of the pathology that characterizes the world can be laid at the feet of institutions and particularly capitalist institutions.

00:11:32.480 But it still seems to me to me to be, it's a strange phenomenon.

00:11:38.740 It's strange and it's obviously ignorant, but I think that there's something else that really is going on here.

00:11:44.900 The Marxists of today are arguing, many of them are arguing, that what they're really wanting is greater shared material prosperity.

00:11:52.500 I don't think that that's actually what's capturing the minds of people right now.

00:11:55.900 I think what's actually capturing the minds of people was the spiritual promise of Marxism.

00:11:59.560 The idea that Marx lays out, even in the Communist Manifesto, when he is talking about the transformation of man,

00:12:05.880 I mean, his initial argument is that markets warp people, that people will become meaner and cruder and ruder and more terrible because of markets,

00:12:14.440 because they are self-interested, that the markets emphasize self-interest as opposed to altruism.

00:12:19.060 And therefore, if you got rid of markets, then you could exist in greater peace and prosperity and plenty because human beings themselves would transform.

00:12:26.140 So it's not that the system itself would create greater material prosperity.

00:12:30.160 It's that in the initial run, it probably would create more privation.

00:12:33.360 It's that in the long run, human beings would be transformed in their souls by all of this,

00:12:37.660 and then they would feel greater bonds to the people around them.

00:12:40.460 That was the spiritual promise of Marxism.

00:12:42.140 I think that that's at root what a lot of people in the West are resonating.

00:12:46.600 Okay, so that's a hope for something like a, well, it's almost like a religious redemption.

00:12:52.680 Yes, that's right.

00:12:53.280 It's a strange thing, too.

00:12:55.020 I mean, I'm preparing for this debate that I'm going to have with Slavoj Žižek, and I've been trying to think it through.

00:13:00.400 And one of the things that's really struck me is that not only are the solutions that Marxism offers error-ridden, to say the least, given the historical evidence,

00:13:13.020 and I just don't see how anybody can deny that, although people certainly do,

00:13:17.320 but that the problem that the Marxists originally identified seems actually to be vanishing.

00:13:23.040 I mean, as you already pointed out, there's been an unparalleled increase in material prosperity among,

00:13:31.860 not only among the rich, which you could complain about if you were concerned about inequality,

00:13:37.040 but among the poorest people in the world.

00:13:39.080 Like, we halved absolute material privation based on UN standards by 50% between the year 2000 and 2012,

00:13:47.380 and the cynics say that's because we set the standard for material privation too low, which is $1.90 a day.

00:13:53.600 But if you look at the curves that you can generate at levels of $3.80 a day or $7.60 a day,

00:14:01.260 you see exactly the same thing happening, and you see rapid increases in economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa,

00:14:08.720 like, you know, 7% growth rates, which are more typically characteristic, say, of China or India.

00:14:14.200 And that's manifested in unbelievably positive statistical evidence,

00:14:21.820 such as that suggesting that now the child mortality rate in Africa is the same as it was in Europe in 1952.

00:14:29.680 And so the Marxists' original complaint was that, you know, the rich were going to get richer,

00:14:33.940 and the poor were going to get poorer, and that that could be laid at the feet of capitalism,

00:14:38.420 just like the fact of hierarchy itself could be laid at the feet of capitalism.

00:14:42.840 And, A, it's clear that capitalism, although it does produce hierarchical inequality,

00:14:49.460 just like every other system that we know of, it also produces wealth,

00:14:53.280 and that wealth is actually being very effectively distributed to the people,

00:14:57.660 you know, perhaps not primarily to the people who most need it,

00:15:01.100 but to the people who most need it in ways that are truly mattering.

00:15:04.660 And so, to me, the entire structure of Marxism is anachronistic.

00:15:14.220 The problem is no longer appropriately formulated,

00:15:17.640 and the solution tends to be deadly, counterproductive if not deadly.

00:15:23.340 So it's maybe, here's something I've been thinking about, too.

00:15:28.220 You can tell me what you think about this.

00:15:30.020 You know, some of it still has to do with the innate human emotional response to inequality.

00:15:38.940 You know, when you walk down the street and you see a ruined alcoholic schizophrenic

00:15:42.840 who's obviously suffering in 50 different dimensions,

00:15:45.960 it's very difficult to feel positive about the state of humanity in the world,

00:15:50.440 and it's very easy for a reflexive compassion to take over and say,

00:15:54.780 well, wouldn't it be something if we could just retool society so that none of that was necessary?

00:16:00.000 It must be someone's fault.

00:16:01.620 It must be something that we're not doing right.

00:16:03.760 And, you know, there's some truth in that,

00:16:05.300 because, of course, our systems could be better than they are.

00:16:09.340 And it seems to me to be that unreflexive compassion

00:16:14.460 that drives whatever residual attractiveness that Marxism still has,

00:16:20.160 apart also from the darker possibility, which is that it really does appeal to the jealousy

00:16:26.300 that's characteristic of people and the envy,

00:16:29.260 which manifests itself as hatred for hierarchy on the basis that some people are doing better than me.

00:16:36.820 You know, so...

00:16:37.820 Right. I think there's also a failure on the part of advocates of the free market

00:16:43.100 to point out that free markets are good for what they are good for,

00:16:45.840 meaning that two things that are important to recognize about free markets.

00:16:49.580 One, free markets are there to create a generalized level of cheaper goods and better products

00:16:55.380 at cheaper prices, more widely available.

00:16:57.520 That's what markets do, and they do it brilliantly.

00:16:59.560 Well, that doesn't mean that markets are there to take care of the person who is unable to work.

00:17:03.880 I mean, that's not something that markets are there to do.

00:17:06.160 It's something I talk about in the book, the need for a social fabric.

00:17:08.780 If you want a free market, you also have to have a social fabric that helps pick people up.

00:17:12.220 Now, people on the left have said that government should be the ersatz social fabric.

00:17:16.100 The government should pick those people up.

00:17:17.420 And in large-scale cases, maybe that needs to be the case.

00:17:20.660 But usually, it was religious communities and informal social fabrics that actually filled

00:17:25.340 those gaps.

00:17:26.880 Beyond that, there is a second problem.

00:17:29.340 And that is, I hear a lot of populists on both left and right make the statement that

00:17:32.620 we just need to make markets work for us.

00:17:35.380 And all I can think when I hear that is you have fundamentally misunderstood what a market is.

00:17:40.620 So Marxism is a set of values, and then a system of economics crafted atop the set of values.

00:17:45.940 So the set of values, as you've said before, is that equality should trump prosperity, that

00:17:50.280 equality should trump freedom, that equality should trump everything.

00:17:53.320 So if equality trumps everything, then the only way to make everyone equal is to turn

00:17:57.040 them into indistinguishable widgets controlled from above until we create an economic system

00:18:03.620 to do that.

00:18:04.380 There are principles that undergird free markets.

00:18:06.560 Free markets are not a human construction.

00:18:08.700 Free markets are a recognition that you are an individual human being in control of your

00:18:12.020 own labor.

00:18:12.860 That simple understanding means that you cannot support any other form of a market.

00:18:17.740 Now, you can support some form of redistributionism at the local level.

00:18:21.460 You can try and urge people to be more moral by giving to their fellow man.

00:18:24.920 But markets themselves are a recognition of a basic truth that Marxism rejects, which is

00:18:29.860 that freedom and individualism ought to trump and indeed need to trump the need for equality.

00:18:36.760 So the freedom versus equality battle is very much alive in our time.

00:18:39.840 And because we have such freedom, people tend toward equality.

00:18:42.480 I think when you have-

00:18:43.640 Well, and we should talk about a little bit about equality too, because there's two important

00:18:48.200 modes of equality that have to be segregated and discussed separately.

00:18:56.900 Because people tend to confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.

00:19:03.060 Right.

00:19:03.200 And I think that it's perfectly reasonable to be a free market champion, let's say, or at

00:19:08.400 least an appreciator of the utility of free markets, and to be strongly in favor of equality

00:19:14.080 of opportunity, which means that you try to remove from the market system any impediments

00:19:21.300 to people manifesting those talents that would make them effective and competent players in

00:19:27.760 the productive market itself.

00:19:30.760 Yeah.

00:19:30.980 Mostly on the basis of the fact that that's counterproductive for everyone, the individuals, but also for everyone

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00:22:26.080 Yeah, that's absolutely true.

00:22:27.520 And I think that's inherent in the idea of markets.

00:22:29.340 It's why when people use terms like crony capitalism, I always think there's no such

00:22:33.320 thing.

00:22:33.620 There's corporatism, which is a better description of it.

00:22:38.400 Crony capitalism is a self-refuting proposition.

00:22:40.620 Capitalism and free markets are based on exactly what you're talking about because, again, the

00:22:44.200 fundamental principle is I own my own labor, which means that if you impede my ability

00:22:48.920 to alienate that labor, you are now interfering with my labor.

00:22:52.540 So free markets are predicated on an idea of equality and rights and the idea of every

00:22:58.260 human being made.

00:22:59.400 This is why I say there's a Judeo-Christian heritage to free markets, every human being

00:23:02.860 made in the image of God, which I think is the single most important sentence written

00:23:06.520 in the history of humanity.

00:23:08.860 And when you abandon, we tend to think that these things naturally occur.

00:23:12.420 This is where you get into the enlightenment argument.

00:23:14.560 The enlightenment argument is that you can just reason your way to these things.

00:23:17.880 Well, you can reason your way to these things.

00:23:19.520 There are also a lot of other things you can reason your way to, including communism and

00:23:22.720 fascism.

00:23:23.480 The question is, what are your starting points?

00:23:25.280 What are the actual fundamental assumptions that you make about human beings and the nature of

00:23:29.380 the world that you then apply reason to, to arrive at something great?

00:23:34.240 And this is why I'm not a fan of the enlightenment view, that just if we start tabula rasa, we

00:23:40.240 can come up with exactly the system that we've built today.

00:23:43.200 I don't think that that's either historically accurate or philosophically accurate, because

00:23:47.240 we see that human beings reach a wide variety of conclusions based on different premises.

00:23:51.200 Well, it's also the case that it assumes that reason, in fact, in some sense, can be complete,

00:23:57.860 including its conclusion.

00:23:59.380 Ability to generate its own comprehensive axioms, which can also be justified on rational

00:24:04.780 grounds.

00:24:05.780 And it's not obvious to me that that's the case.

00:24:08.240 I think that's why the founders of the Declaration of Independence were forced to say, we find

00:24:13.000 these truths to be self-evident.

00:24:15.680 Right?

00:24:15.940 You have to have a starting point.

00:24:17.720 And this is something that I do believe that people like Steven Pinker, who I have a great

00:24:22.160 amount of admiration for, make an error in their overvaluation of the enlightenment and

00:24:29.740 their devaluation of the historical, what, the vast historical epochs that produced the works

00:24:37.780 of imagination, that produced the axioms on which the enlightenment could originally emerge.

00:24:43.700 And you and I seem to agree, I think, very precisely on, especially that phrase that you

00:24:49.320 just used.

00:24:50.700 I mean, I think there's two statements in Genesis that are of equivalent importance, actually.

00:25:00.040 One of them, maybe there's three.

00:25:03.560 One of them is that what God used to create order out of potential and chaos was something

00:25:12.480 approximating a process that was characterized by truth and courage.

00:25:17.680 And so there's an idea there, which is why I think God continually repeats after he creates

00:25:24.800 day after day, that the creation was good.

00:25:28.300 And so the idea is that if you face the potential of the world, which is, I think, something that

00:25:32.880 human beings do with their consciousness, I think that's what consciousness is for, if

00:25:38.120 you face the world with truth and courage, then what you generate out of that field of

00:25:42.920 possibilities is, in fact, good, even though you may pay a price for the truth in the short

00:25:49.180 term.

00:25:49.880 It's an act of faith, even, in some sense, which reflects that axiomatic presupposition

00:25:55.460 that there's nothing that's going to improve the world more than forthright confrontation with

00:26:01.560 the structure of reality and an attempt to abide by the truth.

00:26:05.400 And then you have that second statement, which is a miraculous statement, I believe.

00:26:09.980 It's hard to see it as anything else, that both men and women are made in the image of

00:26:16.300 God.

00:26:16.720 We've already had God established as the creator and the creator who creates in a certain

00:26:21.280 ethical manner.

00:26:23.120 And then that power or ability or virtue or privilege or responsibility is transferred to

00:26:31.680 human beings and it's transferred to men and women.

00:26:34.480 I also find that actually quite stunning, you know, because there's no shortage of postmodern

00:26:40.720 slash feminist criticism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, claiming that it's fundamentally oppressive

00:26:46.620 and patriarchal.

00:26:47.880 And yet, right at the beginning, you have this incredible statement, which seems to fly in

00:26:53.080 the face of the anachronistic nature of the document, stating that it's not just men that are made in the

00:26:59.600 image of God, it's men and women.

00:27:02.040 And that's, and that's, it isn't obvious to me how that conclusion was reached so long ago.

00:27:09.600 Yeah, that's, that's exactly right.

00:27:11.040 And it's also important to note that historically speaking, if you look at surrounding documents,

00:27:15.580 documents from Mesopotamia, typically the, the actual language that was used, the image

00:27:20.360 of God language is actually not unique to the Bible that exists in other cultures, but it was always the

00:27:24.780 king who was made in the image of God.

00:27:26.220 Right.

00:27:26.340 So it's the people who are most powerful who are made in the image of God.

00:27:28.960 The extension of that to all human beings is a unique moment in, in philosophical history.

00:27:34.260 And as you say, the idea that God has created an orderly universe and that we have the capacity

00:27:38.840 to act out within that universe and to see God from behind, so to speak, that we can't

00:27:43.520 necessarily see his face, but we can see sort of the general outline of what he is intending.

00:27:48.160 And then another verse from Genesis that, that I think is deeply important is from the Cain

00:27:52.180 and Abel story, the verse where God says to Cain, Tim Schell, that you have the ability

00:27:56.380 to do better than this.

00:27:58.220 Right.

00:27:58.440 And Cain comes to him and he says, you know, I, why didn't you accept my sacrifice?

00:28:01.400 And God says, well, it's in your control, you know, go out and do something about it.

00:28:05.180 And then of course, Cain rejects that.

00:28:06.860 And it's, that story is so deep.

00:28:09.280 And I think it really is the story of what's happening right now.

00:28:12.540 Right.

00:28:12.840 Well, yeah.

00:28:13.140 God's reaction to Cain is that I rejected you because you could do better.

00:28:17.660 Right.

00:28:18.100 And that's actually a kind of compliment, even though, you know, if you're not offering

00:28:23.080 up the proper sacrifices and things aren't working out for you, it might not be the kind

00:28:26.760 of compliment that you want to hear, but it is a testament to the potential of the human

00:28:31.000 spirit.

00:28:32.380 And so you're making the case in your book, and this is the, this is an, what would you

00:28:37.860 call an injunction, an encouragement to the enlightenment types to look to their axioms

00:28:44.180 and to think hard about how it could be that the idea of individual democratic freedom,

00:28:50.080 for example, and all of the wonderful explicit political ideas that came out of the enlightenment

00:28:55.540 could have possibly emerged.

00:28:59.140 And I do agree that you have to have that initial conception of the individual as sovereign

00:29:04.160 and that that sovereignty has to be associated with something akin to recognition of divinity,

00:29:10.680 at least insofar as what's regarded as divine is regarded as the highest of all possible

00:29:17.000 values.

00:29:18.160 And it is absolutely surprising, as you pointed out, that not only is the idea of the image

00:29:24.900 of God extended to men and women, but that it is not, explicitly not, the domain of kings,

00:29:31.580 who, in fact, might be more at risk for abandoning their actions as avatars of God, so to speak,

00:29:41.640 than those who are in privation.

00:29:44.320 You know, you see that consistently in the Old Testament, where the kings are being taken

00:29:49.400 to task constantly by prophets who do appear to speak more in the language of God, let's

00:29:55.620 say.

00:29:55.820 And then you see it also in the New Testament with the insistence that the wealthy and powerful

00:30:01.640 have impediments to proper ethical action that those who are less materially fortunate

00:30:08.320 might not face.

00:30:10.420 Yeah.

00:30:10.880 I mean, that thematic is present, obviously, in the Old Testament.

00:30:13.800 There's actually a passage where it's talking about the sacrifices.

00:30:16.460 I believe it's in the book of Leviticus, where it talks about bringing accidental sin sacrifices.

00:30:21.940 And it talks about the common man.

00:30:23.860 It says, if you shall sin, then you bring the sacrifice.

00:30:25.900 And then it says, with regard to the prince, the nasi, it says, with regard to the prince,

00:30:30.380 the Hebrew word is ka'asher.

00:30:31.640 It says, when you will sin.

00:30:33.260 So the assumption is that if you have great power, the chances of your sinning are going

00:30:37.540 to be greater because you are going to conceive of yourself as higher than others, and this

00:30:40.760 is going to lead you down a pretty dark path.

00:30:43.760 The point with regard to the Enlightenment is that we actually have some counter evidence

00:30:47.560 of the Enlightenment being awesome all the way through if it is predicated solely on

00:30:52.300 reason and not on a historic understanding of these principles.

00:30:57.380 And that is the French Enlightenment.

00:30:58.460 I mean, this was one of my key points when I was looking at Pinker's book, Enlightenment

00:31:02.160 Now, which, again, you and I agree on this.

00:31:03.940 I have great Enlightenment for Pinker.

00:31:05.100 I took a class with him when I was at Harvard Law School.

00:31:07.540 He did a joint class with Alan Dershowitz.

00:31:08.960 That was kind of fun.

00:31:09.860 But Pinker goes a 450-page book about the Enlightenment, and he never mentions the French Revolution

00:31:15.520 ones, and I thought, I don't know how that's historically possible to do.

00:31:20.380 The Enlightenment was not just David Hume and Adam Smith and the American Founding Fathers.

00:31:25.620 The Enlightenment also was Rousseau and Voltaire and Robespierre, and it was the German progressive

00:31:32.120 Enlightenment that had a real dark side.

00:31:35.920 Human reason can lead you to a lot of different very bad places.

00:31:39.160 The metaphor that I like to use with regard to Western civilization is that Western civilization

00:31:42.760 is a suspension bridge, and it's over a river of, as you would say, chaos.

00:31:48.460 And on the one end of the bridge, the big pole, is these fundamental assumptions you have

00:31:52.980 to make about the nature of the world that I don't believe could be arrived at other than

00:31:56.380 through some form of divine revelation.

00:31:58.780 This would be the Judeo-Christian tradition, and those principles are things like, we have

00:32:01.840 free choice.

00:32:02.440 That's an assumption you have to make and is not implicit in scientific materialism.

00:32:05.840 The idea that history has a progressive nature, that you can improve the world around you.

00:32:09.700 Again, that is reliant on an assumption you have to make.

00:32:14.020 The idea that human beings are held to a morality that they themselves do not subjectively create

00:32:18.640 out of emotional need.

00:32:19.980 That is something that you have to make an assumption about.

00:32:22.340 The idea of objective truth itself is something you have to make an assumption about, and that's

00:32:26.460 an assumption that I think can be made most specifically by the idea that there is a mind

00:32:30.340 outside of us that creates that objective truth and stands behind an ordered universe.

00:32:34.860 All of those are assumptions from Judeo-Christian values.

00:32:36.940 I also think there's evidence for much of this.

00:32:39.440 You know, one of the things that I've been discussing with my audiences is like, you know,

00:32:43.400 it depends, obviously, on what you're willing to take as evidence.

00:32:47.200 But it isn't obvious to me at all that you can establish a functional relationship with

00:32:53.600 yourself unless you hold yourself responsible for your actions and you regard yourself as a free

00:33:01.880 agent in, at least in some regards.

00:33:04.540 Like, obviously, we're not omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

00:33:09.380 That's clearly the case.

00:33:10.560 We're subject to stringent limitations.

00:33:12.500 And there are situations in which our actions devolve into determinism.

00:33:19.700 That's obvious neurophysiologically.

00:33:21.600 It has to be the way the world works, is that once you execute a decision, there comes to

00:33:25.640 a point where that decision is manifested in something approximating a deterministic manner.

00:33:31.980 I think the evidence for that is overwhelming.

00:33:33.920 But that doesn't mean that when you're looking out into the future and you're contemplating the

00:33:38.620 many paths that you could take, that what you do to make your decisions then is deterministic

00:33:44.520 in a simple manner.

00:33:46.620 I think if that was the case, there'd be no need for consciousness at all.

00:33:50.120 And then I look at how people react to themselves.

00:33:52.760 We hold ourselves responsible, despite our own inclination, for the sins that we manifest,

00:34:01.980 for the manners in which we wander off the path.

00:34:04.420 People wake up at four in the morning and they berate themselves for the actions they

00:34:09.280 took that they knew they shouldn't and the inaction that they manifested when they knew

00:34:13.660 they should have acted.

00:34:14.940 And if we were masters in our own house without that central moral compass, there'd be no reason

00:34:20.340 at all for us to wake up and torture ourselves to death with our moral inequity.

00:34:26.100 And then if you have a friend or a family member and you insist upon treating them as if they're

00:34:32.560 a deterministic agent with no effect on the future and no responsibility for their choices,

00:34:38.420 it's actually impossible to have a relationship with them.

00:34:42.080 You can't even have a relationship with a two or three year old if you insist upon infantilizing

00:34:47.540 them in that manner and not attributing to them the choice that enables valid punishment,

00:34:54.680 let's say, on the one hand, you've done something wrong and you need to be held accountable for

00:34:58.760 it, but also valid accomplishment on the other, which is that you've done something that you

00:35:03.140 didn't have to do, that was voluntary, that's deserving of approbation and reinforcement.

00:35:10.160 And we act that out.

00:35:12.020 And then the next level of evidence seems to be that if you found your polity on propositions

00:35:20.460 other than that, the sovereignty of the individual and the responsibility of the individual, the

00:35:26.780 whole thing goes sideways so rapidly that it's almost indescribable.

00:35:30.540 And it doesn't just go sideways, it goes sideways and down.

00:35:34.300 And so I don't know exactly what to make of that as a proof.

00:35:40.360 You know, it's a strange sort of proof.

00:35:42.300 The proof being that, well, there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way for human beings to

00:35:47.280 organize their social interactions at any level of social organization without accepting those

00:35:53.880 initial, I would say, beochristian assumptions.

00:35:57.440 This is right.

00:35:58.140 And then this is where the main debate happens between me and Sam Harris, because Sam will

00:36:02.180 reason himself to those assumptions and away from those assumptions and to those assumptions

00:36:06.300 in a way he'll use those assumptions in building other assumptions.

00:36:09.600 And I've said to him before, I feel like you're using bricks from a house that you just

00:36:12.580 torn down.

00:36:13.820 So you can't really do that.

00:36:16.420 And this is why I say, on the one hand, you have to have those Judeo-Christian assumptions.

00:36:20.040 And those, by the way, undergird even the very concept of reason, because the idea of

00:36:23.160 reason is that you are using a willful process of thought in order to convince someone else

00:36:28.700 predicated on the notion that the other person's opinion is valuable and that you shouldn't

00:36:32.500 just club them over the head and take their stuff.

00:36:34.220 I mean, the reason has, the value of reason has implicit moral biases.

00:36:38.160 And those moral biases, you can't reason your way to.

00:36:40.120 As I said to Sam, from an evolutionary biology perspective, there's no reason for reason other

00:36:44.600 than if you think that maybe you can convince, unless, especially in a world of non-mass

00:36:48.860 communication, what is the reason for reason, right?

00:36:51.660 In a world that pre-exists mass communication, what is the reason that you need reason?

00:36:56.220 Wouldn't force be more effective?

00:36:57.520 For most of human history, it was.

00:36:58.920 It was significantly more effective than reason.

00:37:00.940 It's certainly what the radicals on the left would argue even now.

00:37:05.320 I mean, and the idea of reason seems to be predicated, and that would go along with the

00:37:09.760 idea of free speech, which I think is also equally grounded in these underlying axioms,

00:37:15.880 is that each of us as sovereign individuals have a valid mode of existence.

00:37:22.180 It's about, and there's something unique about that valid mode of existence, and it's also

00:37:27.480 something that can be communicated, and that part of the reason for rational discussion

00:37:32.320 is that the ability to share that unique and valuable element of private experience with

00:37:39.680 someone else is salutary, but it's also salutary in a manner that allows for the mutual spiritual

00:37:47.740 transformation of both of the people that are involved in the discussion, and it seems to me

00:37:53.440 that you can't.

00:37:55.320 If you're pro-reason, you've already bought that argument.

00:37:58.720 Exactly.

00:37:59.000 This is exactly right, and so faith and reason, to this extent, are not intention.

00:38:03.940 Faith undergirds reason, because you have to make fundamental assumptions even to get

00:38:07.460 to reason, and this is why I think that one of the things that has happened, and it's

00:38:10.560 really unfortunate, I discuss it in the last chapters of the book, is that when you take away

00:38:15.380 the assumptions that undergird reason, reason itself collapses in.

00:38:18.600 It's not that the stains appear on top of the structure.

00:38:22.340 Once the structure falls, reason falls with it, too, and we return to our sort of tribal

00:38:26.560 naturalistic roots that are quite dangerous.

00:38:29.320 This is why I say that you need Jerusalem on one end of the bridge.

00:38:32.680 The other end of that suspension bridge is reason, meaning that we can't be theocrats.

00:38:36.600 We can't look at fundamentalist religious texts and take them as completely literal, and then

00:38:44.840 hope to develop as a civilization on the basis of that complete literalism.

00:38:48.680 So you have to look to which of these commandments, for example, in the Torah, are directed toward

00:38:53.220 eternal human nature.

00:38:55.020 So I would suggest that commandments that are directed toward reigning in certain appetites

00:39:00.120 are directed toward God's understanding of human nature.

00:39:02.180 That certain injunctions with regard to how we behave in the Ten Commandments, these are

00:39:06.500 predicated on an understanding of human nature that is truly profound and worthwhile preserving.

00:39:12.040 It's also worth noting that the story of Western civilization is the expansion of these principles

00:39:17.640 out from the tribal and toward a broader range of humanity.

00:39:20.340 And that's why the book is not just an argument, here's how I interpret the Bible, and here's

00:39:24.600 why that's right.

00:39:25.340 It's an argument that historical development was necessary after the Bible.

00:39:29.920 So it is not just that the Bible solves all your problems.

00:39:32.440 It's that God understands, even from a religious perspective in Judaism, and I think in Christianity,

00:39:36.880 too, that we are going to apply human reason to these texts.

00:39:39.940 That's from a religious perspective.

00:39:41.080 From a non-religious perspective, the point I'm making is that you have to take these

00:39:44.440 fundamental assumptions, whether you like them or not, that are religiously rooted, and

00:39:48.240 then apply your reason to develop from the fundamental assumptions that we have already stated.

00:39:53.740 And that tension is what allows the suspension bridge to continue to function.

00:39:58.420 That doesn't mean that it is always equally solid throughout time.

00:40:01.460 It isn't, because the tension sometimes wavers.

00:40:03.420 Sometimes reason takes dominance.

00:40:04.620 Sometimes Judeo-Christian values or Judeo-Biblical literalism takes dominance.

00:40:10.160 Bottom line is, you collapse reason, you end up with theocracy.

00:40:12.420 You collapse Judeo-Christian values, you end up with nihilism, is sort of the basic argument.

00:40:16.500 Okay, okay.

00:40:17.180 So, you know, one of the things that Sam is afraid of, and, you know, there's some validity

00:40:22.840 in this sphere, and I think he tends to apply this more to the state of Islamic fundamentalism,

00:40:30.020 but the same argument can be made with the other religious traditions, you know, evangelical

00:40:36.440 Christianity, for example, and maybe Orthodox Judaism.

00:40:39.580 Who knows?

00:40:40.500 That the danger is that we'll take these revealed truths, which differ, and that holding them

00:40:48.400 as absolute revealed truths will make us parochial tribal, and the consequence of that will be

00:40:54.240 all sorts of catastrophe and horror.

00:40:57.040 Right.

00:40:57.120 And, you know, one of the things I learned when I was studying the Old Testament, and

00:41:01.940 this was very interesting, a Jewish friend of mine, Norman Doidge, sort of clued me into

00:41:06.360 this, because one of the things he told me was that Christians, who emphasize the New

00:41:11.520 Testament, tend to parody the Old Testament God to a somewhat unfair degree, casting him as

00:41:19.780 much more tyrannical, in some sense.

00:41:22.320 The God of wrath, yeah, the God of justice versus mercy, yep.

00:41:25.420 Right, exactly, exactly.

00:41:26.620 And so I took that seriously, and especially when I was reading the Abrahamic stories.

00:41:30.900 And, you know, you see throughout the earliest writings the idea that, in some bizarre sense,

00:41:39.280 God can be bargained with.

00:41:41.300 Right.

00:41:41.560 And so you see that even in the Cain and Abel story, because Cain actually faces God with

00:41:47.360 his complaints, and says, well, you know, here's how I look at the world, and God excoriates

00:41:53.460 him, because he believes that he's looking at the world improperly, and I think for good

00:41:58.420 reason.

00:41:58.980 But there is the implication that you could have a conversation with God, and hypothetically

00:42:03.600 learn something.

00:42:04.840 And, but then that transforms even more when you see the stories that follow.

00:42:12.440 So Abraham directly intercedes with God on, in favor of Sodom, right?

00:42:19.540 Right.

00:42:19.700 Because, and he makes a pretty, what would you say, extreme case for redeeming Sodom, which

00:42:27.460 seems to have degenerated into quite the, into quite the state of hell.

00:42:32.120 trying to entice God into not being more destructive than necessary, if there's any goodness to

00:42:38.720 be found.

00:42:39.440 And he actually does that successfully.

00:42:41.780 And so that's very interesting.

00:42:43.100 So even though God is absolute in his judgment, in some fundamental sense, there is this capacity

00:42:49.300 for dialogue, which seems to be an analogy to the idea that reason and revelation can

00:42:55.660 coexist and, and, and, and, and bolster each other in some sort of upward development.

00:43:01.340 Well, this is exactly right.

00:43:02.880 And then the idea of natural law, which the seeds are there in the Judaic value system,

00:43:07.740 I think natural law is more fully fleshed out in sort of Greek teleological sense.

00:43:12.080 When, when they talk about the idea that the Aristotle, Plato, when they talk about the

00:43:15.400 idea that you can look at the world around you and discover the purposes of the world around

00:43:19.160 you simply by using reason.

00:43:20.600 Well, in the, in the Judaic sense, there's the idea that God abides by the moral code that

00:43:25.280 he himself created.

00:43:26.800 And you can ask him questions about it.

00:43:28.200 In fact, the very name Israel is in, in Hebrew, it's Yisrael.

00:43:32.320 Yisrael literally means struggle with God.

00:43:34.300 Yes.

00:43:34.620 Yes.

00:43:35.120 Yes.

00:43:35.420 Well, that was the other thing I was going to bring up.

00:43:38.100 The direct thing I was going to bring up is that, that there is this, and that's a remarkable,

00:43:43.820 that's a remarkable story that it's, it's, it's Jacob.

00:43:49.680 I always get Jacob and Joseph confused.

00:43:51.360 Right.

00:43:51.900 Jacob.

00:43:52.560 Yeah.

00:43:52.720 It's Jacob on the other side of the river before he meets Yisrael.

00:43:55.340 Exactly.

00:43:55.800 Exactly.

00:43:56.220 On the other side of the river.

00:43:57.280 So he hasn't crossed back to his homeland, right?

00:43:59.840 He hasn't returned home after his hero's journey.

00:44:02.540 He sent his wife and his children and his belongings ahead to try to make peace with the

00:44:08.200 brother that he's seriously betrayed.

00:44:10.660 And, and he's had his adventures and maybe he's learned his lessons, but then he's on the

00:44:15.160 bank of the river and he's visited by an angel who appears to be God.

00:44:18.900 And he wrestles with him all night and he comes out damaged, right?

00:44:22.140 Which is an indication that this is sort of like the, the Egyptian idea when Horace encounters

00:44:28.640 Seth and has his eye torn out, that there's some high probability of damage that if you

00:44:36.220 encounter the divine, even, even in some positive sense, but he wrestles with him all night and

00:44:41.900 then defeats God apparently in some sense and, and is allowed to move forward with his adventure.

00:44:50.040 And then he's given this new name and the name really struck me when I started thinking

00:44:54.500 about it because what it does imply, I think this is such a positive message and, and, and

00:44:59.600 I don't know how to reconcile it precisely with the Jewish claim of, of chosenness as a people

00:45:06.500 because my reading of the, of that particular text seemed to imply that the chosen people

00:45:13.240 are precisely those who do in fact wrestle with God.

00:45:16.380 And so that they, they take these ethical questions seriously.

00:45:19.960 They're not accepting them without question and without thought because there's no wrestling

00:45:27.520 there.

00:45:28.560 Right.

00:45:28.760 But the real morality comes in the, in the struggle between the revelation and the, and the,

00:45:34.820 and, and, and, and the freedom for thought and choice.

00:45:38.220 Yeah.

00:45:38.400 I mean, I think that it's a beautiful idea.

00:45:39.700 And one of the things that's fascinating about that is if you read the rest of the book

00:45:42.620 of Genesis, every time in Genesis, somebody's name is changed because there are several name

00:45:46.460 changes, right?

00:45:47.160 Uh, Abram becomes Abraham, uh, Sarai becomes Sarah.

00:45:51.460 There, there are several points at which there are angels who come and basically change the name

00:45:55.560 or God changes somebody's name.

00:45:57.100 That's their name going forward.

00:45:58.440 When Jacob is re-termed Israel, he is not called Israel consistently from there to the end of,

00:46:03.920 of, of, to, to his death.

00:46:05.440 He's, the names are used at different times.

00:46:07.900 So sometimes he's Israel and sometimes he's Jacob.

00:46:09.860 So the idea there is that sometimes he is the best version of himself, the version of

00:46:15.380 himself who struggles with morality, who struggles with God, who tries to come up with proper

00:46:18.820 solutions.

00:46:19.580 And sometimes he's still the old Jacob, the old Jacob who ran away from Esau and who served

00:46:23.800 seven years unjustly under Laban and, and all the rest of it.

00:46:27.340 So it's really fascinating.

00:46:28.820 One of my favorite Talmudic stories, this has been deeply embedded in Judaic tradition for a

00:46:32.360 long time, the idea of struggling with God and struggling with the dictates of morality,

00:46:36.820 because part of Jewish tradition is of course, the idea of the oral tradition, uh, the idea

00:46:41.100 that we were given a written document on Sinai, but then there was an oral tradition that was

00:46:45.840 also passed along to Moses.

00:46:47.140 That was the interpretation of the written tradition, um, which in some ways may be a backfill

00:46:52.160 justification.

00:46:52.740 Uh, but I, I think that there's a, a fundamental truth to it.

00:46:56.700 There's, there's a segment that I quote in the book from the Talmud.

00:46:59.820 It's a really amazing story where it's, it's part of these sort of apocryphal stories,

00:47:04.540 what they call the Agadita in, in Talmudic, in Talmudic parlance.

00:47:07.880 There's, there's a story where there's a rabbi who is in an argument with a bunch of other

00:47:12.320 rabbis about a particular point of halacha, about of Jewish law.

00:47:15.180 And this rabbi is arguing with these other rabbis and the other rabbis vote one way and

00:47:19.300 he votes the other way.

00:47:19.980 So he loses.

00:47:21.060 And the rabbi who loses says, listen, I know I'm right.

00:47:24.380 Not only do I know I'm right, if I'm right, let the walls of this, the walls of this,

00:47:28.960 this synagogue close in around us.

00:47:31.540 The walls start to lean in.

00:47:32.720 And then the, the rabbi say, you know what?

00:47:34.480 That's not evidence that that doesn't show that you're right.

00:47:36.820 It just shows that the walls are closing it.

00:47:38.480 And he says, well, you know, if, if I'm right, then let the river outside starts to flow backwards.

00:47:42.680 So the river starts to flow backwards.

00:47:43.800 And the rabbis inside says, it's still not evidence.

00:47:45.620 We're not going to take that.

00:47:46.700 He says, well, if I'm right, let there be a bot call.

00:47:48.860 Let there be the voice of God literally come down from heaven and say that I'm right.

00:47:52.140 And sure enough, a voice from heaven comes down and says that he's right.

00:47:57.220 And the, and the other members of the parliament, the other members of the Sanhedrin, they say

00:48:02.340 to him, you know what?

00:48:03.680 None of that counts because God gave us a rule.

00:48:05.660 And the rule is that we have a majority rule in this body right here.

00:48:09.160 And so our interpretation is correct.

00:48:10.720 And yours is wrong.

00:48:11.360 It doesn't matter what miracles you bring to, to show that your side is right.

00:48:15.480 And the conclusion of the story is that God says, one of the angels asked God about it.

00:48:20.160 And God says, my children have defeated me.

00:48:22.500 And the idea is that God is happy about this.

00:48:24.500 God wants us to use our reason to take those fundamental principles that he gave us and

00:48:28.580 then develop those across time.

00:48:29.720 That's how you get development.

00:48:31.040 I would also interpret this to some degree from a psychological perspective, you know,

00:48:35.060 because, and this, this might be far fetched speculation, but I don't think that it precisely

00:48:43.000 is.

00:48:43.980 I mean, I do believe that our cognitive structures, our cognitive function are embedded in narrative.

00:48:50.160 And that, that seems to be a right hemisphere function and that the right hemisphere is the

00:48:55.360 source of intuitive revelation.

00:48:57.580 Now, whatever metaphysical implications that have, I, that has, I, I have no idea.

00:49:02.980 I also know that, you know, many religious experiences seem to be characterized by preferential

00:49:10.420 activity in the right hemisphere.

00:49:12.100 So there's something very strange going on in the right hemisphere.

00:49:14.400 And then we have a left hemisphere that's argumentative and parliamentary and logical.

00:49:19.280 And obviously in order for us to make our way in the world, we have to have a continual

00:49:23.620 dialogue between the intuitive axioms that are offered to us spontaneously in our imagination

00:49:30.180 by the right hemisphere.

00:49:31.380 And the left hemisphere, who does a critical analysis and tries to lay that out in some

00:49:35.700 logical and, and, and let's say logical and algorithmic manner.

00:49:40.860 But the left can collapse into a kind of unthinking tyranny as a consequence of that.

00:49:45.200 And the right without that corrective can, what would you say, stray too far down imaginative

00:49:50.980 paths and no longer be applicable to the, to the fundamental day-to-day problems of the world.

00:49:57.440 So we need that balance and, and it is a strange thing that we have these two hemispheres, which

00:50:04.020 implies that we need two ways of looking at the world.

00:50:06.440 And I don't think that it's unreasonable to look at the relationship between that and then

00:50:11.060 necessity for something like the revelation of intuition and the corrective power of rationality.

00:50:17.580 But you can't dispense with the intuition.

00:50:20.160 It seems to do something like ground you in the world and to provide you with your fundamental

00:50:24.700 axioms.

00:50:25.400 I think that's right.

00:50:27.460 And by the way, that seems to me how an enormous amount of scientific discovery takes place

00:50:31.360 is you, people have a flash of intuition and then it's a question of, I mean, that's how

00:50:34.640 you come up with the hypothesis, right?

00:50:36.380 When, when you understand something.

00:50:37.820 They often backfill too, you know, like the scientific journal, um, outlines how you came

00:50:45.100 to your hypothesis through a process of rational deduction, um, step by step.

00:50:52.220 But that isn't what happens.

00:50:54.300 What happens is you have a hunch of some sort.

00:50:56.720 And often I've seen this, especially with intuitive scientists, they have a hunch that

00:51:00.620 actually sounds irrational when they first, first put it forward.

00:51:04.980 And sometimes it takes them months or even years to backfill that intuition with the rationality

00:51:11.520 that's necessary to communicate its integrity to other scientists.

00:51:15.900 And so the, the narrative that's written in the scientific document is actually a kind

00:51:21.120 of, well, it's a kind of formal, I wouldn't call it a deception.

00:51:24.320 It's a formalization, but it's also predicated on the assumption that it's linear rational thinking

00:51:29.960 that leads to these intuitive hypotheses.

00:51:32.780 And sometimes that's the case, especially if it's incremental change, but those major leaps

00:51:38.620 forward are like the introduction of new alternative axioms.

00:51:42.940 And then they have to be tested by rationality.

00:51:46.420 Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

00:51:47.820 I think that's also the story of history that you have these intuitive leaps and yeah, there's

00:51:52.260 a history to those intuitive leaps and you do have to have both.

00:51:54.640 You'd have to understand the history of those intuitive leaps.

00:51:56.640 And you also have to understand when an intuitive leap has, has actually taken place.

00:52:00.420 I think you can make that argument about revelation.

00:52:01.900 I think, frankly, you can make that argument maybe about the enlightenment that there are

00:52:05.140 some intuitive leaps going on, but those intuitive leaps have a history and don't exist in the

00:52:09.260 absence of the backstory.

00:52:11.120 So the intuitive leap of the enlightenment, in large part, at least politically seemed to

00:52:15.340 me to be the, the full articulation of the idea that the human being made in the image

00:52:23.180 of God had intrinsic worth that transcended that which was being allowed.

00:52:31.900 under the feudal system.

00:52:33.260 You see that first, I would say in the transformation of Renaissance art, because what you see is

00:52:40.140 the divine figures, for example, Mary and Christ, to take a single example, or to take two

00:52:45.980 particular examples, start to remove themselves from their iconic representation and become

00:52:52.300 genuine individuals.

00:52:53.580 And so that's a, that's a bringing down of the divine to earth, but it's also an elevation

00:52:59.380 of the individual, right?

00:53:00.760 Is that these were real people.

00:53:02.260 They were like us.

00:53:03.400 And at the same time, you see this spread of the idea that, well, each individual is sovereign

00:53:09.780 and worthwhile.

00:53:10.400 And I do think it's out of that that comes eventually the powerful anti-slavery movies,

00:53:16.400 movements, and the demand for universal suffrage.

00:53:22.760 Suffrage, exactly.

00:53:24.000 This is exactly right.

00:53:25.020 I mean, and this is the part where I become rather perturbed when people suggest that the,

00:53:30.440 the evils of Western civilization are unique while the goods are universal.

00:53:34.800 This is, this is the part of the argument I've never understood from people who are highly

00:53:38.600 critical of Western civilization.

00:53:40.080 They point out correctly that Western civilization has been responsible for an immense amount

00:53:44.760 of evil.

00:53:45.140 There, there's tremendous racism endemic in Western civilization.

00:53:48.220 There's, there's religious persecution.

00:53:49.980 Obviously there's genocide against, you know, my, my extended family.

00:53:53.320 I mean, this sort of stuff was part of Western civilization.

00:53:56.220 It is, but here, here's what makes Western civilization different.

00:53:59.420 All of those things exist in virtually every other culture throughout the vast span of time.

00:54:03.840 The good stuff is the part that we don't have a really good explanation for.

00:54:06.940 The good stuff is the part where we have to say, okay,

00:54:08.500 what drove all the good stuff to happen?

00:54:10.700 Because any of it for that matter, because it's damn unlikely.

00:54:14.240 Well, like one of the things I can't understand, this is a real mystery to me, man.

00:54:18.380 And I can't explain it except, and maybe this is an intuitive idea because I haven't laid

00:54:25.720 it out as well as I might've, but one of the things I cannot understand is how any countries

00:54:31.800 escaped absolute corruption.

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00:55:52.460 Because most of the countries in the world are absolutely corrupt.

00:55:57.080 The police are corrupt.

00:55:57.960 The politicians are corrupt.

00:55:59.060 The unions are corrupt.

00:55:59.960 The corporations are corrupt.

00:56:01.480 The currency is corrupt.

00:56:03.380 The day-to-day interactions between people are corrupt.

00:56:06.460 And in the really corrupt countries, the interactions between family members are corrupt.

00:56:11.160 You know, so you get situations like, well, East Germany, which is a bit anachronistic now,

00:56:15.480 where, you know, one out of three people were government informers.

00:56:18.580 It's like, and corruption is easy, man.

00:56:21.660 It's the Hobbesian way of the world.

00:56:26.060 But then there's a handful of countries, and I would include Japan and South Korea among

00:56:30.580 those, that where corruption isn't the fundamental rule, where trust is the fundamental rule.

00:56:37.580 I can't see how that could have manifested itself, except within the confines of a religious belief

00:56:46.560 system that insisted, above all, on the enactment of a higher moral ethic, right?

00:56:54.180 Something outside of politics, something outside of self-interest.

00:56:56.840 It's a weak argument, because I still don't understand it.

00:56:59.660 I don't see how a country can make that transition from fundamental corruption to honesty.

00:57:05.540 It's an absolute miracle, as far as I'm concerned.

00:57:07.940 And a number of countries have managed that, and they all, almost all, are either Western

00:57:14.720 countries or highly Westernized countries.

00:57:17.820 Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right.

00:57:19.800 And it's also, when you examine different places on Earth, what you see is that the social

00:57:24.460 fabric is going to decide the character of the country.

00:57:27.220 And this is why, when people start saying, well, we should apply Nordic solutions in the

00:57:30.460 United States, they say, well, is our culture the same as the Nordic culture?

00:57:34.660 Because maybe that solution is not going to work.

00:57:36.560 I mean, the sort of one-size-fits-all attempt, in terms of political policy, to just apply

00:57:42.240 things randomly everywhere, and then assume they will go exactly the same, is obviously

00:57:45.960 untrue.

00:57:46.320 Most famously, in sort of the classical neoconservative foreign policy conception, that you could plop democracy

00:57:51.860 down in the middle of the Gaza Strip, and suddenly everybody would be in favor of free

00:57:56.760 markets and peace with your neighbors.

00:57:59.220 And the sort of institutions tend to be successful when people teach their kids the right things.

00:58:08.020 Well, that's also part of the reason that I made the argument constantly to Harris and

00:58:13.200 other atheists that I've talked to, that they're Judeo-Christian whether they know it or not.

00:58:17.720 Right.

00:58:17.820 And the reason for that is that all of their embodied actions presuppose the Judeo-Christian

00:58:23.280 ethic.

00:58:24.120 The only thing that isn't religious about them is their articulated, post-enlightenment,

00:58:32.780 rational representation of the world.

00:58:34.880 And I do think you see that in Harris quite frequently, because he does believe in evil.

00:58:40.280 He does believe in good.

00:58:41.340 He believes that the proper way of proceeding in the world is to move from evil towards

00:58:46.880 good.

00:58:47.860 And I can't...

00:58:50.560 You know, I've had exactly the same conversation with Sam.

00:58:53.440 And it's been a bizarre conversation, even on the notion of objective truth.

00:58:58.940 So Sam, it's kind of weird.

00:59:00.760 So you and Sam and I, I would say that I'm, as a religious person, more closely aligned with

00:59:05.160 Sam's vision of what objective truth is than your sort of American pragmatist purse version

00:59:11.040 of what objective truth is.

00:59:13.180 And with that said, I don't know where Sam is getting his version, right?

00:59:16.800 I'm getting my version from the idea that God created an objective truth that the mind

00:59:20.140 of man can ferret out from time to time.

00:59:22.800 And Sam's version is what?

00:59:25.500 Like, I just don't understand how evolutionary biology results in anything remotely approaching

00:59:29.680 the idea that an objective truth is possible.

00:59:31.940 I see evolutionarily beneficial stuff happening, right?

00:59:35.660 That if you come up with an idea that makes your species more likely to predominate, then

00:59:40.500 you hold by that.

00:59:41.380 But that doesn't make it objectively true.

00:59:42.960 It makes it objectively useful, which is a different thing.

00:59:45.440 I also don't see how it's a straightforward matter to get from reliance on evolutionary

00:59:51.440 biology, say, as your fundamental way of orienting yourself with regards to reality in the world.

00:59:57.060 And something like the primacy of rationality and the ability to extract out from that rationality

01:00:03.880 something approximating a universal morality.

01:00:06.540 I can't see those three things fitting together at all.

01:00:09.760 This is right.

01:00:10.520 And even Sam's moral standard, which is generalized human flourishing, there's a lot of play in

01:00:14.760 those joints.

01:00:15.340 I mean, I've asked Sam several times, he was on my Sunday special, and I asked him to define

01:00:19.600 human flourishing.

01:00:20.320 And I was pointing out to him that the vast majority of human beings disagree on the very

01:00:23.720 nature of what that term constitutes.

01:00:25.780 If you talk to religious people about what human flourishing constitutes, they're not going

01:00:29.540 to tell you about all of the nice stuff they have in their house.

01:00:32.000 They're going to tell you about their ability to teach the religious precepts to their

01:00:34.720 kids.

01:00:35.340 If you're talking about human flourishing on an evolutionary level, then presumably that

01:00:39.220 would assume us having more kids rather than fewer kids.

01:00:41.760 And in developed countries, we have fewer kids rather than more kids.

01:00:44.440 So what exactly is the standard for human flourishing other than sort of what Sam likes?

01:00:50.880 And that's-

01:00:51.240 Yeah, well, he seems-

01:00:52.420 I mean, I think part of the way that he circumvents that problem is by pointing out that it might

01:00:58.900 be possible for us to agree on what constitutes unnecessary human suffering, and to work for

01:01:05.240 the opposite of that.

01:01:06.440 Like, it makes it kind of vague.

01:01:08.120 We agree on cruelty, I think.

01:01:11.340 Well, but the funny thing is, too-

01:01:13.040 I'm not sure we even agree on that as the truth, but-

01:01:14.400 Well, I'm not sure that we exactly agree on that either, because it's not like there's

01:01:18.480 been any shortage of high-cruelty warrior culturists in the past.

01:01:23.680 I mean, that was certainly the case with Rome.

01:01:25.860 Right.

01:01:26.340 Or cruelty on behalf of a greater good, right?

01:01:28.900 You could easily make the case for cruelty on behalf of human flourishing.

01:01:32.040 I mean, Hitler did.

01:01:33.520 It's an evil case.

01:01:34.640 That's the whole point, right?

01:01:36.020 That was the case of communism, that you break a few eggs to make an omelet.

01:01:39.480 That is, the higher human flourishing is the interest of the majority.

01:01:44.160 Yes, and it's not obvious that that's not rational.

01:01:46.720 I mean, one of the things I really liked about Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago,

01:01:50.740 was that, you know, he makes this- he makes an anti-enlightenment case in a very powerful

01:01:55.900 manner, because he says, well, look, here's four or five axioms, or six or seven axioms.

01:02:01.360 They're derived directly from Marxism.

01:02:02.860 And if you accept those, and then you act rationally as a consequence of your acceptance

01:02:10.960 of those axioms, and of course the Marxists would claim that those axioms were derived

01:02:15.680 by rational means, that all you get is something approximating all hell breaking loose.

01:02:21.800 And so what seems to be the case is that there is a necessary set of underlying axioms, and

01:02:26.560 I do believe they're coded properly in the Judeo-Christian ethic, that if you then act upon rationally,

01:02:32.680 you get something approximating whatever progress we've managed to make.

01:02:36.960 And I think that progress is substantive.

01:02:39.760 Yep, totally agree.

01:02:41.580 And this is effectively the case that I'm making in the book.

01:02:44.340 I think that the big difference we have right now in civilization is a difference that was

01:02:47.380 first articulated, I think, beautifully by G.K. Chesterton in his sort of contrast between

01:02:52.860 left and right, his analogy, and it's a beautiful metaphor, is that you're walking through a forest

01:02:57.800 and you come across a wall.

01:02:59.400 It's just this old archaic wall, old stone wall.

01:03:01.740 You don't know why it's there.

01:03:02.960 If you're on the left, your first instinct is, I don't know why this wall is here.

01:03:06.220 Probably I should tear this wall out.

01:03:07.540 Because why is the wall here?

01:03:08.520 I don't know.

01:03:09.520 The person on the right, the kind of conservative or traditional person, the traditionally minded

01:03:14.540 person, their first instinct is, I don't know why this wall is here.

01:03:18.100 I'm going to go try and find out why the wall is here.

01:03:20.580 And then maybe I'll think about tearing it out.

01:03:22.040 And that's the case I'm making, I think, with regard to our civilization.

01:03:28.100 There are foundational things in our civilization that maybe it's possible to remove that particular

01:03:32.880 Jenga block and everything stands.

01:03:34.440 But I'm not going to pretend that just because I don't understand the reason for this particular

01:03:39.440 revelatory principle, that the revelatory principle isn't important and undergirding

01:03:43.480 and therefore a reason and put there by people who are just as smart as I was.

01:03:46.580 There's a certain arrogance to people who are living now that they were much smarter than

01:03:50.380 people who came before.

01:03:51.480 No, it's just that you're standing on those people's shoulders so you can see a little

01:03:53.900 bit further.

01:03:54.380 But the truth is that they were probably seven foot and you're probably a four footer.

01:03:58.100 Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that my intellectual attitude changed quite substantially

01:04:02.620 when I decided that I was going to risk taking the religious texts that I was studying with

01:04:10.020 some degree of seriousness.

01:04:11.640 And I came to that through Solzhenitsyn and Jung, I would say, fundamentally, because they made

01:04:16.160 a strong case for things, let's say, they made a strong case that there were presuppositions

01:04:26.040 encoded in those narratives in a dreamlike manner, same way that Piaget did, that we couldn't

01:04:34.100 do without and that we should be very careful in dispensing with them in that arrogant, rational

01:04:40.800 manner.

01:04:41.240 So that you start by treating the text with a certain amount of reverence and you with

01:04:47.020 a certain amount of ignorance, right?

01:04:49.060 There's something here that you don't understand and you should probably assume that it's

01:04:54.540 worthwhile because it's being kept rather than to leap to the proposition that you and

01:05:00.820 your ignorance can clearly see why it's unnecessary.

01:05:04.200 Yeah, and I think that the greatest impact, the saddest part of this is that the greatest

01:05:09.340 impact in terms of throwing away the stories of our heritage, basically, is that that impact

01:05:16.960 is generally not going to be felt in the urban centers with people who go to Sam's lectures

01:05:21.220 or listen to his podcast.

01:05:22.220 Those people have a worldview that they have shaped by listening to stuff like Sam's or Stephen

01:05:30.220 Pinker's or Richard Dawkins and that worldview, while I think it may not be fully coherent,

01:05:35.920 it coheres for them.

01:05:37.060 But the problem is that you apply that to people whose main draw to morality is not going

01:05:42.920 to come from listening to these particular sources.

01:05:45.280 The people who get their social fabric from churches in the middle of the country in the

01:05:48.520 United States, the people who have built a social fabric along with their neighbors

01:05:51.440 because they have a commonly oriented goal.

01:05:53.300 And then you take that away from them and you offer them, go find your own purpose.

01:05:56.600 Good luck with that.

01:05:57.280 Yes, that's right.

01:05:59.220 They're not going to turn into fully-fledged, humanistic, positively-thinking Enlightenment

01:06:06.540 types merely as a consequence of abandoning the religious superstitions.

01:06:11.240 That's exactly right.

01:06:11.880 That's another thing that the Enlightenment types, I think, are naive about.

01:06:18.220 It's easier to tear down than to build up, is sort of the way that I put it to Sam.

01:06:22.260 Yes.

01:06:22.620 You can tear apart my religious tradition, and you can probably do so in an entertaining way.

01:06:27.140 I mean, you do, obviously.

01:06:28.760 And then how are you going to build?

01:06:30.120 What exactly are you building?

01:06:31.600 And I can do the same thing to your worldview, but then what am I building?

01:06:35.720 The question is going to be, what are the foundational-

01:06:39.820 That's it.

01:06:40.320 We're not standing on the first floor of the building.

01:06:43.520 We are standing on the top floor of a building.

01:06:45.640 You can't go at the bottom floor with jackhammers and then expect that the top story is just going

01:06:49.120 to stay there.

01:06:50.540 That's not how this works.

01:06:52.060 Yes.

01:06:52.560 Yeah.

01:06:52.860 Yeah.

01:06:53.240 Yeah.

01:06:53.540 That's exactly it.

01:06:55.220 So, all right.

01:06:56.320 All right.

01:06:56.860 Well, look, I promised that I'd let you be at 115, and it's 125, and so I don't want

01:07:03.020 to take up any more of your time.

01:07:05.260 I'm very pleased that your book is doing well.

01:07:09.020 I hope that it does accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it, is to make the case

01:07:15.560 that it's much more appropriate for us in the modern world to continue to consider the

01:07:22.960 enlightenment, first of all, in its faults as well as its virtues.

01:07:27.540 It's a very important issue, but also to consider it as a continuation of a process that started

01:07:35.540 thousands of years before, and that can't be just casually dismissed on the presupposition

01:07:42.180 that the enlightenment was drawn out of a hat by a magician, you know, 400 years ago with

01:07:47.540 no developmental precursor.

01:07:49.320 And I think that's, you know, the other thing that's remarkable to me about that is that

01:07:53.340 the people, so many of the people who are enlightenment types, like Pinker and Hitchens

01:07:59.080 and Harris, are also evolutionary biologists.

01:08:02.940 And Jesus, they should know better, man.

01:08:04.860 And it's like, even people like Frans de Waal, you know, who's been studying chimpanzee behavior,

01:08:10.220 has shown very clearly the evolutionary origins of a rather profound proto-morality.

01:08:16.840 So even if you're not looking at this from the perspective of divine revelation, whatever

01:08:21.420 that might be, and that's a great mystery, you know, because I think often divine revelation

01:08:26.280 is the revelation of our true nature to ourselves.

01:08:29.420 And, you know, that might be metaphysically mediated, God only knows, but there's a lengthy

01:08:35.700 developmental history preceding the development of anything like fundamental moral assumptions.

01:08:42.540 And the evolutionary biology seems to support that presupposition powerfully.

01:08:48.760 And so that's another contradiction in the enlightenment viewpoint that I just don't get.

01:08:53.360 It's like, well, as far as you're concerned as an evolutionary biologist, everything has a

01:08:59.340 history that should be marked off in the hundreds of millions, or at least the tens of millions of

01:09:04.820 years. And yet this radically important transformation in the manner in which human

01:09:09.840 beings conducted themselves, well, that was just something that emerged out of nothing, right?

01:09:15.180 It's like, it's so funny, because it's a ex nihilo, I don't think that's properly pronounced.

01:09:22.600 Ex nihilo, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:09:23.340 Yes, ex nihilo argument. It's like, well, we were ignorant, feudalistic Christians squabbling

01:09:30.460 among each other in this superstitious morass. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, in some sense,

01:09:37.540 came this brilliant new way of looking at the world. And I don't see how that's in keeping with

01:09:43.300 that deeper view of history that's necessary if you're an evolutionary biologist.

01:09:47.560 Yeah, I obviously agree totally with that. And I find it kind of hilarious. A lot of the

01:09:53.600 presuppositions that are made are fundamentally at odds with a lot of the other presuppositions

01:09:58.060 that are that are that undergird the system of thought.

01:10:00.620 You see, you know, I was talking to Pinker just recently, really, like two weeks ago,

01:10:04.780 and I broached this topic. You know, he did agree, by the way, to have a three way discussion

01:10:11.020 with you and I.

01:10:11.820 Yeah, I mean, I'd totally be interested in that.

01:10:16.000 Good, so I've talked to the CAA people, and we're going to try to set it up, because

01:10:19.420 I think that would be great.

01:10:21.760 And we could see what you see with Pinker.

01:10:24.680 We'll have an alt-right festival.

01:10:26.120 That's right, that's right.

01:10:28.320 That's the way this is now. Everybody's alt-right.

01:10:31.220 Oh yeah, man. We'd be attracting neo-Nazis like Matt.

01:10:34.680 Two Jews and a self-helping Canadian.

01:10:37.580 Yeah, exactly. We're at the forefront of that movement. That's for sure.

01:10:41.820 It would be, see, because one of the things that struck me so interestingly about Pinker,

01:10:46.560 the last time I talked to him, was as soon as I broached the argument that these Enlightenment

01:10:52.060 ideas were founded in something that looked like a metaphysical religious narrative, whatever

01:10:58.740 its origins, all he did was point to all the negative examples of what religious structures

01:11:06.160 have managed.

01:11:08.220 Right.

01:11:08.420 That seems to me to be such an unfair argument.

01:11:11.200 Well, it's an avoidance argument. Again, that's also stuff that non-religious structures

01:11:16.060 have created. The question is not why bad stuff happens in religious society. The question

01:11:21.540 is why good stuff at all?

01:11:23.440 Yes, that is the question, especially given that it's inappropriate to conflate religious

01:11:30.200 structures with tribalism.

01:11:31.860 Correct.

01:11:32.280 You know, especially because you can, look, I mean, you might want to blame human evil on

01:11:37.560 the proclivity for us to gather together in groups under a religious hierarchy. But then

01:11:44.140 you're stuck with the problem of chimpanzees who do exactly the same thing with the equivalent

01:11:49.240 degree of brutality with no religious thinking whatsoever. And so I think it's perfectly reasonable

01:11:55.040 to point out that religious thinking can become a variant of tribalism. But it's no more fair

01:12:01.080 to blame human social conflict on religion than it is to blame the existence of hierarchy on capitalism.

01:12:09.480 The greatest tribalism that I'm seeing in today's world has not only nothing to do with religion,

01:12:13.920 but is actively anti-religion. The greatest tribalism that I'm seeing right now, whether

01:12:18.540 you're talking about the intersectional left that creates hierarchies of value based on your

01:12:22.300 group membership, or whether you're talking about the white supremacist alt-right, which is militantly

01:12:26.160 anti-Christian and sees Christianity and Judaism, by extension, as a weakness, that's pure

01:12:35.160 tribalism. White supremacy has nothing to do with overarching religious instincts. In fact,

01:12:39.440 it says that overarching religious instinct is quite bad. One of the great anti-tribal forces

01:12:43.680 in human history has been the presence of religion. It's a point that Robert Putnam makes in Bowling

01:12:48.220 Alone. He presupposed that diversity was our strength, as the nostrum goes. And he then found

01:12:55.980 that ethnic diversity in a vacuum doesn't actually create strength. It creates ethnic diversity.

01:13:02.680 What he said is the only two things you get with pure ethnic diversity are increased protest

01:13:06.660 marches and increased television watching. But if you have a common purpose, if you have a common

01:13:10.520 purpose, a common reason for being together, then ethnic diversity and experiential diversity

01:13:16.080 is our strength. And it's really great, right? You go to a church and you see a diverse group of

01:13:19.940 people, all of whom came from different places, and they all care for each other. And they're all

01:13:23.200 taking care of each other. And they all have different stories to tell and enriching stories to tell.

01:13:27.040 That's how you build a society.

01:13:28.140 Yeah, well, they're all striving to play the same axiomatic game.

01:13:31.720 Exactly.

01:13:32.080 It's predicated on these underlying revelatory truths, the most important of which, as you

01:13:38.140 pointed out, is the notion that human beings are made in the image of God, which, you know,

01:13:43.660 it's one of the things, because I'm, you know, I tend never to take a religious view if I could take

01:13:50.500 a scientific view. I never take a metaphysical view if I could take a reductionist view. You know,

01:13:56.540 it's a form of mental hygiene in some sense. But there are statements, there are biblical statements

01:14:02.500 that are so unlikely that it's very difficult for me to account for them reductionistically,

01:14:09.960 or even biologically, even though I've done my best to do so. And that, well, the idea that you extract

01:14:16.940 the best out of the chaos of potential with truth, that's one, man, because that is one daring

01:14:22.800 metaphysical statement. And that requires a tremendous amount of courage to even attempt.

01:14:26.980 And I do believe that it's true. I'm not sure it's not the most true thing that's ever been written.

01:14:33.400 But then a close contender would be the one that you identified, which is, well, men and women are

01:14:39.080 made in the image of God. It's like, who the hell would have thought that up? It's such a, it's so

01:14:46.600 crazily irrational, in a sense. It flies in the face of everything that you see about human beings,

01:14:54.620 or virtually everything that you see about them, their hierarchical arrangement, their relative

01:14:58.360 weakness, their mortality, their flawed nature, their sinful nature, you know, their innumerable

01:15:06.300 inadequacies. And then to say, in spite of all that, so long ago, and at the beginning of this

01:15:12.740 civilizing tradition that, well, yeah, despite all that self-evident pathology and radical individual

01:15:20.300 difference in power and ability, that each of us has a divine spark. It's like, ha.

01:15:28.480 It is an, it's an amazing thought. And it's an inspiring thought. And I hope that at the end

01:15:32.400 of the day, that's, that's, if we're going to take away one message from, I think, this conversation,

01:15:36.380 and in general, if we're going to take one message out to the world, the idea that you're made in the

01:15:40.060 image of God, and so is everybody else. If we build on that, I think we can build something.

01:15:44.180 Well, that's a, that's an excellent place to end.

01:15:47.000 Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate it, Jordan.

01:15:48.920 It's really good to talk to you, Ben, and good luck with your book. And I hope it has the effect

01:15:52.840 that you're, you're hoping for. I hope that we can, that we can make a strong case, especially with

01:15:58.820 the Enlightenment types, and, and even the atheists, to some degree.

01:16:02.680 I hope so, too, because I think that in the end, we can all be on the same page. But I think they're

01:16:06.200 going to have to recognize the value of tradition, just as we respect the value of reason.

01:16:11.740 Right. Right.

01:16:12.940 Awesome. Thanks, Jordan.

01:16:13.980 Okay, man.

01:16:14.740 Be well.

01:16:14.960 Good to see you.

01:16:16.420 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books,

01:16:20.560 Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life,

01:16:25.440 An Antidote to Chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the

01:16:30.200 Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, ebook, and text links,

01:16:35.640 or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you

01:16:40.740 did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, comment a review, or share this episode with

01:16:45.360 a friend. Next week's podcast is going to be a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in Ottawa,

01:16:51.380 Canada, at Centrepoint Theatre on July 23rd, 2018. Hope you have a wonderful week.

01:16:57.400 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

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01:17:39.360 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 21, 2019

Religious Belief and the Enlightenment with Ben Shapiro

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