The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Perilous State of the University

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00:00:52.000 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:00:59.000 You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.

00:01:06.000 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:13.000 I'm here today in Manhattan talking to Dr. Jonathan Haidt, who's a professor at NYU, and I'm here for a bunch of reasons.

00:01:35.000 Jonathan is an extremely interesting researcher. I've been following his work on disgust and political belief literally for decades.

00:01:42.000 He was one of the first people who started to do serious research on disgust, which is its own emotional system, and therefore very much worth attending to.

00:01:50.000 But we also have some other interests in common. Jonathan also started this institute called the Heterodox Academy, which is attempting to bring back a reasonable diversity of views, what he regards as a reasonable diversity of views to university faculty and campuses and discussions.

00:02:08.000 So, I first met Jonathan, it's going to be just about 30 years ago, 25 years ago, eh?

00:02:16.000 That was in 2014. Yeah, 20, I'm sorry, in 1994.

00:02:19.000 Oh, it was in 1994. Yeah, yeah, right, right. So, yeah, you came to do a job talk at Harvard for an assistant professorship position, and I'd been aware of your work on disgust then and agitated hard for them to hire you because I thought it was of great significance, which turned out to be exactly the case.

00:02:36.000 So, what do you remember about that?

00:02:38.000 I remember I was so excited to have an interview at Harvard. It was my only interview. If I didn't get that job, I had no job for the following year.

00:02:45.000 And it was a very strange day in which I didn't feel particularly welcome or wanted.

00:02:51.000 And then I had my session with you in which here was this guy who actually got a job at Harvard, and he was studying Jung, which is like almost taboo.

00:03:02.000 And he was talking about dreams of creativity. And so I just, that was the really bright, that was the bright memory of the day was our hour-long conversation.

00:03:11.000 Yeah, well, I was also really interested at the time and now in the biological basis of behavior, right?

00:03:17.000 And so, and in the relationship between fundamental motivational systems and thought, because obviously our thought is grounded in fundamental motivational systems.

00:03:28.000 And your work on disgust, which maybe you can tell the viewers a little bit about, was really interesting to me because it was an emotional system that hadn't been studied much.

00:03:36.000 I mean, you were really one of the pioneers in the, in the psychological study of disgust.

00:03:40.000 Well, the way to explain it is that Paul Rosen, my advisor at Penn, is the pioneer in the study of disgust.

00:03:46.000 And he'd studied it as a food-related emotion. And he'd written a bit about it being a moral emotion.

00:03:51.000 And I was a graduate student at Penn, and I was interested in morality. And I was reading the Bible, and I was reading anthropological accounts of different countries and different cultures.

00:04:03.000 And at the time, morality was all about reasoning about harm, rights, and justice.

00:04:08.000 So Lawrence Kohlberg was the leading figure in the field. And because I was looking at morality across cultures,

00:04:14.000 and when you look across cultures, it's not just about fairness and harm and rights.

00:04:19.000 It's about menstruation and food taboos and skin lesions. And it's very physical.

00:04:25.000 And I was, you know, why, why do so many societies, why is it like the normal default way of being is to somehow bring the body into morality? Why is that?

00:04:34.000 And so I just happened to be at Penn, where the world's expert in disgust was.

00:04:38.000 And I went to talk to him, and that started one of the best collaborations of my life.

00:04:42.000 And what it led to is a broadening of the moral domain, basically. There's a sort of Western, secular approach that you see in Western philosophers.

00:04:54.000 Either morality is about harm and utilitarianism, and let's minimize harm, or it's about rights and principles, you know, Immanuel Kant.

00:05:02.000 And a much better way psychologically to think about morality is virtue ethics. It's just a lot of stuff.

00:05:08.000 It's just, we have just a lot of stuff that we judge on. And this led me eventually to realize that people on the left and people on the right care about different stuff.

00:05:17.000 Everybody cares about harm and fairness. But the stuff about keeping, you know, boundaries around the group,

00:05:24.000 build a wall, protect the group, hold the group together, hate traitors, you know, everybody can do that.

00:05:31.000 But right-wing morality builds on these additional foundations, these additional emotions and foundations.

00:05:38.000 So that work on disgust that I was just beginning to talk about then when we first met in 1994,

00:05:43.000 led eventually to what we now call moral foundations theory, and with about five or six colleagues.

00:05:49.000 If you go to yourmorals.org, you can take our test, you can learn all about it.

00:05:54.000 But it led to the perspective that ultimately was, I think, the right perspective as the culture war was heating up,

00:06:01.000 and as left and right were essentially becoming like different countries, different cultures.

00:06:06.000 So it's not obvious on first consideration why disgust would be a moral emotion.

00:06:13.000 So, you know, most of the work that's done that's outside of the disgust realm, I would say,

00:06:19.000 is predicated on the assumption that the reason that conservatives in particular,

00:06:23.000 but perhaps people who are more authoritarian in general, draw boundaries around their territories because they're afraid of the other.

00:06:31.000 But that isn't really, that isn't really how it plays out as far as I can tell,

00:06:35.000 because conservatives, for example, are less neurotic than trait in the big five trait sense than liberals,

00:06:40.000 although it's a minor difference. But the disgust issue seems to be particularly relevant.

00:06:45.000 So can you tell us a little bit about why disgust per se?

00:06:49.000 Well, first, conservatives are a little less neurotic, but they also,

00:06:54.000 if you do very low-level perceptual experiments, just like a puff of white noise in the ear,

00:06:58.000 people who react more strongly to that, to any sort of very low-level threat, are more likely to vote Republican in this country.

00:07:05.000 So there are, you know, there are all these interesting personality differences that lead to different politics.

00:07:09.000 But as for why disgust, so I'm a Durkheimian, I would say.

00:07:15.000 I love the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

00:07:18.000 And I'm also a social psychologist, so I'm always thinking not about people as individual utility maximizers,

00:07:25.000 but people as members of social groups, people who are totally focused on belonging in their social groups,

00:07:32.000 and people who have some pro-social motives about keeping the group together, about doing things that are good for the group.

00:07:38.000 So, as I try to argue in my book, The Righteous Mind, yes, we're selfish.

00:07:42.000 There's no doubt that we often will do things to advance our own self-interest at the expense of others.

00:07:48.000 But we're also really groupish, which means we'll do all sorts of things to advance our group at the expense of others.

00:07:55.000 Basically, we're tribal. We evolved as a tribal species, and we're doing, we have all this software,

00:08:02.000 I would say, all these predispositions, these mental predispositions for life in tribes that are battling other tribes.

00:08:10.000 And that's why it comes out so easily.

00:08:12.000 If you look at the way boys organize themselves when they get a fraternity, the hazing rituals.

00:08:17.000 When you look at the way, it's especially clear in boys, the way street gangs organize themselves.

00:08:21.000 Girls' tribalism is a little different.

00:08:23.000 But I would say this is, and that's why, again, I love the Jungian approach of archetypes.

00:08:28.000 There's something, there's just this weird stuff that is pan-human.

00:08:31.000 Even if it comes out slightly differently around the world, there really is a human nature,

00:08:35.000 and it comes complete with a whole bunch of, like, pre-designed ideas.

00:08:39.000 So there is a new article, I think it was published in Nature, I'll try to find the link for it, it's about a year old,

00:08:45.000 that was based on high-resolution imaging of neuronal connections.

00:08:50.000 It's actually reviewed in Kurzweil's book, How to Build a Mind, I think that's the name of it.

00:08:56.000 And so it turns out that the cortex is made out of these columnar structures that are pre-organized units of neurons,

00:09:03.000 and they're replicated across the entire cortex, basically the same structure.

00:09:07.000 And, like, the older, let's say, connectionist idea was that neurons that fire together wire together, right?

00:09:15.000 That's Hebb, and of course that's pretty standard neurology, but the columns are already pre-wired,

00:09:20.000 so it's actually columns that fire together that wire together, but there's even more with the high-resolution scanning.

00:09:26.000 So it turns out that underneath the columnar structure there are these pre-built highways that are connective tissue that are pre-prepared,

00:09:36.000 so the columns have the option to connect to the underlying highway, and then that highway can connect to other columns.

00:09:43.000 So it's as if, implicit in the brain organization, and this is at the cortical level, say nothing of subcortical organization,

00:09:50.000 there's already pre-existent likelihoods that certain neurons will wire together.

00:09:57.000 Yeah, so, and what else is cool is that this is actually architecturally quite regular.

00:10:04.000 So they found that these superhighways are arranged in lines and at right angles to one another,

00:10:12.000 so it's almost like a three-dimensional structure of wired cubes that underlies the neuronal structure.

00:10:17.000 So that's some neurological evidence for the archetypal idea.

00:10:20.000 So let me just explain to, explain to the viewers here why this isn't just some like psychological geek conversation.

00:10:26.000 This is actually really relevant to a lot of the things that, that we'll be talking about and that your audience probably cares about,

00:10:31.000 because one of the most contested ideas in the social sciences is the idea of innateness.

00:10:36.000 And the idea is, well, if something is innate, then it can't, it can't vary across societies.

00:10:42.000 And if it varies across societies, then it's not innate.

00:10:45.000 And if gender varies, if masculinity or femininity vary across society, then it's not innate.

00:10:50.000 It's socially constructed.

00:10:52.000 But that's the wrong understanding of innateness.

00:10:55.000 The definition that I use comes from Gary Marcus, who's actually a neuroscientist here at NYU.

00:10:59.000 He says, innate doesn't mean hardwired.

00:11:01.000 There's almost nothing interesting that's hardwired.

00:11:03.000 Innate means structured in advance of experience, but then experience can still revise it.

00:11:09.000 And boy, does that work for gender, for almost everything.

00:11:13.000 For fears.

00:11:14.000 Yeah, that's for almost everything.

00:11:15.000 We're not a blank slate about anything.

00:11:17.000 And something I used to tell my students at UVA, I taught at UVA for 16 years, is,

00:11:21.000 you know, everything's a social construction.

00:11:24.000 Masculinity, femininity, cancer, the sun, death, everything there's a social construction for.

00:11:32.000 You won't find a society that doesn't have thoughts about these things.

00:11:35.000 But the fact that societies have social constructions tells us nothing about whether there's not also an underlying biological reality.

00:11:44.000 And in almost all cases there is.

00:11:46.000 Well, otherwise we wouldn't be able to communicate, which is one of E.L. Wilson's comments, right?

00:11:50.000 When, I mean, Wilson is the entomologist who studied ants at Harvard and also wrote a number of books about sociobiology

00:11:56.000 that got him in trouble with the radical leftists.

00:11:58.000 And he said, even if we could communicate with ants, there'd be nothing to say to each other.

00:12:02.000 Because their fundamental mode of being in the world is based on motivations and interests that are so different from ours

00:12:09.000 that there wouldn't be any structure for communication.

00:12:11.000 And you can kind of tell that with regards to the animals that we make friends with, right?

00:12:15.000 We're much more likely to make friends with animals who have a fundamental biological and social nature that's very close to ours, like dogs.

00:12:22.000 Because we can basically speak their language, even though not completely.

00:12:26.000 A mammal language of love and, you know, I miss you and I want to play with you.

00:12:30.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:12:31.000 Yeah, exactly. And that bonding.

00:12:33.000 Yeah, okay, so back to disgust, back to disgust.

00:12:36.000 So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rosen is to see us as these amazing omnivores.

00:12:43.000 This is part of our survival strategy, even more than other apes.

00:12:46.000 We are just brilliant omnivores.

00:12:48.000 And we have the omnivores dilemma, which is we've got to be interested in all kinds of new stuff.

00:12:54.000 We're not tied to any place. We can roam onto a whole new continent.

00:12:58.000 So we're interested in stuff, but stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes.

00:13:03.000 We have to be careful about that stuff.

00:13:05.000 And so these motives have to be intentioned.

00:13:07.000 And this is actually an interesting way to understand the left-right difference.

00:13:10.000 You have to have both motives.

00:13:12.000 But if, so imagine two siblings, one of whom is set more towards trying new stuff, seeking out new stuff.

00:13:18.000 And the other is a little more fearful, a little more like, whoa, no, let's, you know, let's not try that.

00:13:22.000 Let's stay with what's tried and true.

00:13:24.000 I mean, that's progressivism and conservatism.

00:13:26.000 That's the origins of it.

00:13:28.000 And if you look at kids' behavior at the age of two or three, it does predict how they'll vote much later.

00:13:33.000 Not hugely, but there is a clear prediction there.

00:13:36.000 So disgust is part of a regulatory system about our engagement with the world.

00:13:42.000 And whether we are just sort of out there and, you know, we seek out variety and diversity.

00:13:48.000 We think diversity is just a great thing.

00:13:50.000 Or whether we want a little more order, structure, predictability.

00:13:53.000 Conservatives are neater than progressives.

00:13:56.000 If you take photos of their rooms, you know, you can actually, you know, cleanliness and organization, you can predict how they vote.

00:14:05.000 Disgust, it turns out, what's really cool about disgust in modern politics is if you look at all the different things that we're fighting over,

00:14:12.000 especially in this country, our culture wars over, you know, going back a few decades, you know, sex, drugs, the flag, immigration, all of these things.

00:14:20.000 I have a study with my colleagues, it was led by Sena Koleva, in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people.

00:14:28.000 And we also had their scores on the disgust scale, but one of the foundations of morality is sanctity and purity, and it relates to disgust.

00:14:36.000 What we found is that if you know, if you know what people's left-right, how they place themselves on the left-right scale,

00:14:44.000 you can pretty much predict where they fall on most cultural attitudes, except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity.

00:14:53.000 So what I mean is, flag burning, okay, do you think, you know, do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag,

00:14:59.000 or the country's flag, as an expression, as a political action, what do you think?

00:15:03.000 People just give some answer on a one to seven scale.

00:15:05.000 And people on the right think, you know, more likely to say no, people on the left, yes.

00:15:10.000 People who score high on loyalty are more likely to say no, people lower on it say yes,

00:15:16.000 and that's even taking account of where they're on the left-right dimension, but here's the cool thing.

00:15:20.000 It's only if you add in the purity or sanctity thing that you can really understand what people are doing,

00:15:25.000 because some people see the flag not as just a piece of cloth,

00:15:30.000 they see it as having some innate essence, something sacred about it, which must be protected.

00:15:35.000 And so, so this is true.

00:15:37.000 They think of it as a unifying center.

00:15:39.000 Exactly, that's right. So if there's something sacred, and this is the, this is the central piece of my work around politics and morality,

00:15:46.000 is the psychology of sanctity. If you hold something sacred, then your team circles around it,

00:15:53.000 and it's only those who circle around with you, and sometimes literally circle around, like Muslims at prayer in Mecca,

00:15:59.000 they literally circle the kabbas. Circling is a very primitive, ancient, it feels right to circle something.

00:16:05.000 But even if, even if you do it symbolically, or you all bow at the same time, that binds you together.

00:16:10.000 Children do that with their mothers when they, when they engage in exploratory behavior, right?

00:16:15.000 Well, they use their mother as a center of the world, and children differ in the degree to which they'll move outward from their mother.

00:16:21.000 So, they move out until they, they, they trip over their, their uncertainty threshold.

00:16:27.000 Oh, neat. Is it, is it a distance? Like, you can measure the distance?

00:16:29.000 It's a distance, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so the more exploratory kids, who are lower in negative emotion,

00:16:34.000 will go out farther before they come back to their mother. So the mother's a center.

00:16:38.000 And you know, that, that would be associated symbolically with the idea of the center as a motherland, or potentially as a fatherland.

00:16:44.000 That's right, that makes sense. So this way, that we're, we're incredibly symbolic creatures.

00:16:48.000 We're not just out to make as much money as we can. We're symbolic and, and social creatures.

00:16:53.000 And this psychology of sanctity or purity has become really important, not just on the right.

00:16:58.000 It's always been important for, especially religious conservatives.

00:17:01.000 We're beginning to see it even on the campus left.

00:17:04.000 And this is why I think we see some of the odd things we see on campus.

00:17:08.000 That the campus must be kept as a sacred and pure space.

00:17:12.000 One of the things that really alarms me about what's happened on campus in the last couple of years,

00:17:17.000 is that the older idea we had, that it's a place for contesting ideas,

00:17:22.000 it's a, it's a zone of enormous choice.

00:17:24.000 People can take what courses they want, say what they want.

00:17:27.000 It's kind of a wonderful free-for-all with some, with, with, with norms of respect.

00:17:31.000 It's now becoming much more of a religious zone,

00:17:34.000 where the perimeter of the campus is the, the boundaries.

00:17:37.000 And within, it's, it, they're almost, they're blasphemous, basically.

00:17:41.000 And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury protest,

00:17:46.000 when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury.

00:17:49.000 And as, as everybody knows, he was shouted down.

00:17:52.000 So the students are chanting, and they're chanting in unison.

00:17:55.000 And it seems like a religious revival meeting.

00:17:57.000 And they're swaying, and they're saying they're sacred, you know, racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away.

00:18:04.000 It's like a ritual incantation.

00:18:06.000 So that all...

00:18:08.000 To define the, the space as safe.

00:18:10.000 And it's safe in a kind of maternal way.

00:18:12.000 Not yet, not yet.

00:18:13.000 So far, all this happening is they're binding together.

00:18:15.000 They're moving and, you know, synchronous movement and call and response.

00:18:18.000 So it, it's using a lot of tropes from religion and religious worship.

00:18:21.000 But here's the cool thing.

00:18:23.000 When the administrator, I forget who it is, comes on to say,

00:18:27.000 Okay, we have moved, we're moving the talk.

00:18:31.000 And then you hear a couple people screaming out,

00:18:34.000 Off campus! Off campus!

00:18:37.000 And he says, to another location on campus.

00:18:40.000 And there's like, oh no, no!

00:18:43.000 Because, you know, look, no one had to go to this talk.

00:18:47.000 So everyone could have just stayed home.

00:18:49.000 And the students did succeed in shutting down the venue.

00:18:52.000 So they could have declared victory.

00:18:54.000 But it's not a full victory unless he is physically off the campus.

00:18:59.000 We can't have him speaking on campus because that defiles us.

00:19:03.000 That pollutes us.

00:19:04.000 We must shut that down.

00:19:06.000 And that's where I started saying, wow!

00:19:08.000 This is like full-blown psychology of religion,

00:19:11.000 Durkheim, sanctity, purity, blasphemy.

00:19:14.000 And that, I think, you know, that doesn't describe most students.

00:19:17.000 But that describes as sort of the core, those who,

00:19:20.000 who really have their identities wrapped up in this movement.

00:19:23.000 Okay, so, so, with disgust, I wanted to, I wanted to ask you a couple things about that.

00:19:29.000 So, you know, the Big Five research into political differences basically shows that

00:19:34.000 the Liberals are high in trade openness and low in trade conscientiousness.

00:19:38.000 And the Conservatives are the reverse.

00:19:39.000 But we've fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness,

00:19:44.000 with the Big Five aspect scale.

00:19:46.000 And orderliness is strongly associated with disgust.

00:19:49.000 So, so, right.

00:19:50.000 Sounds like, sounds like Freud, yeah.

00:19:52.000 Right, right, exactly.

00:19:53.000 It does sound a lot like Freud.

00:19:54.000 But it, but it also is in accordance with your observations that Conservatives have neater spaces, for example.

00:20:00.000 So, so now...

00:20:01.000 And their meetings start on time.

00:20:02.000 Yes.

00:20:03.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:04.000 Right, right.

00:20:05.000 So, so then the nexus for political belief seems to be openness.

00:20:11.000 So that's that exploratory tendency that you talked about.

00:20:14.000 Exploration of ideas and creativity.

00:20:16.000 And low orderliness.

00:20:18.000 And so then I thought, well, why in the world would, why would the political nexus go across those dimensions,

00:20:24.000 which are some relatively uncorrelated?

00:20:26.000 Then I thought, and this is in keeping with your work on disgust,

00:20:30.000 is that it's an issue of borders.

00:20:32.000 Which, of course, seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump's election when he talked about borders.

00:20:37.000 But you might say, and I think this is reasonable,

00:20:40.000 that the Conservative is someone who wants the borders between categories to remain intact,

00:20:46.000 no matter what level of analysis.

00:20:48.000 So it's borders from the highest resolution level of cognition,

00:20:53.000 all the way up to the actual physical borders of rooms, towns, states, countries.

00:20:59.000 Countries, all of that.

00:21:00.000 So, the borders should be thicker.

00:21:02.000 And the reason they want that,

00:21:04.000 now there was a paper published in PLOS One,

00:21:06.000 I don't know if you saw it, it was a couple of years ago,

00:21:08.000 it was a mind-boggling paper,

00:21:09.000 it should have been like front page news as far as I was concerned.

00:21:12.000 And what the researchers did was,

00:21:14.000 between countries and then within provinces or states,

00:21:18.000 within countries, they correlated the level of frequency of infectious disease,

00:21:27.000 with authoritarian political beliefs,

00:21:30.000 and found a walloping correlation, it was like 0.6.

00:21:32.000 It was one of the highest,

00:21:34.000 for those of you who don't know,

00:21:36.000 social scientists never discover anything that's associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6.

00:21:41.000 Other than heritability.

00:21:42.000 Right, other than heritability, yes.

00:21:44.000 And so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease,

00:21:47.000 the higher the probability of totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes.

00:21:52.000 And then they controlled for governance,

00:21:54.000 because one of the questions was,

00:21:56.000 was this top-down authoritarianism,

00:21:58.000 or bottom-up authoritarianism?

00:22:00.000 And the answer was that it was bottom-up.

00:22:02.000 Okay, and so I thought about that in two,

00:22:05.000 from two perspectives simultaneously.

00:22:08.000 At the time, okay,

00:22:10.000 so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness,

00:22:12.000 so it's say a fundamental sub trait.

00:22:15.000 And I was reading this book that was called Hitler's Table Talk.

00:22:19.000 And it was a,

00:22:20.000 it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942.

00:22:26.000 Yeah, so it's a spontaneous utterance, say.

00:22:28.000 And it's full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented.

00:22:35.000 But what's really interesting is all the language is disgust.

00:22:38.000 It's not fear.

00:22:40.000 So, so Hitler's basic metaphor was that the Aryan race and country was a pure body.

00:22:47.000 And then it was assaulted by parasites, right?

00:22:49.000 And then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up and shook hands.

00:22:54.000 What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years, right?

00:22:58.000 Because of smallpox and measles.

00:23:00.000 And so that border issue that separates conservatives from liberals, let's say,

00:23:07.000 is the conservatives say the novel is potentially contaminated.

00:23:11.000 It's not so much that it's dangerous.

00:23:13.000 That's different.

00:23:14.000 That's fear.

00:23:15.000 It's contaminating.

00:23:16.000 And the liberals say, hold on a minute.

00:23:17.000 If you make the borders too thick, then information can't pass through.

00:23:21.000 Exactly.

00:23:22.000 So that's the omnivorous dilemma right there.

00:23:23.000 Right.

00:23:24.000 Right.

00:23:25.000 And then since we have a biological architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected,

00:23:29.000 we have the same attitude towards abstract information,

00:23:33.000 which would be ideas that we do to things like food or illness.

00:23:37.000 Right.

00:23:38.000 Right.

00:23:39.000 And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea.

00:23:43.000 That's right.

00:23:44.000 I'm a big fan of George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By,

00:23:46.000 that we use our bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics

00:23:53.000 and like what our policies should be about borders and immigration.

00:23:57.000 There's a Canadian psychologist, Mark Schaller.

00:23:59.000 He and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of the behavioral immune system.

00:24:04.000 Yeah.

00:24:05.000 Right.

00:24:06.000 That we don't just try to, you know.

00:24:07.000 Microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears.

00:24:11.000 And so whoever can keep themselves and their children from being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game.

00:24:18.000 And so a lot of that is judging carefully about people.

00:24:21.000 Is he dangerous?

00:24:22.000 Is she dangerous?

00:24:23.000 And that's both for sexuality, for contact, for all kinds of association.

00:24:27.000 So yeah, in a lot of ways our emotions and our bodily interactions structure how we think and feel about social emotions.

00:24:35.000 Well, even with the Black Death in Europe.

00:24:37.000 I mean, so the Black Death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world and they brought back rats that were infected.

00:24:43.000 Exactly.

00:24:44.000 So what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time.

00:24:48.000 So the European expansion produced a tremendous interchange of ideas from all around the world.

00:24:53.000 That's globalization.

00:24:54.000 But it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time.

00:24:58.000 So wouldn't it be good if in every society or every organization we had some people who specialized in saying,

00:25:06.000 hey, what are the opportunities?

00:25:08.000 And then we had other people who specialized in saying, well, but what are the risks?

00:25:11.000 And it just so happens that a lot of people have trouble doing all that in themselves.

00:25:15.000 When we have systems that are well constituted with people who have different personalities and different motives and goals,

00:25:21.000 we actually can get better outcomes.

00:25:22.000 We can have a discussion between them.

00:25:24.000 Yeah, well, that's exactly why.

00:25:26.000 It's for that precise reason that I've been so interested in free speech as a value.

00:25:32.000 Because, well, even on the economic front, it's pretty obvious if you look at things economically

00:25:37.000 that the entrepreneur types who start businesses are lumped in with the liberal creative types.

00:25:43.000 We've done a lot of work on the prediction of entrepreneurial behavior and ability.

00:25:46.000 And it's openness that's the big predictor.

00:25:48.000 It's not the only one.

00:25:49.000 It's openness and IQ, fundamentally.

00:25:51.000 But for managerial and administrative expertise, it's IQ and conscientiousness.

00:25:56.000 So the liberals start businesses, but they can't run them.

00:26:00.000 Because their interests flit and they don't have the organizational ability.

00:26:05.000 And the conservatives can run them, but they can't continue to transform and expand them.

00:26:09.000 Yep.

00:26:10.000 Yin and yang.

00:26:11.000 Yin and yang.

00:26:12.000 Yep.

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00:30:19.000 So, one more thing about what happened in Nazi Germany that's very relevant and interesting, because it's useful to get these motives right, you know.

00:30:29.000 First of all, if something disgusts you, if something, if you're afraid of something, then you run away from it or you freeze.

00:30:35.000 But if something disgusts you, you try to burn it or kill it, right?

00:30:39.000 You try to get rid of it or expel it. That's right. You want to get it away and destroy it.

00:30:44.000 So, when Hitler first came to power, he put in a bunch of public health schemes, like he had vans that went around and screened people for tuberculosis.

00:30:53.000 Then he went on a factory cleanliness campaign.

00:30:58.000 So, the factories were supposed to be tidied up.

00:31:01.000 And he washed, he bathed about four times a day, by the way, and was also a great worshipper of willpower, which is associated with orderliness.

00:31:07.000 And seems maybe to be associated with disgust sensitivity in some way that isn't yet understood.

00:31:12.000 Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't understand that connection either.

00:31:16.000 So, they, he convinced factory owners in Germany to get rid of the rats and the mice and the insects in the factories and also to clean them up and beautify them.

00:31:27.000 But the gas they used to clean up the factories was cyclone A.

00:31:31.000 And it was the variation of that gas, cyclone B, that was then used in, yeah.

00:31:36.000 So, you could see this ramping up, so it was, yeah, absolutely.

00:31:39.000 So, it was public health, then it was social cleanliness, then he went into the asylums and cleaned them up.

00:31:46.000 And so, it was just this expansion of, of who was contaminated and who was impure.

00:31:52.000 And I think also his fascination with fire and his use of fire symbolism was also associated with that, with that appeal to purification.

00:32:00.000 Because the idea of purification by fire is a very ancient idea.

00:32:04.000 So, okay, so, so how did your work on disgust change the way that you looked at things, fundamentally?

00:32:13.000 I mean, you gave some indication of that already, but what else has changed?

00:32:17.000 So, since I was coming out of a, of a psychological literature that was very focused on, on sort of secular, secular ethics about justice and fairness.

00:32:29.000 And then I began studying disgust and looking at the broader moral domain that almost all societies have.

00:32:35.000 That then also led me to think about, well, okay, if disgust is a reaction to things that seem to be degrading,

00:32:42.000 so an interesting element of disgust is this notion of degradation.

00:32:46.000 There are always these vertical metaphors in which disgust brings us down and, and disgust.

00:32:51.000 So a lot of, some religious practice in Judaism and Islam and, and Hinduism is about preparing your body to approach God and purification.

00:32:59.000 And so that led me to think, well, if there's an emotion which is about seeing our lower baser animal biological nature,

00:33:06.000 is there an opposite emotion? Is there an emotion of, that we feel when we see some manifestation of a higher, nobler nature?

00:33:13.000 And I was just beginning to think this when I moved to UVA.

00:33:16.000 I got my first job at the University of Virginia in 1995.

00:33:19.000 And I read the set of Thomas Jefferson's letters.

00:33:23.000 And in one letter, he describes, he describes the feelings you get from reading great fiction.

00:33:29.000 He advises a cousin of his that he should buy fiction for his library, not just, you know, serious works of law and philosophy.

00:33:35.000 And he described, he says, doesn't, he describes the feeling of, of having your sentiments be elevated.

00:33:43.000 Does it not dilate your breast or give you an open feeling in your chest when you see these acts of beauty and kindness and gratitude?

00:33:51.000 I thought, wow, that's exactly it.

00:33:53.000 And so because I've been studying disgust, I then started studying its opposite, which I and some others called moral elevation.

00:33:59.000 So there's this kind of vertical metaphor of elevation and degradation.

00:34:03.000 And that maps onto the body, too, with regards to-

00:34:06.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:34:07.000 High, low, clean, dirty.

00:34:09.000 Yeah, it's a beautiful pairing.

00:34:12.000 And so having this language of elevation and disgust just really has helped me see a lot of things.

00:34:18.000 I just, I can just see a lot of things happening.

00:34:20.000 It allows me to like, even, you know, manipulate, like if I'm applying for a grant proposal,

00:34:24.000 like I can get very good at like having an elevating ending and, you know, to, you know, end with a note of uplift.

00:34:31.000 And so it just broadened my thinking about morality.

00:34:34.000 And this was around 1995.

00:34:36.000 And so again, it just prepared me.

00:34:38.000 And I'd already been to India by that point.

00:34:41.000 I spent three months doing research in ERISA in Eastern India.

00:34:44.000 So it just broadened my thinking.

00:34:46.000 And that's what allowed me, finally, to understand conservatives.

00:34:51.000 Because I had always been on the left.

00:34:53.000 I hated Ronald Reagan.

00:34:55.000 I thought Republicans were stupid and evil.

00:34:59.000 And it was only when I'd gone to India and really tried to understand a traditional, religious, hierarchical, gender-stratified society.

00:35:07.000 I tried to understand it in their terms.

00:35:09.000 I didn't try to just bring in my own, my own Western left, you know, left-leaning perspectives.

00:35:14.000 That I was, and this was all under the guidance of Richard Schwader, my postdoc supervisor at the University of Chicago where he did a postdoc.

00:35:21.000 It was only then that I was able to sort of get inside their minds and their moral system and see that there were alternative moral worlds.

00:35:29.000 They each had their own logic.

00:35:31.000 And that was the metaphor I came to, you know, at the time, you know, the Matrix movies were very popular.

00:35:36.000 So the metaphor of the Matrix as a consensual hallucination made a lot of sense.

00:35:40.000 That's why I came up with the idea of just speaking about moral matrices, whichever different moral matrices.

00:35:44.000 That are grounded in biology.

00:35:46.000 Biology in the sense that it gives us the potential.

00:35:48.000 It's like the building blocks of this matrix can't be just anything.

00:35:51.000 It comes from our experiences, our embodied experiences.

00:35:55.000 And again, George Lakoff is the master of that thinking.

00:35:59.000 And so it was only then that I was able to now listen to conservative talk radio and Christian religious radio and see,

00:36:09.000 rather than just saying, oh, those stupid terrible people, say like, oh, wow.

00:36:13.000 Yeah, you know, I can see that they're striving for certain virtues.

00:36:16.000 Right, right. So you started to understand their metaphorical language essentially.

00:36:19.000 That's right. And that was like, kind of like my, you know, I don't know, Great Awakening or scales falling from my eyes.

00:36:23.000 But, you know, since, well, it took a few more, it took a lot more years.

00:36:26.000 But eventually I kind of just like pulled out the implants from my eyes and I stopped seeing everything through a partisan lens.

00:36:33.000 And I'm not on any side now. I'm just trying to understand what the hell is going on.

00:36:36.000 Well, it's really useful. It's really useful to understand that there are actual reasons why people see the world differently.

00:36:43.000 And that you can't just easily say that one is right and the other is wrong.

00:36:46.000 Because the Liberals are correct when it comes to borders, that if you thicken them too much and diminish the information flow,

00:36:52.000 you risk making the society so static that any radical environmental transformation will sink it.

00:36:58.000 It's the case. But the Conservatives are right in that you pay a big price with regards to newcomers and new information,

00:37:04.000 with regards to risk, to exposure, to contaminating, well, to contamination period, but also to contaminating ideas.

00:37:11.000 And so then I've always thought, you know, the environment itself moves back and forth like a snake in some sense.

00:37:18.000 And what we're trying to do is stay on the center of its back.

00:37:21.000 And the only way we can do that is by people, by having people pull to the right and say, be careful.

00:37:26.000 And people pull to the left and say, well, yeah, but be open.

00:37:29.000 With that dialogue and the exchange of information that that dialogue allows,

00:37:34.000 we can maybe specify the center of that moving target and stay on the back, let's say.

00:37:41.000 Yeah. Okay. So that's a really complicated metaphor with the snake.

00:37:43.000 But I think it's a perfect way in to what's going on on campus and to why viewpoint diversity is so important.

00:37:49.000 Because I agree exactly with what you just said.

00:37:52.000 And so what I, the view that I've come to in studying moral psychology is that we, is that humans are ultra-social apes.

00:38:02.000 We evolved to live in these small groups that are fighting with each other.

00:38:07.000 We evolved to have these low-level, animistic religions.

00:38:12.000 That's our steady state. That's the way we were for at least 100,000 years or much more.

00:38:16.000 Probably closer to a million in some form.

00:38:19.000 So that's sort of our design. That's what we were designed for in a sense.

00:38:23.000 And in that sense, we're, as individuals, we're really kind of stupid tribal creatures designed to do post-hoc reasoning.

00:38:31.000 But if you put us together in the right way, with the right checks, with the right, the right systems,

00:38:38.000 the whole can be vastly smarter than the components that go into it.

00:38:44.000 Which is true of the brain, too. The brain is composed of neurons.

00:38:47.000 Really kind of stupid little switch.

00:38:49.000 If you put them together in the right way, and you get something really brilliant.

00:38:52.000 And in the same way, I don't know all the history here, but my understanding is that science begins,

00:38:57.000 or the culture of science, the scientific revolution begins in Europe in the 17th century.

00:39:04.000 As you begin getting, you get the printing press so people can share their ideas.

00:39:08.000 But you get communities of people who are challenging each other's ideas.

00:39:12.000 And that's what makes it so brilliant, is that people have to do their best.

00:39:17.000 We're really bad at disconfirming our own ideas. It's very hard to make, it's very hard to do that.

00:39:21.000 But you put your ideas out there, and then everyone else is motivated to challenge them.

00:39:25.000 And so if you put us together in the right way, the truth comes out.

00:39:29.000 And so adversarial systems of law, journalists know this, they have to listen to both sides.

00:39:33.000 Scientists know this, social scientists should know this.

00:39:36.000 Okay, what happened?

00:39:38.000 Well, the academy has always leaned left in the 20th century, but leaning isn't the problem.

00:39:46.000 So people think, oh viewpoint diversity, we need everybody, we need Nazis, we need everybody.

00:39:51.000 No, we don't need everybody. What we need is no orthodoxy.

00:39:55.000 That's what's fatal, orthodoxy.

00:39:58.000 So if you have a field like sociology, or social psychology, in which it's two or three to one, left to right,

00:40:05.000 that's totally fine with me. That's totally fine.

00:40:08.000 Because if someone makes some claim that's just like ideologically blind,

00:40:13.000 someone will say, you know, common sense, other evidence that you've missed, and then the system works.

00:40:19.000 But what I learned when I started down this road in 2011, I gave a talk at the big conference of social psychologists,

00:40:26.000 I gave a talk about this problem that we're losing our diversity, that I could only find one conservative in the entire field.

00:40:33.000 And I gave a talk on this.

00:40:35.000 And so what I've learned since then is that the ratio in psychology was between two to one and four to one, left to right,

00:40:47.000 all the way up to the early 90s.

00:40:49.000 We've gathered together all the studies we could find.

00:40:51.000 So all the way up to the early 90s, it's only three or four to one, left to right, which would be okay.

00:40:55.000 But then between 1995, before, and 2010, it goes to 14 to one.

00:41:03.000 Do you have any idea why?

00:41:04.000 Yes.

00:41:05.000 And why that time?

00:41:06.000 Yes.

00:41:07.000 So you get the same story whether you look at Republican-Democrat ratios or Liberal-Conservative.

00:41:13.000 They tell the same story.

00:41:14.000 So the big things going on there are, one, is that the greatest generation, which had a lot of Republicans,

00:41:21.000 so a lot of men go off to World War II, they're on the GI Bill, they enter the academy in the 1950s.

00:41:27.000 A lot of them are conservative or Republican.

00:41:30.000 So you have a lot of them.

00:41:32.000 But in the 60s and 70s, one of the main reasons to go to grad school in the social sciences is either,

00:41:37.000 A, to stay in school to escape the Vietnam War draft, or B, to fight for social justice and against racism.

00:41:44.000 So in sociology and psychology in particular, in political science maybe, I'm not sure,

00:41:48.000 you get a huge influx of left-leaning people who are there to pursue social justice.

00:41:54.000 So, you know, the motives are fine.

00:41:56.000 And if it was balanced, it would be totally fine.

00:41:58.000 But as you get these young junior people on the left coming in the 70s and 80s,

00:42:03.000 and then you get the older people that are more politically balanced retiring in the 80s and 90s,

00:42:07.000 by the time you get to the late 90s, it's all baby boomers.

00:42:11.000 And so do you get a positive feedback loop developing in there?

00:42:15.000 Like you said, if it's like 3 to 1, it's okay.

00:42:18.000 But maybe when it hits 4 to 1, it goes to like 20 to 1.

00:42:21.000 Exactly. So then you start getting hostile climate.

00:42:24.000 So I wrote a review paper on this with Joe Duarte and Phil Tetlock and Lee Justin, Jared Crawford.

00:42:32.000 And we, so we reviewed everything that we could find.

00:42:37.000 And we concluded that most of what's going on is self-selection.

00:42:41.000 That is, people on the left are more open to experience.

00:42:43.000 They're always going to get self-selection.

00:42:46.000 But then there's really good evidence that there's also hostile climate.

00:42:49.000 I mean, it's undeniable now that if you are not on the left in a grad program,

00:42:54.000 there's just constant little subtle or not so subtle reminders that you don't belong.

00:42:58.000 And look, in the academy, we're all about saying, hey, if there are subtle hints here and there, you can't succeed, right?

00:43:05.000 I mean, that's what we do for a living is we say that little things will stop people.

00:43:09.000 Well, little things are put in the way of anyone who doesn't fit politically.

00:43:13.000 And so you do get hostile climate. You do get over discrimination.

00:43:16.000 There's evidence of that.

00:43:17.000 And then there is also, it is part of the story here, that what it means to be a conservative in the 90s,

00:43:23.000 and especially the 2000s, has changed.

00:43:25.000 So it is true that, you know, that the conservatives were not in any way anti-science until much more recent times.

00:43:34.000 Now, actually, both sides are anti-science about different sciences.

00:43:37.000 But in America, the right wing, the Republican Party, it's controversial,

00:43:43.000 but I do believe that the polarization starts with the right moving further out.

00:43:47.000 So what it means to be conservative?

00:43:48.000 To be anti-evolutionary, which is actually what's happening on the left now, too.

00:43:52.000 Exactly.

00:43:53.000 Yeah, so, well, I talked to Brett Weinstein the other day and, you know, he, one of his claims is that

00:43:59.000 evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone.

00:44:03.000 So it's a science that's very likely to be targeted by extremists.

00:44:07.000 You also brought up something that actually touches on the difficult problem of how it is that you might define someone

00:44:15.000 who's ideologically possessed, let's say, or ideologically rigid.

00:44:19.000 Because the idea was that you can make a valid case for the utility of free information flow,

00:44:26.000 and the free flow of people that would go along with that, and you can make a good case for the danger of that.

00:44:31.000 And so the idea might be that if you're only making a case for the danger of that, then you're tilted too far to the right.

00:44:37.000 And if you're only making a case for the utility of that, then you're tilted too far to the left.

00:44:41.000 Exactly, that's right.

00:44:42.000 And so we can look at immigration as a nice example.

00:44:45.000 There's a recent essay in the Atlantic, I think it was, by Peter Beinart,

00:44:49.000 where he, he reviews, he starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about immigration,

00:44:56.000 from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, a bunch of other people on the left,

00:44:59.000 who used to be able to say, on the one hand, you know, compassion, economic.

00:45:04.000 On the other hand, you know, we have to have a legal process and there's a threat to low-wage workers.

00:45:10.000 So people on the left used to be able to talk about immigration and talk about the pros and cons, the pluses and minuses.

00:45:16.000 But Beinart shows how in the last four or five years, you can't.

00:45:19.000 If you so much as suggest that, well, maybe immigration is on net good,

00:45:24.000 but it might have some deleterious effects on certain classes of low-wage American workers,

00:45:29.000 you could get in big trouble.

00:45:31.000 Right, because that's instantly prejudicial.

00:45:33.000 Wow.

00:45:34.000 Because immigration has become a sacred topic.

00:45:36.000 So this is the key thing that I want everyone to keep in mind.

00:45:39.000 We are fundamentally religious creatures.

00:45:41.000 We're built for religion.

00:45:43.000 And it's a great achievement to create a scientific establishment and an academic establishment

00:45:48.000 that keeps that way of thinking out.

00:45:50.000 Scientific thinking is not natural thinking.

00:45:52.000 Religious thinking is natural thinking.

00:45:54.000 And what's happening to us, in the last few years especially,

00:45:57.000 is a flooding in of religious thinking.

00:46:00.000 And so let's get a bunch of social scientists to talk about immigration.

00:46:04.000 What are they going to do?

00:46:05.000 Look at the data?

00:46:06.000 Weigh up the pluses and minuses?

00:46:07.000 No.

00:46:08.000 They're going to, many of them feel they're on a team.

00:46:12.000 And that team is fighting the right.

00:46:14.000 The right is anti-immigrant.

00:46:15.000 It includes racist elements.

00:46:17.000 Therefore, that justifies us in being pro-immigration.

00:46:21.000 And social sciences are always, there's always ambiguity.

00:46:24.000 There's always conflicting studies.

00:46:26.000 Yeah, and there's multiple causal factors as well.

00:46:28.000 Always in the social science study.

00:46:30.000 That's right.

00:46:31.000 So Beinart's point was that the left used to be able to think straight about immigration.

00:46:36.000 Maybe it had a, you know, it was generally pro-immigration, but it used to be able to think straight.

00:46:39.000 But in the last few years, a religious orthodox mindset has overtaken it.

00:46:44.000 Okay, so we might as well also point out that it's a primordial religious mindset.

00:46:48.000 Right?

00:46:49.000 Because I mean there are...

00:46:50.000 Yeah, I don't mean Christian or Jewish.

00:46:51.000 I mean ancient, tribal, small-scale, lots of gods.

00:46:55.000 Right, right.

00:46:56.000 Well, so then one of the things that you might suggest is that when you throw out a sophisticated religious structure,

00:47:02.000 an unsophisticated religious structure comes in to fill the gap.

00:47:06.000 I do think that's true.

00:47:07.000 Okay, okay.

00:47:08.000 So that's definitely worth thinking about, so...

00:47:10.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:47:11.000 So that's right.

00:47:12.000 The thing to think...

00:47:13.000 Right, with religions, we have to clarify fundamentalism is the problem, not religion.

00:47:17.000 And so if you get a...

00:47:18.000 And it's close to tribalism.

00:47:19.000 That's right.

00:47:20.000 If you get a fundamentalist...

00:47:21.000 You know, I'm happy to say, and if you have people applying to a grad program in psychology,

00:47:26.000 and I find out that they're Christian, that's fine.

00:47:29.000 There's no problem.

00:47:30.000 But if they're fundamentalist Christian, I would think...

00:47:33.000 Well, let's say it's not psychology.

00:47:34.000 Suppose it's, you know, geology.

00:47:37.000 So someone applies to a geology program, they're a fundamentalist, young earth creationist.

00:47:42.000 Are you going to admit them?

00:47:44.000 No, I don't think you should.

00:47:45.000 They're not able to do the right kind of thinking based on what we know to be the case.

00:47:51.000 They're not in a scientific paradigm.

00:47:53.000 They're not in a scientific paradigm.

00:47:54.000 That's right.

00:47:55.000 So if we wouldn't admit a fundamentalist Christian to a geology program, why would we

00:48:00.000 admit someone who is just as fundamentalist about certain moral and political issues into

00:48:04.000 a sociology program or into a psychology program?

00:48:07.000 If they come in knowing what the right answer is, committed to that right answer, likely

00:48:12.000 to get angry at anyone who contravenes that right answer, and showing signs of closed-mindedness,

00:48:20.000 I don't think they belong in a grad program.

00:48:22.000 Yeah, I guess the question is, how in the world do you set up mechanisms to ensure that

00:48:27.000 you're not swamped by fundamentalists of any sort?

00:48:30.000 So those are people who are reducing everything to a single cause.

00:48:33.000 It's something like that.

00:48:34.000 How can you implement a structure that protects the organization against that without the structure

00:48:40.000 itself becoming totalitarian?

00:48:42.000 Because these things spin out of control so fast.

00:48:45.000 Yeah.

00:48:46.000 So I think what we have to realize in the academy is that we face, I think we face an existential

00:48:52.000 crisis.

00:48:54.000 We rely an enormous amount on public goodwill.

00:48:57.000 We get enormous tax subsidies, direct research support, and recent polling shows that while

00:49:06.000 Democrats have always had a higher opinion of the universities and Republicans, until two

00:49:09.000 years ago everybody thought universities are a good thing.

00:49:12.000 They make life better.

00:49:13.000 So Americans have been very supportive of higher education.

00:49:16.000 There have been rising gripes on the right.

00:49:18.000 But it's only between 2015 and 2017 that now Republicans go from saying mostly universities

00:49:24.000 are good things, in two years they go way down and say universities are bad things.

00:49:27.000 They're making things worse.

00:49:29.000 Now how is this news greeted?

00:49:32.000 Pundits on the left are saying, oh, those Republicans are so anti-science.

00:49:37.000 Look how ignorant they are.

00:49:38.000 They now hate universities.

00:49:40.000 Come on, anybody who's been watching the news, anybody who's seen the mobs, the shout-downs,

00:49:46.000 the illiberal behavior.

00:49:48.000 You know, the metaphor I use is like, you know, Americans on the right and left are really

00:49:52.000 supportive of the military.

00:49:53.000 We have one of the few institutions that we still hold in high esteem on both sides.

00:49:57.000 And so the Republicans more than Democrats.

00:49:59.000 So suppose you had Gallup polling showing Republicans like the military more than Democrats,

00:50:04.000 but both really like it.

00:50:05.000 And then suddenly, in 2015, we started seeing video from all over military bases, the military

00:50:12.000 academies, in which the military leaders are overtly right-wing.

00:50:17.000 They're saying terrible things about leftists and progressives and the midshipmen and the

00:50:23.000 cadets and everybody is mobbing the occasional liberal.

00:50:26.000 And they're behaving in a really despicable, scary, and intimidating way.

00:50:30.000 What do you think the left would now think about the military?

00:50:33.000 Obviously, support for the military would plummet.

00:50:35.000 And that's what's happening in America with universities.

00:50:38.000 We are losing the support of half the country.

00:50:41.000 This is unsustainable, especially in red states where, you know, they control the purse strings.

00:50:46.000 So I think we have a major crisis.

00:50:48.000 I think we've got to go into crisis mode, and we've got to clean up our act.

00:50:52.000 So just as we're doing in psychology with the replication project,

00:50:55.000 we recognize that our methods weren't good enough.

00:50:58.000 And we're doing a crash course, thanks to Brian Nosek and others, the Open Science Project.

00:51:02.000 We're really trying to improve our game.

00:51:05.000 Thank God, we need to.

00:51:06.000 I think we have to do the exact same thing about partisanship and our duties.

00:51:11.000 Okay, so let's talk about Heterodox Academy, because you set that up,

00:51:14.000 this organization that you should tell everybody about, precisely to deal with this issue.

00:51:19.000 And so I'd like to know about it, how it's growing, what it's doing, what your aims are, all of that.

00:51:25.000 So I gave this talk in 2011, laying out the fact that we have no more conservatives in social psychology,

00:51:31.000 and why this makes it hard for us to find truth.

00:51:34.000 And in the months after that, a few social psychologists resonated with the message.

00:51:38.000 They said, wow, I think you're right, I have some data on this.

00:51:41.000 So the five of us, or six of us, wrote this paper.

00:51:46.000 It came out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

00:51:49.000 Oh, Charlotte Stern, I'm sorry, was the sixth one that I forgot to add in before.

00:51:52.000 We got this paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

00:51:56.000 It came out, it was sort of online in 2014, but it came out for good in the summer of 2015,

00:52:02.000 which coincidentally was the same summer that my article came out with Greg Lukianoff,

00:52:06.000 called The Coddling of the American Mind.

00:52:08.000 That was about things going on with undergrads.

00:52:10.000 But our concern was entirely faculty.

00:52:12.000 It was just the nature of the academic community, the research community.

00:52:16.000 So we got these two things going on, summer of 2015.

00:52:19.000 And then that summer I hear from Nick Rosencrantz, a law professor,

00:52:24.000 who says we have the same problem in law.

00:52:26.000 It might even be worse in law.

00:52:28.000 It's really bad in Canada, in law.

00:52:30.000 Okay, because, and as he points out, we're training all these students.

00:52:34.000 They never meet a conservative.

00:52:36.000 Then they have to go argue cases in front of judges, half of whom were appointed by Republicans.

00:52:40.000 They have no idea what a conservative thinks.

00:52:42.000 This is malpractice.

00:52:43.000 We've got to train.

00:52:44.000 So, and I hear from a sociologist, Chris Martin, same thing in sociology.

00:52:48.000 So the three of us said, hey, you know, this is a big problem for the whole county.

00:52:51.000 Have you looked at faculties of education?

00:52:53.000 Oh my God, those are the worst.

00:52:55.000 By worst, I don't know the numbers.

00:52:57.000 But in terms of the vindictiveness, the pressure put on any nonconforming opinion,

00:53:03.000 my impression, I don't have data, but my impression from the letters I get is that

00:53:07.000 education schools and social work schools are the worst.

00:53:11.000 That's exactly in keeping with my understanding as well.

00:53:14.000 It's hard to tell which of those two are worst.

00:53:16.000 I would say it's the faculties of education because they have a direct pipeline to kids.

00:53:20.000 Oh, in terms of their effects.

00:53:22.000 Yes, far more pernicious.

00:53:23.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:24.000 Yeah, but equally warped, let's say, but more pernicious.

00:53:28.000 And the things that are happening in the Canadian education system as a consequence of that are so reprehensible.

00:53:33.000 And we should get to that because it's happening here too with these ideas filtered down to high school.

00:53:36.000 I've been so focused on college, now we're discovering the problem is actually baked in.

00:53:41.000 The illiberal attitudes are often baked in by the time they arrive.

00:53:44.000 Yes, and purposefully, like in Canada, increasingly the radical leftists have control over curriculum development

00:53:51.000 and they're starting to develop social justice curriculums, which is what they call them for kindergarten kids.

00:53:58.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:59.000 So it's really...

00:54:00.000 So let's finish up with Heterodox Academy and then we'll get back to the earlier grades.

00:54:02.000 So originally three of us decided to put up a website.

00:54:05.000 I invited all the other authors from the BBS paper.

00:54:08.000 We invited a few other people working on this.

00:54:10.000 And so for the first year, we had this project.

00:54:12.000 It was called heterodoxacademy.org.

00:54:14.000 We put the site up on about September 10th, I think it was, of 2015.

00:54:20.000 And it was just a community of researchers who are studying the problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity.

00:54:27.000 Well, five days later, the protests start at Missouri.

00:54:30.000 So these are racially motivated protests or protests about racial insensitivity and racial problems at Missouri.

00:54:37.000 And at first, it seems like this is just a Missouri problem.

00:54:40.000 But coming in the wake, of course, of Ferguson and all the videos we saw of unarmed black men being killed by police,

00:54:47.000 a lot of these concerns spread to other universities.

00:54:50.000 The protests aren't just about race.

00:54:52.000 But it was that fall of 2015, especially the Yale protest,

00:54:56.000 when the president of Yale validates their narrative that Yale's a racist place, we have to reform Yale,

00:55:02.000 then it spreads nationally.

00:55:04.000 Now suddenly, this is not just a faculty issue anymore.

00:55:06.000 So even though at Hedrox Academy we'll mostly focus on the faculty,

00:55:09.000 we're now seeing it's a complex ecosystem with all kinds of forces acting on universities,

00:55:14.000 so that between 2015 and 2017, the danger of speaking honestly about what you think,

00:55:21.000 about an academic or intellectual proposition, has skyrocketed.

00:55:25.000 The risk of being mobbed, ostracized, formally investigated.

00:55:29.000 By Title IX people, for example.

00:55:31.000 By Title IX people.

00:55:32.000 We're sitting here at NYU.

00:55:34.000 Go to any bathroom.

00:55:35.000 I'll show you on this floor.

00:55:37.000 Go to any bathroom.

00:55:38.000 There's a sign telling students exactly what number to call to report you or me

00:55:42.000 if we say something that someone takes to be a bias act.

00:55:46.000 Oh, so you have bias investigation teams here.

00:55:49.000 That's right.

00:55:50.000 See, we haven't got to that particular point in Canada yet, so I think we're farther ahead

00:55:55.000 down that path in some ways, but not quite as far in others.

00:55:59.000 Yeah, that's really unbelievable.

00:56:00.000 So things are changing very, very fast.

00:56:02.000 It's not at all schools.

00:56:03.000 But then again, things are changing so fast, we don't really know.

00:56:06.000 We don't have good data on what's going on.

00:56:09.000 What I can tell you though is that at Heterodox Academy, when we started out in 2015,

00:56:14.000 there was a lot of suspicion.

00:56:15.000 A lot of people on the left were afraid like, oh, is this some right-wing group?

00:56:19.000 Now, very few of us are actually on the right.

00:56:21.000 But because we end up mostly speaking up for libertarians and conservatives who are attacked

00:56:27.000 or silenced, you know, people will think, oh, we must be right-wing.

00:56:30.000 But we're not.

00:56:31.000 I mean, I've never voted for Republican in my life.

00:56:33.000 I've never given money to Republican campaign.

00:56:35.000 I'm now increasingly calling myself a liberal now that we see illiberalism flourishing.

00:56:40.000 But so when we started out, there was a lot of suspicion of us from many professors.

00:56:47.000 But now that it's clear that the problems, these are not just a few anecdotes.

00:56:51.000 This is the new normal.

00:56:53.000 And it's not just in the universities as you pointed out.

00:56:55.000 That's right.

00:56:56.000 It's spreading like mad.

00:56:57.000 And it's not just in the US.

00:56:59.000 It spread, in 2015, I thought it was a uniquely American problem.

00:57:02.000 Boy, it's in Canada and the UK.

00:57:04.000 And Australia.

00:57:05.000 And New Zealand.

00:57:06.000 That's right.

00:57:07.000 It is a uniquely Anglosphere problem.

00:57:08.000 This is really interesting.

00:57:09.000 It's not on the continent very much at all.

00:57:10.000 What about in the Nordic countries?

00:57:12.000 No.

00:57:13.000 So political correctness, you have lots of places.

00:57:16.000 The unique thing that identifies this new culture is linking the political correctness with

00:57:22.000 the sense of fragility.

00:57:23.000 And this is something America has pioneered.

00:57:26.000 The idea that, so in Britain, they've always had no platforming, they call it.

00:57:32.000 So if there's an, and there was an actual British National Party, some actual fascist party.

00:57:36.000 You know, so if a, if a BNP member is going to speak on campus, you mob him, you shut it down.

00:57:41.000 No platform.

00:57:42.000 So, you know, you've had passionate politics, certainly since the 60s.

00:57:46.000 So that's not new.

00:57:47.000 And that's everywhere.

00:57:48.000 Um, what's new is the American idea that if someone says something, and it could be a

00:57:54.000 sincerely expressed idea, not a racist rant.

00:57:57.000 Just like, I don't know, I think that maybe hormones do affect gendered behavior.

00:58:01.000 Can you say that?

00:58:03.000 Well, what if someone takes that as, as somehow essentializing gender, and then saying that

00:58:11.000 women are inferior, whatever.

00:58:12.000 Yes.

00:58:13.000 Well that happened to James Damore, for example.

00:58:15.000 Exactly.

00:58:16.000 Exactly.

00:58:17.000 So, um, so that's what's new, is the idea that if someone says something, that someone,

00:58:22.000 a member of a protected or marginalized group, is offended by, that person is harmed.

00:58:26.000 If that person is harmed, we must protect that person.

00:58:30.000 And more ominously, just in the last year or two, it's not just that they're harmed their suffering,

00:58:34.000 it's that this was violence.

00:58:35.000 Yes.

00:58:36.000 Right.

00:58:37.000 Violence.

00:58:38.000 Well, that's part of the postmodern narrative that, and this is so, this is so dangerous.

00:58:41.000 The, the, the crossing the line into, into violence.

00:58:44.000 It just occurred to me just like yesterday, I was thinking about this.

00:58:46.000 Wait.

00:58:47.000 The state is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, right?

00:58:50.000 But if speech, especially his speech and her speech and the people, the speech of those people in that academic movement,

00:58:56.000 or on the, and that, if their speech is violence, well, the state is supposed to have a monopoly on their speech then.

00:59:02.000 And, um, and if it's violence, well, then we have a right to use violence back.

00:59:08.000 The state doesn't have a monopoly on our violence, because our violence is, you know, morally motivated.

00:59:13.000 So, just the, the Orwellian and, and authoritarian implications of this move, once you say that speech is violence,

00:59:20.000 you're unlocking, you know, you're opening Pandora's box.

00:59:23.000 I mean, you're, you're five steps down the road to hell.

00:59:25.000 And I'd say we're about seven steps down the road to hell.

00:59:27.000 You, you, so, okay.

00:59:28.000 You, so you're, you're that concerned about it.

00:59:30.000 Okay.

00:59:31.000 So, now, tell me, how many, how many members, if you, you don't have to discuss any of this, obviously,

00:59:37.000 but how many members of Heterodox Academy are there now?

00:59:40.000 We have 1,300 members.

00:59:41.000 So, once we opened up, so originally it was just for researchers who were studying this problem,

00:59:46.000 but we had lots of people wanting to join.

00:59:48.000 And so we said, well, okay, why not?

00:59:50.000 And so we just said, all right, if, as long as you're a professor,

00:59:52.000 um, that is, you have a PhD, you're living more or less the life of a professor, you have a university affiliation.

00:59:58.000 So, we now take adjuncts if they have a PhD, um, we take postdocs.

01:00:02.000 Basically, if you're in the guild, if you're living the life of a professor,

01:00:06.000 and you're concerned about the rise of intimidation, frankly,

01:00:13.000 um, if you're concerned that our wonderful institution, I love, I love being a professor, I love the academy,

01:00:19.000 and I feel like it's not just losing public respect, it's losing its ability to, to function.

01:00:25.000 It's losing its ability to teach and do research on politicized topics.

01:00:29.000 And there are more politicized topics all the time.

01:00:32.000 That's, that's right. And there are a few in the natural sciences, not many, but there are some in the natural sciences as well.

01:00:36.000 Anyway, my point is, we're now growing very rapidly.

01:00:39.000 And something I'm very excited by is, since we've started having more violence on campus,

01:00:44.000 with beginning with Bertha and Middlebury, we're seeing a pervasive sense among people on the left,

01:00:49.000 that there really is a problem here, that something has to be done.

01:00:52.000 And so, we are finding much more acceptance now, um, from professors on the left.

01:00:57.000 So, I like to think about, there's the liberal left, which is the great majority, and there's the illiberal left.

01:01:03.000 We did a factor analysis of politically correct beliefs and found exactly that.

01:01:07.000 Oh.

01:01:08.000 And that the, and that the illiberal left was also high in orderliness.

01:01:11.000 That's interesting.

01:01:12.000 Uh-huh.

01:01:13.000 That's the authoritarian predisposition.

01:01:14.000 Exactly.

01:01:15.000 Yeah.

01:01:16.000 And also, uh, kind of markedly declined.

01:01:18.000 It was also characterized by a marked lack of verbal intelligence.

01:01:22.000 Oh, that's interesting.

01:01:23.000 So, yeah.

01:01:24.000 Wow.

01:01:25.000 The correlation was about 0.4.

01:01:26.000 Well, that, oh, that's beautiful.

01:01:27.000 That's beautiful.

01:01:28.000 Because one of the simplest formulations I've heard, a really great formulation from Mark Lilla.

01:01:32.000 So, Mark Lilla wrote this fantastic op-ed in the New York Times a week after Trump was elected,

01:01:37.000 saying identity politics is a really foolish thing to do.

01:01:40.000 It pushes lots of people over to Trump's side.

01:01:43.000 Identity politics is part of the problem.

01:01:45.000 Well, he writes this op-ed, and one of his fellow professors at Columbia, I forget how she does it,

01:01:50.000 but she basically says something about, you know, the mask with eye holes falls from his face.

01:01:55.000 Like, you know, he's a Ku Klux Klan member or something like that.

01:01:57.000 Right, right, right.

01:01:58.000 And so Lilla, Lilla, who is in the humanities, he's an intellectual historian, Lilla has this simple formulation.

01:02:04.000 He says, that's a slur, not an argument.

01:02:07.000 And once I had that simple formulation, I realized, wow, that's almost all the pushback I've ever gotten.

01:02:13.000 It's somehow, you know, oh, you know, you're winking at Nazis, or you're-

01:02:18.000 Yeah, that's happened to me over and over.

01:02:20.000 I was just, my neighborhood was just postered with-

01:02:22.000 I saw that.

01:02:23.000 Yeah, the intimidation.

01:02:25.000 So, this is really key.

01:02:27.000 We're supposed to be all about, you can say anything you want, you can make any argument you want,

01:02:32.000 if you can support it, if you can back it with reason.

01:02:35.000 This is critical thinking.

01:02:36.000 This is what we're supposed to train our students to do.

01:02:38.000 Well, and it's not only that you can say anything, but you can say it-

01:02:42.000 There's a boundary on that, which especially if you're a scientist, less so in the humanities,

01:02:46.000 but if you're a scientist, the things you say have to be vetted by people who are going to be critical of them, right?

01:02:53.000 So, so not only-

01:02:54.000 There's an accountability for words.

01:02:55.000 That's right.

01:02:56.000 There's accountability built into it.

01:02:57.000 That's right.

01:02:58.000 So, I didn't mean to say you can say whatever you want with a racist rant.

01:03:00.000 No, no, no.

01:03:01.000 I know.

01:03:02.000 I mean, you can put forth any idea you want if you can back it up.

01:03:04.000 What we're seeing with anything politicized is it's not about backing it up.

01:03:08.000 Students are learning rhetorical techniques to link their enemies to something racist.

01:03:14.000 Well, something contemptible.

01:03:16.000 Contemptible.

01:03:17.000 Disgusting.

01:03:18.000 You bet.

01:03:19.000 And those are the things that are not only worthy of being destroyed, but that you have a moral duty to destroy.

01:03:24.000 Exactly.

01:03:25.000 That's right.

01:03:26.000 So, it's almost like the immune system.

01:03:27.000 I don't know how exactly it works, but there's some cell that tags a cell as, you know,

01:03:32.000 enemy, enemy, and once that tag is put on the cell, that attracts other, I forget what kind of cell, to mob it.

01:03:38.000 So, we should look into this, this metaphor of the immune system.

01:03:40.000 Yeah.

01:03:41.000 Because, you know, once you're labeled as a racist, students don't have to read you that it doesn't matter what you actually say.

01:03:47.000 You will now be attacked on campus.

01:03:49.000 Well, it's also, too, that once you're labeled that way, if someone defends you, the label is contagious in exactly the same manner.

01:03:55.000 That's right.

01:03:56.000 And that's the dynamic of a witch hunt.

01:03:57.000 That's how we know we're in this super religious territory of witch hunts, that if you stand up for someone, you are tagged and then you will be mobbed.

01:04:04.000 Right.

01:04:05.000 And that's an infectious disease.

01:04:06.000 And that's why there's so much cowardice on campus among both students and faculty.

01:04:11.000 People are afraid to stand up.

01:04:13.000 Even if the majority think that what's going on is nuts or is unfair, they're afraid to stand up.

01:04:19.000 And that's in part due to social media because it's just, I mean, students today have been raised with various platforms that make it easy for people to join in, attack someone.

01:04:30.000 They look at who liked what.

01:04:32.000 In that article we just saw on Reed, there was a bit of a counter-revolution at Reed.

01:04:36.000 Yeah.

01:04:37.000 The students had to get together somehow and decide, should I like that post?

01:04:41.000 How about if we all like it at the same time?

01:04:42.000 Right.

01:04:43.000 Then we'll get in less trouble.

01:04:44.000 Right.

01:04:45.000 Okay.

01:04:46.000 So to what degree, so let's talk about the aims of the Heterodox Academy.

01:04:49.000 So you've brought people together who are in principle interested in a diversity of opinions.

01:04:55.000 But in what manner is that going to be utilized to, I don't want to use the word combat, but to deal with this emergent problem of ideological rigidity in universities?

01:05:08.000 Yeah.

01:05:09.000 So two useful concepts here.

01:05:10.000 One is the emperor's new clothes.

01:05:12.000 We all know that story.

01:05:14.000 Even if most people, even if everybody sees this as nuts, the emperor's walking around with

01:05:18.000 no clothes, they're afraid to say it until one person says it.

01:05:21.000 So, and this is also the Ash experiment.

01:05:24.000 Everybody says that that line is the same as that line.

01:05:26.000 It's obviously not true.

01:05:27.000 If one person says the truth, then nobody conforms after that.

01:05:32.000 Right.

01:05:33.000 So the mere presence of a group of people who say, you know what, we actually need a diversity

01:05:37.000 of opinions.

01:05:38.000 And the fact that on our site we'll publish things.

01:05:40.000 So sometimes when professors are mobbed, like when Brett Weinstein was mobbed, so I wrote

01:05:44.000 an essay that stood up for him, we've done that for some of them.

01:05:47.000 It's happening so fast, I can't keep up.

01:05:48.000 I can't, I've got books to write.

01:05:49.000 And I, you know, every week there's some new member who's getting mobbed.

01:05:52.000 And so we're going to develop a team of people who will write.

01:05:55.000 But just knowing that there are people who will stand up for you, knowing that there are

01:05:59.000 people who will say, wait a second, you know, this is not what we do in the academy.

01:06:04.000 So that's one thing is we just stand up for each other.

01:06:06.000 Two is we develop products that we think can basically fix the situation.

01:06:13.000 So one of our products is called the Campus Expression Survey.

01:06:16.000 It's a survey designed to actually measure who is afraid of speaking up, about what topics,

01:06:22.000 and why.

01:06:23.000 What are they afraid of?

01:06:24.000 And it turns out everyone's afraid of the students more than the faculty.

01:06:27.000 They're afraid mostly to talk about race.

01:06:29.000 What about the administrators?

01:06:30.000 Everyone's afraid of the students.

01:06:32.000 They're afraid of the students.

01:06:33.000 I don't have, we have not surveyed them.

01:06:35.000 I've only surveyed students.

01:06:36.000 I don't know.

01:06:37.000 Okay, okay.

01:06:38.000 But from what we hear, people are afraid of the students showing up on your doorstep.

01:06:45.000 Well that's also appalling in its own manner.

01:06:47.000 Like, was that read?

01:06:48.000 It's a failure of leadership.

01:06:49.000 Yeah.

01:06:50.000 That's for sure.

01:06:51.000 They let those kids come into the classroom, the actual classroom, and disrupt a class on an

01:06:55.000 ongoing basis.

01:06:56.000 Right.

01:06:57.000 For months.

01:06:58.000 I couldn't understand that exactly.

01:07:00.000 I mean, my response to that would be, first I would tell them to leave.

01:07:05.000 Second, I would call campus security.

01:07:07.000 Third, if something wasn't done about it, I just wouldn't teach the class.

01:07:10.000 So I don't understand, like, it seems to me that it's also up to individual professors to draw a line,

01:07:15.000 which is that if you're being intimidated by students, why do you show up and teach the class?

01:07:21.000 I don't understand that.

01:07:23.000 Again, people are afraid to stand up if it means that people will call you a racist.

01:07:29.000 Yeah, but God, I mean, it's weird in that situation, though, because you're also afraid to go to your class.

01:07:35.000 That's right.

01:07:36.000 And there's a much more proximal threat there.

01:07:38.000 That's what I mean.

01:07:39.000 That's what I'm most alarmed by, is the rise of intimidation.

01:07:42.000 Intimidation is now a factor in many aspects of academic life, and that's just terrible.

01:07:46.000 That's completely incompatible with what we do and who we are.

01:07:50.000 Well, it's especially appalling given that whatever happens in the university campuses.

01:07:55.000 You know, like, one of the questions I've faced in Canada is, well, why should we care about what's happening in the Ivy Towers?

01:08:02.000 Because you're going to hire these people next year.

01:08:04.000 Yeah, well, it's the hard, like, what's happening in the campuses is going to happen in society in five years.

01:08:09.000 That's how it goes.

01:08:10.000 It's already happened.

01:08:11.000 This is actually an important point.

01:08:12.000 I just gave a talk at a big law firm here in New York where they're very devoted to diversity, but they're doing it right.

01:08:18.000 They're really thinking about diversity.

01:08:19.000 Like, why is diversity good?

01:08:20.000 And so they have a whole month on viewpoint diversity, which is just fantastic.

01:08:24.000 And what I'm learning from talking to a number of people in the business world is that in the last year, there are now all these pressures on leaders to endorse this, condemn that, sign this open letter.

01:08:36.000 Most of that's coming into human resources.

01:08:38.000 That's right.

01:08:39.000 That's right.

01:08:40.000 But it's the same dynamic we have on campus.

01:08:42.000 And the answer to it, so if anybody, anybody watching here, if you run a business, if you have friends who are in business, I think the only, there are only two stable equilibria.

01:08:51.000 One is that every organization is just either all right-wing or all left-wing.

01:08:55.000 But that would be disastrous.

01:08:56.000 So either you just say, okay, we're on one side.

01:08:58.000 That would be terrible.

01:08:59.000 The other is what we call the Chicago Principles of Free Expression.

01:09:03.000 The University of Chicago has the best statement out there on how the university provides a platform on which multiple views can contest.

01:09:11.000 The university does not take anyone's side.

01:09:14.000 That's the only other stable alternative.

01:09:16.000 And I think leaders need to do this in business, certainly at universities.

01:09:20.000 So we're encouraging every university to adopt the Chicago Principles because a lot of what mass action is, is an attempt to compel the authority to come in on your side and punish your enemies.

01:09:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:32.000 And so that has to stop.

01:09:33.000 We can't go on.

01:09:34.000 So how, how effectively is the Chicago Statement on, on, how effectively is the Chicago Statement being disseminated?

01:09:41.000 How rapidly are universities signing up or, or?

01:09:44.000 There are a few signed on early in this whole crisis.

01:09:48.000 Purdue, there are about 10 or 15 that have, that have endorsed it or something like it.

01:09:53.000 Uh, it's not enough to just endorse something, but if you have leadership that's committed to creating an open platform in which people can disagree.

01:10:02.000 Um, and, and I'm, one thing that's very encouraging.

01:10:05.000 I've been invited by a number of university presidents to come speak.

01:10:08.000 Um, we have all kinds of, of innovations at Heterodox Academy, uh, to foster a more inclusive climate in which people can actually, uh, engage with difference.

01:10:18.000 There's a lot of interest.

01:10:19.000 So I think the university leaders were very slow to react.

01:10:23.000 They didn't want to alienate certain factions of students, but they're almost all reasonable people.

01:10:29.000 They're almost all liberal left, uh, not illiberal.

01:10:32.000 Yeah.

01:10:33.000 They're horrified by what's going on.

01:10:34.000 They know they're sitting atop a powder keg.

01:10:36.000 They don't want things to blow up in their face as happened, uh, at Evergreen.

01:10:40.000 So this brings us to our, our, our, another product, the one that we're most excited by.

01:10:45.000 Uh, so we just went online, uh, actually, uh, today.

01:10:48.000 Uh, it's called the Open Mind Platform.

01:10:51.000 If you go to openmindplatform.org, um, you can find, we've developed, uh, an app.

01:10:57.000 We have a whole library of readings and videos.

01:11:01.000 We've developed an app that guides you through.

01:11:04.000 We don't just say, here's how to engage with different viewpoints.

01:11:07.000 We start by saying, why is it good?

01:11:10.000 And we make the case that you need this.

01:11:12.000 Everybody needs this.

01:11:13.000 And two, um, we remind people that we're all basically self-righteous hypocrites.

01:11:19.000 We have quotes from wisdom traditions around the world.

01:11:22.000 And we've all heard this.

01:11:23.000 So just a little bit of, you know, you can call it emotional manipulation if you like,

01:11:26.000 but just get people into a mindset in which they're willing to say, oh yeah, whoa, you know, calm down.

01:11:32.000 We're all, we're all, uh, uh, too self-righteous here.

01:11:36.000 And then we, then we teach them some psychology, um, about motivated reasoning.

01:11:40.000 And only then do we teach them to engage with views that are not their own.

01:11:43.000 So we've already run this in about, uh, 15 or 20 classes.

01:11:47.000 Um, the results so far look promising that at the end of it,

01:11:50.000 the measures show that students are more open to other ideas.

01:11:53.000 So the open mind platform, we think, is a tool that we think a lot of universities are going to adopt.

01:11:59.000 There, there's a lot of interest in it.

01:12:01.000 And if there's leadership, if the professors generally do support viewpoint diversity and open inquiry,

01:12:07.000 if we change freshman orientation so that students are trained first and foremost in how to step back,

01:12:14.000 give people the benefit of the doubt, be open-minded, if we do that first.

01:12:18.000 That, you know, that's like behavioral, um, exposure to some degree, right?

01:12:22.000 The idea would be that if you're, if you're afraid or disgusted by something that you don't understand,

01:12:28.000 the appropriate first treatment, first of all, the treatment is necessary,

01:12:31.000 because otherwise you'll, you'll isolate yourself in the ways that you already described.

01:12:35.000 And second, that brief exposure, voluntary exposure, is going to be the best curative.

01:12:40.000 That's right.

01:12:41.000 That's the opposite of the safe space idea.

01:12:43.000 Exactly.

01:12:44.000 Where you need to be protected.

01:12:45.000 That's right.

01:12:46.000 The safe space, the safe space idea is the worst thing you could possibly do for the very people you're trying to protect.

01:12:49.000 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:12:50.000 I mean, the psychology, what, you know, the psychology behind safe spaces and microaggressions

01:12:55.000 is just the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we want to create kids, especially black kids, gay kids, women, whatever.

01:13:02.000 And whatever, if you think that they are vulnerable to more stigma, more conflict, if you think that they are vulnerable,

01:13:08.000 that's especially when a safe space will be temporarily pleasant, but in the long run, bad for them.

01:13:15.000 Right, and that's the critical issue, too, with regards to safe spaces, is that they're sacrificing the medium and long-term

01:13:21.000 of the student's well-being, let's say, to the short-term lack of fear and conflict.

01:13:27.000 They're infantilizing them, essentially.

01:13:29.000 So, yeah, okay. So, alright, so, I was thinking about the discussion idea, I've got a personality test online now,

01:13:38.000 that's based on this big five aspect scale, but it might be interesting as something for us to think about,

01:13:43.000 to find people who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness or orderliness,

01:13:48.000 and offer them the opportunity to engage in dialogue with people who have the opposite personality traits,

01:13:54.000 because, well, first of all, because they're going to run into people like that, always, right?

01:13:58.000 Oh, yeah.

01:13:59.000 And maybe even establish a relationship with them inadvertently.

01:14:04.000 And so, being able to tolerate that might give them the kind of insight that you said you developed,

01:14:09.000 when you realized that the conservative ethos was based on a reasonable but not complete set of beneficial axiomatic presuppositions.

01:14:19.000 So, alright. So, now this is pretty much taken over your life, this Heterodox Academy, as well as the writing.

01:14:26.000 Now, you're writing a couple of new books, I understand.

01:14:28.000 Yeah. So, I was in the psychology department at the University of Virginia for 17 years.

01:14:36.000 And when my book The Righteous Mind was coming out, I wanted to move to New York City for a year so I could, you know, do promotional work for it.

01:14:43.000 And I just had, my second child was just born, and I knew it would be hard to fly up from Charlottesville.

01:14:47.000 So, I just happened to get a position, a temporary position here at Stern, at the business school.

01:14:51.000 And when I first arrived, I wasn't that interested in business.

01:14:55.000 But as soon as I got here, Occupy Wall Street happened, and suddenly it was like everyone's talking about morality and politics and capitalism and business.

01:15:03.000 And then I started learning about the history of capitalism, and I knew nothing about it. It was fascinating.

01:15:07.000 And I started seeing how free enterprise and free markets have helped, you know, raise weight, raise living standards around the world.

01:15:15.000 Yes. Radical decline of poverty.

01:15:17.000 In a staggeringly rapid fashion that's completely unprecedented.

01:15:21.000 That's right. Especially since the year 2000.

01:15:23.000 That's right. So, since, so, you know, here I was, 48 years old, discovering I knew nothing about, it was like when I first learned about evolution.

01:15:30.000 Like, wow, this explains like everything in the natural world.

01:15:33.000 And learning about capitalism, business, explained everything about the built world and the world that we actually live in.

01:15:40.000 And there was also all these business scandals. This was 2011, the wake of the financial crisis.

01:15:45.000 And I saw a huge opening to begin applying moral psychology to help corporations have better ethics.

01:15:52.000 So I'd been, everything I do involves applying moral psychology to help complex systems work better.

01:15:58.000 So I've been focused on political polarization and governance for years before then, and that led to the Righteous Mind.

01:16:04.000 And then I got here to Stern. They offered me a job during that first year, and I took it, and it's been fantastic.

01:16:09.000 It's been really exciting. It's like a whole new, you know, almost like being back in grad school.

01:16:13.000 A whole bunch of new things to learn.

01:16:14.000 It must be a kind of a shock, an existential shock, to be in a business school in some sense.

01:16:18.000 No, it's not, it's not a shock. I mean, it's a different culture.

01:16:21.000 It's much more open in the sense that it's so diverse, like the things people are doing.

01:16:25.000 There's not like a way that we do things here. And it's much more open to applied projects, to actually having impact on the world.

01:16:31.000 Yeah, to applied projects, yeah.

01:16:32.000 And so it was a perfect time for me. Like, I just, you know, The Righteous Mind, that wraps up like the first half of my career.

01:16:37.000 Like everything I did is in that book. And now it's time for something new.

01:16:41.000 And that new thing was going to be looking at how morality or moral psychology both underlines or is the foundation for our ability to do capitalism,

01:16:52.000 like contracts, reciprocity, all sorts of things, and how our left-right divide from The Righteous Mind makes it hard for us to figure out what's true.

01:17:00.000 Like, if you raise the minimum wage, does it help or hurt the working poor?

01:17:04.000 Right.

01:17:05.000 If you're an economist on the left, it obviously helps them. If you're an economist on the right, it obviously hurts them because fewer of them have jobs.

01:17:10.000 And you can gerrymander the measurement devices to produce the conclusions that you want, which is a big problem.

01:17:15.000 That's right. So I'm supposed to be writing a book called Three Stories About Capitalism, The Moral Psychology of Economic Life.

01:17:21.000 And so I started traveling around the world looking at how development is going in various countries.

01:17:27.000 I did a three-month trip to Asia in 2015. I came back from Asia. My article came out with Lukianov, The Kotlin, The American Mind.

01:17:35.000 The BBS article was published. And I thought, okay, now I can get back to this, you know, keep writing this capitalism book.

01:17:40.000 And then the universities kind of began melting down in the fall. And then we started Hederox Academy. And so, yes, it has taken over my life.

01:17:47.000 It's basically a full-time job in addition to trying to write the, I'm also working on a book.

01:17:53.000 So Lukianov and I didn't want to turn our article into a book because we thought we'd said everything.

01:17:58.000 But man, have things been happening fast. And we've learned so much more since we wrote that article.

01:18:03.000 And you wrote that article when? How long ago was that?

01:18:05.000 Well, we wrote it in late 2014. And then we edited it in early 2015. And it finally came out in August of 2015.

01:18:12.000 And so last October, Greg wrote to me and said, John, I think I do want to turn the article into a book.

01:18:18.000 Because we know so much more now. And the problem is so much more serious than it was.

01:18:22.000 And the evidence, my God, the evidence about the mental health crisis of adolescence.

01:18:27.000 When Greg and I wrote the article, we were, you know, we saw lots of hints that depression and anxiety were going way up.

01:18:33.000 Yeah.

01:18:34.000 And we think that's related to the overprotection.

01:18:36.000 Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that just for a second, then go back to the book.

01:18:40.000 Sure.

01:18:41.000 So I've got a potential demographic explanation for that in part.

01:18:44.000 Well, and I don't know if you guys have looked into this or not.

01:18:46.000 Well, there's two things that I think might be contributing to it. One is, two or three things.

01:18:54.000 One is the average age at which children are, the average age at which people have children has gone way up.

01:19:02.000 That's true. Okay. So why does that matter?

01:19:03.000 Well, because I think people get more conservative and cautious as they get older.

01:19:07.000 A little bit. True, but it's a very small effect.

01:19:09.000 Okay.

01:19:10.000 And it's, wait a second, it's the having of the kids, which is what makes them more conservative.

01:19:14.000 When you have kids, you are more threat sensitive, you're more likely to vote for the right-wing party.

01:19:19.000 So just delaying childbirth wouldn't explain it.

01:19:23.000 Okay. What about fewer siblings?

01:19:25.000 That would, yes. That's part of it. And this is what we're seeing in Asia too.

01:19:29.000 When you have a lot of kids, you're not quite as worried. You don't have all your eggs in one basket.

01:19:34.000 Well, and you can't be quite as worried and the siblings raise each other.

01:19:37.000 That's right.

01:19:38.000 Right. And then there's a lot of dominance of hierarchies.

01:19:40.000 And they fight a lot more. They play and fight.

01:19:42.000 Exactly. It's the free play and the fighting, the working things out for themselves.

01:19:46.000 Those are essential skills of adulthood.

01:19:48.000 Okay. So then, all right.

01:19:50.000 Smaller family size is part of it. I agree.

01:19:52.000 Right. Well, and then also what's happening increasingly in schools is that kids aren't allowed free play.

01:19:57.000 And they're certainly not allowed rough and tumble free play.

01:20:00.000 Exactly. That's right. That's one of the biggest things of all.

01:20:03.000 So the two, there are three giant. There are a lot of causes.

01:20:07.000 I mean, this is such, actually, it's a really fun puzzle because it's like the biggest social science puzzle of our age.

01:20:12.000 What is happening that's making so many of our systems go haywire?

01:20:15.000 And I'm focusing on the university.

01:20:17.000 The big three, I would say, are one is the loss of unsupervised free play.

01:20:22.000 Yeah. Okay.

01:20:23.000 And Peter Gray has been brilliant on this. He's at Boston College showing how even among young animals, they have to practice the skills for adulthood.

01:20:30.000 Yeah. And getting in conflict.

01:20:31.000 Peg sex showing that too.

01:20:32.000 Exactly. So getting in conflicts and then dealing with it and sometimes losing and you come back.

01:20:38.000 Having a game in which there's a problem, but you have to work it out or the game stops.

01:20:42.000 That's what kids always did.

01:20:43.000 Yeah.

01:20:44.000 It's only recently, beginning in the 90s, that they're always supervised.

01:20:47.000 Because we're afraid if we take our eyes off them, they'll be kidnapped.

01:20:50.000 And it was never a risk. It was never a risk.

01:20:52.000 You know, I've kind of wondered about this gender flexibility issue as a form of delayed fantasy play.

01:20:58.000 You're getting Freudian on me. Go ahead.

01:21:00.000 Well, because it looks to me like that.

01:21:02.000 You know, when kids are little and three and four, say three to seven, they do a tremendous amount of identity play.

01:21:08.000 You know, they pretend they're animals. They pretend they're parents.

01:21:12.000 They pretend they're girls if they're boys. They pretend they're boys if they're girls.

01:21:16.000 Like, they really do a tremendous amount of identity play.

01:21:19.000 And one of the things that's been really puzzling me is, well, what happens if they never have an opportunity for that?

01:21:26.000 Because they're not engaging in fantasy play. Maybe it's just delayed until adulthood.

01:21:30.000 Oh, that's interesting.

01:21:31.000 So, because play, it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of that rough and tumble play.

01:21:36.000 And then the fantasy play that enables you to adopt different identities.

01:21:40.000 And then the negotiated games that you talked about that enable people to handle both victory, but even more importantly, loss.

01:21:47.000 That's right.

01:21:48.000 That's plausible. That could well be. That I have no opinion on.

01:21:52.000 But the big three factors that I think are explaining part of what's happening on campus are,

01:21:57.000 one, the loss of the unsupervised play so that the kids have always, there's always an adult present,

01:22:02.000 and so they come to college and they expect there to be an adult or Dean somebody if there's a conflict.

01:22:06.000 That's one.

01:22:07.000 Two is social media, which hit just as iGen, so iGen, internet generation.

01:22:13.000 This is Gene Twenge's work.

01:22:14.000 You know, we used to think that the millennial generation ends in 1998 or 2000.

01:22:23.000 But Gene Twenge shows, looking at four large data sets, that birth year 1995, kids born in 1995 and after are really different.

01:22:32.000 Their values are different.

01:22:33.000 They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially the girls.

01:22:38.000 Boys have gone up, girls have gone way up.

01:22:42.000 And the reason seems to be that Facebook lowered its age.

01:22:46.000 So in 2005, you had to be a college student at a certain number of colleges to get Facebook.

01:22:52.000 In 2006, you could be any 11-year-old who lies and says that she's 13 and you've got a Facebook account.

01:23:01.000 But then you're using it on your parents' PC.

01:23:03.000 In 2007, the iPhone comes out and it saturates the market faster than any consumer product ever has.

01:23:10.000 So by 2010 or 11, a lot of adolescents have Facebook and other social platforms.

01:23:17.000 And this is just devastating, especially to girls, because it's not texting.

01:23:21.000 Texting is just me to you.

01:23:23.000 You know, that's back and forth.

01:23:24.000 That's fine.

01:23:25.000 You know, when we were kids, you called your friends on the phone.

01:23:27.000 That's fine.

01:23:28.000 The problem seems to be, according to Twenge, it's especially platforms in which you put something out,

01:23:33.000 and then you wait and see what everyone says about it.

01:23:36.000 And that especially is damaging to girls who already are at risk of eating disorders and image disorders.

01:23:41.000 Okay.

01:23:42.000 So girls become more susceptible to negative emotion when they hit puberty.

01:23:45.000 Well, they're...

01:23:46.000 Yes.

01:23:47.000 That's always been the case.

01:23:48.000 Then there's another issue, too, with regards to female aggression.

01:23:51.000 So, you know, it's clearly the case that males are more likely to be physically damaging slash aggressive than females are.

01:23:59.000 But what females use is reputation-savaging.

01:24:02.000 That's right.

01:24:03.000 That's Nikki Crick's work.

01:24:04.000 Nikki Crick, passed away a couple years ago, showed that if you add it all up, boys and girls are equally aggressive.

01:24:09.000 But the boys' aggression is more physical, the girls' is more relational.

01:24:12.000 So if you imagine a bunch of 13-, 14-year-olds in their middle schools, and then you parachute in a whole bunch of iPhones,

01:24:20.000 everybody's got one in their pocket.

01:24:21.000 It's an amplifier.

01:24:22.000 What are the boys going to do?

01:24:23.000 They're going to play video games.

01:24:24.000 Yeah.

01:24:25.000 And that doesn't hurt anybody.

01:24:26.000 Yeah.

01:24:27.000 And girls are going to use it to amplify the social interactions.

01:24:30.000 So this is Twenge's explanation.

01:24:31.000 I think it makes a lot of sense.

01:24:32.000 Yeah.

01:24:33.000 So it's a catastrophe.

01:24:34.000 It's a crisis.

01:24:35.000 And we're really hurting, especially the girls.

01:24:37.000 So we've got to change something about that.

01:24:39.000 Anyway, but social media is possibly the largest single reason why things are going haywire on campus.

01:24:45.000 The third big factor is…

01:24:46.000 And do you think it's primarily Facebook, or can you tell?

01:24:49.000 Well, it's…

01:24:50.000 The kids use a lot of different platforms.

01:24:52.000 But from what I hear, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat…

01:24:57.000 Again, the thing is it's one to many.

01:24:59.000 That's what's bad.

01:25:00.000 Anything…

01:25:01.000 If you put something out there and you see how many people like it, that's what's bad.

01:25:06.000 Right.

01:25:07.000 And there's always the threat that it'll go viral in a terrible way.

01:25:09.000 Exactly.

01:25:10.000 So that's like a hammer.

01:25:11.000 Exactly.

01:25:12.000 There's a sort of damage over your head.

01:25:13.000 Unlimited damage.

01:25:14.000 Unlimited downside to saying something.

01:25:16.000 So what do you do?

01:25:17.000 So they're all careful.

01:25:18.000 So I don't know if I want to like that post because I could get in big trouble for it.

01:25:22.000 Right.

01:25:23.000 Well, the benefit to liking it is minimal and the potential catastrophe for discipline…

01:25:26.000 Unless you're expected to like it.

01:25:27.000 In which case you better like it because if you don't like it, you'll get in trouble.

01:25:30.000 So it's a much more of a mob mentality.

01:25:33.000 Kids are afraid…

01:25:34.000 I'm not blaming the kids.

01:25:35.000 I'm very sympathetic to them.

01:25:36.000 These are my kids.

01:25:37.000 My kids are 11 and 7.

01:25:39.000 They're going to come up into this.

01:25:41.000 So the kids have been raised in a social environment that's much more about mob formation

01:25:46.000 and mob attacks and defenses against mobs.

01:25:51.000 So the third factor then is the political polarization and the purification of our institutions.

01:25:56.000 And so if you imagine coming up in the 90s when political polarization is going up,

01:26:00.000 we're beginning to hate each other more across party lines.

01:26:02.000 But it's not that hard.

01:26:04.000 Not that nasty.

01:26:05.000 But it's been getting much, much more hostile.

01:26:07.000 So that now if someone goes to a campus Republican meeting…

01:26:12.000 It's a Democrat who goes to a meeting of the campus Republicans as happened at UC Santa Cruz a couple weeks ago.

01:26:18.000 And someone finds out…

01:26:20.000 So the hatred, the cross-party hatred is so much stronger now.

01:26:26.000 And many of our institutions are much purer.

01:26:29.000 So if you went to college in the 90s, there might have been a few conservative professors around.

01:26:34.000 But now there aren't.

01:26:35.000 So as you said before, it's like exposure therapy.

01:26:37.000 If you've never encountered a conservative idea,

01:26:39.000 and then a conservative like Heather MacDonald comes to speak on your campus,

01:26:43.000 well this is like a major immune response problem.

01:26:45.000 We've got to get the tribe together and mob her and, you know, shut her down.

01:26:50.000 So those are the…

01:26:52.000 I mean, there are many other reasons.

01:26:53.000 But the loss of unsupervised play, social media, and rising polarization.

01:26:58.000 Those are the three big ones.

01:26:59.000 Right. Well, those are big problems, especially the loss of unsupervised play.

01:27:02.000 It's not obvious at all how that might be addressed.

01:27:05.000 Yes, it is.

01:27:06.000 Okay, good, good.

01:27:07.000 I'd like to hear about that.

01:27:08.000 Everyone should just buy Lenore Skenazy's book, Free Range Kids,

01:27:12.000 and then they should loosen up and give their kids more unsupervised time.

01:27:16.000 Now, you can't do this alone.

01:27:18.000 You'll be arrested.

01:27:20.000 Yeah.

01:27:21.000 I tried to get my son to go out across the street to, you know,

01:27:23.000 buy groceries when he was, you know, nine years old.

01:27:25.000 Yeah.

01:27:26.000 And he'd say like, but, you know, Daddy, people look at me funny.

01:27:28.000 There are no other kids out there.

01:27:30.000 And so Lenore has started a fantastic organization called Let Grow.

01:27:35.000 So if viewers go to letgrow.org…

01:27:38.000 Okay, we'll put all this in the description, all of these things.

01:27:41.000 Great.

01:27:42.000 So I'm on the board of it as an advisor.

01:27:43.000 Peter Gray, an expert on play, is on the board.

01:27:46.000 And they're doing these simple things, simple, simple things.

01:27:50.000 Like you convince a school to just open up the playground an hour early.

01:27:56.000 Or keep it open after school.

01:27:58.000 Why should kids always have organized activities and soccer practice?

01:28:02.000 Just give them a place to play where there's a nurse available if someone gets hurt.

01:28:06.000 There is an adult, but he's not supervising.

01:28:08.000 He's just over there.

01:28:10.000 Right.

01:28:11.000 So don't worry, parents.

01:28:12.000 There is an adult.

01:28:13.000 But beyond that, they can do what they want.

01:28:15.000 And they just started this a few weeks ago, and the results are fantastic.

01:28:18.000 The kids are having so much fun.

01:28:20.000 They are becoming more independent.

01:28:22.000 They're more willing to do projects on their own.

01:28:24.000 It's working out great.

01:28:25.000 Oh, that's really good.

01:28:26.000 So you can't do this on your own.

01:28:28.000 But the thing is, we all know something's wrong.

01:28:31.000 So those are very practical.

01:28:33.000 That's a very practical piece of advice for schools.

01:28:35.000 It's like open up the unsupervised play facilities and facilitate their use.

01:28:42.000 That's right.

01:28:43.000 Give everyone a place which is safe.

01:28:44.000 And by safe, I mean physically safe.

01:28:46.000 Right.

01:28:47.000 Or use the word safety to describe emotions and ideas.

01:28:50.000 Safety means physical safety.

01:28:52.000 So you've got to provide a physically safe place for the kids to play.

01:28:55.000 And beyond that, you let them go.

01:28:57.000 Now, there will arise problems of bullying.

01:28:59.000 So if it's repeated harassment, you know.

01:29:02.000 Well, I know a book about that.

01:29:04.000 What book?

01:29:05.000 It's by Dan Olweus, called Bullying, What We Know and What We Can Do About It.

01:29:08.000 And it was written, it's got to be 30 years ago.

01:29:11.000 He always cut the incidence of bullying in the Scandinavian countries down by 50%.

01:29:19.000 And he really, really targets what bullying means.

01:29:22.000 So he's not a safe space guy by any stretch of the imagination.

01:29:26.000 I don't know what the origins of it are.

01:29:28.000 I know that the valuations of his program in America show anywhere from 0 to 20% reductions.

01:29:33.000 Yeah, well, I don't know.

01:29:34.000 So the effects are much smaller.

01:29:35.000 In the US.

01:29:36.000 In the US, yeah.

01:29:37.000 Yeah, the question is whether or not they were able to implement them with the rigor he did in the US.

01:29:42.000 Yeah, but bullying programs are part of the problem.

01:29:45.000 Because bullying clearly is a problem.

01:29:46.000 We need to do something about it.

01:29:48.000 But because we have what's called concept creep.

01:29:50.000 Yeah.

01:29:51.000 So it's now gotten to the point.

01:29:52.000 I can imagine what concept creep looks like even.

01:29:54.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:29:56.000 So now it's the case that if kids don't invite, if some kids want to do something,

01:30:02.000 and they don't invite another kid, they've excluded that kid.

01:30:05.000 Right.

01:30:06.000 Right.

01:30:07.000 I've read of schools in Europe that don't allow kids to have best friends for exactly

01:30:11.000 that reason.

01:30:12.000 Yeah, well, because this is also something that really bothers me about the misuse of the

01:30:16.000 IAT.

01:30:17.000 Because it's not that easy to distinguish in-group preference, which no one can, no one in their

01:30:22.000 right mind would want to eliminate in-group preference given that it governs your choice

01:30:27.000 of mate and your behavior towards your family members, let's say.

01:30:31.000 To distinguish that between out-group exclusion is no simple matter.

01:30:35.000 And to tell kids that they can't have a best friend is another thing that interferes with

01:30:39.000 an important part of their development.

01:30:41.000 That's right.

01:30:42.000 I think both of us have spent a lot of time looking at ancient wisdom at the writings of

01:30:47.000 people long ago.

01:30:48.000 And I often come back to Aristotle's claim that any virtue carried to extremes becomes

01:30:53.000 a vice.

01:30:54.000 So inclusion is a good thing if people are being excluded because they have a physical

01:30:59.000 stigma or they're overweight or their skin color.

01:31:04.000 So we need to be looking at the reasons why kids are excluded.

01:31:08.000 But if you say inclusion is the primary virtue, inclusion over everything else, and so if

01:31:15.000 those two best friends are excluding others, no more best friends.

01:31:18.000 Right.

01:31:19.000 This is madness.

01:31:20.000 Yeah.

01:31:21.000 This is a vice.

01:31:22.000 So I think that inclusion, again, you know, it's a virtue unless it's carried to extremes.

01:31:27.000 Well, that's probably a pretty good place to stop, I would say, unless you have anything

01:31:32.000 else that you wanted to talk about.

01:31:34.000 We talked about the role of religion and the fact that people are naturally religious

01:31:39.000 thinkers.

01:31:40.000 We talked about the Heterodox Academy.

01:31:42.000 We talked about your work on Disgust and your plans for the Academy.

01:31:45.000 You talked about your books.

01:31:47.000 Is there anything else that might be of interest that you can think of?

01:31:51.000 Let's see.

01:31:52.000 I'll just say that I'm actually optimistic about what's going to happen on campus.

01:32:00.000 I think things might continue to get worse this year.

01:32:04.000 But I think there's an interesting phenomenon called preference falsification.

01:32:09.000 When you have people not speaking honestly, as you had under communism, when you have a whole

01:32:18.000 system where almost everybody thinks this is terrible, I hate this, but I don't dare say

01:32:23.000 anything, when you have preference falsification, as worked by Timur Koran, and everybody hears

01:32:28.000 everybody else's preferences, so they think, okay, that's what everybody thinks.

01:32:32.000 When you have an unraveling, it can unravel very quickly.

01:32:35.000 And that's what happened in the communist countries.

01:32:37.000 Because everybody hated it.

01:32:39.000 And it fell amazingly quickly.

01:32:41.000 And I think the pushback at Reid last week, or that was written up last week.

01:32:46.000 Yeah, that was a great deal.

01:32:47.000 So I think because most people, and we're starting to see, is that a lot of people of

01:32:51.000 color also say, you know, you're not speaking for me.

01:32:55.000 I mean, every group is diverse.

01:32:57.000 And so when you have a variety of people, and you have progressive speaking, you have a

01:33:02.000 variety of people, I think we're going to see more and more people standing up saying, wait,

01:33:07.000 what's happening is, this is not right.

01:33:10.000 This is illiberal.

01:33:11.000 This is opposed to the values of the academy.

01:33:12.000 This is not what I want for myself or my kids or my students.

01:33:16.000 So I do think that we're going to start seeing a lot more people standing up.

01:33:20.000 And one of our goals at Heterodox Academy is to just help put out the ideas that people need.

01:33:25.000 And this is what you're doing too.

01:33:26.000 Just put out the ideas.

01:33:27.000 Critique the bad ideas.

01:33:28.000 And put out concepts that can contest in this space of ideas.

01:33:35.000 Get good information.

01:33:37.000 So if people go to HeterodoxAcademy.org on our research pages, we have all the information

01:33:42.000 about what do all the polls say?

01:33:43.000 What's the current information about students' attitudes?

01:33:46.000 We have the history of this.

01:33:47.000 We have a lot of research on who is more biased, left or right?

01:33:50.000 Well, it turns out both sides are about equally biased.

01:33:53.000 So we think that by just doing what we actually do well as academics, that is research, making

01:34:00.000 arguments, being calm and civil, we actually think that we can turn this around.

01:34:05.000 So if anybody watching this is a professor, I would invite you to join.

01:34:09.000 Go to HeterodoxAcademy.org and sign up.

01:34:11.000 Okay, so let me ask you one more question.

01:34:13.000 I mean, that sounds good.

01:34:16.000 And it's good to hear that you're optimistic.

01:34:19.000 I mean, I waver, although I wouldn't say I'm pessimistic.

01:34:24.000 I just think we're in one of those situations where things could spiral in either direction

01:34:28.000 very rapidly, and that worries me.

01:34:30.000 What about the disciplines on campus that seem to be primarily devoted to the activist cause?

01:34:36.000 Like, because my view is, or my fear is, that we've subsidized the activist disciplines.

01:34:43.000 Let's say women's studies as a good example.

01:34:45.000 But we could say social work and then the faculties of education now as well.

01:34:49.000 I think they're in the same, in the same bin.

01:34:52.000 Let's, let's, let's put it that way.

01:34:54.000 The women's studies programs in particular, their, their express goal, expressed on their websites,

01:35:00.000 is to produce social justice, radical left-leaning activists.

01:35:05.000 And so, like for a while, one of the things I proposed in Canada was that the conservatives, in particular,

01:35:12.000 cut the university funding by 25% so that the universities would have to sort themselves out.

01:35:17.000 But then, that was, that was a provocative claim, obviously.

01:35:20.000 But then I thought, well, that's not a good idea because it opens up the door to political interference in the academy.

01:35:26.000 And that's bad conservative and left.

01:35:28.000 No, that's right.

01:35:29.000 That's right.

01:35:30.000 But the academy's done a very bad job of policing itself methodologically.

01:35:33.000 And we have these disciplines.

01:35:35.000 Women's studies, I think, is a prime example.

01:35:37.000 And that's been very much criticized in Canada by Janice Fiomenko, who used to be, yeah.

01:35:41.000 Oh, yeah.

01:35:42.000 Yeah, she is.

01:35:43.000 And she's, she, she's not in a natural milieu when she's doing such things, you know.

01:35:47.000 She's, she's a brave and tough person.

01:35:49.000 And she's gone after the women's studies types on methodological grounds, particularly.

01:35:54.000 But, but, there are people who are working full-time at doing nothing but producing the kind of polar,

01:36:01.000 so what, do you have any thoughts about that?

01:36:03.000 Yes, yes, I do.

01:36:04.000 I think, so here I teach in the business school here and I teach a course called Professional Responsibility.

01:36:10.000 And I teach my students about their fiduciary duties.

01:36:13.000 Their duties to their employers, the duties that we have to each other.

01:36:16.000 And fiduciary duty refers to a very, very high standard of care.

01:36:21.000 If you're managing someone's money, you know, you, you really have to be committed to doing what's in their interest, not in your interest.

01:36:27.000 And I think we need that concept in the academy.

01:36:30.000 We have, I'm not sure if we call it fiduciary duties or just professional duties.

01:36:34.000 But I think we have two primary professional duties that we must never, never betray.

01:36:39.000 One, the most important one in our role as scholars, is our duty to the truth.

01:36:44.000 We must never say things that we think are false or allow people to say things that we think are false because we're afraid if we challenge them we'll get in trouble.

01:36:53.000 So we have a fiduciary duty to the truth and political ideological commitments clearly warp us.

01:36:59.000 They make us do things. They make us, they push us.

01:37:02.000 So we've got a whole, we've got to recognize that if we let our systems get out of whack, we are betraying the truth.

01:37:09.000 We are systemically, what do you want to, we have a systemic truthism problem.

01:37:13.000 We are systemically betraying the truth in many of our disciplines.

01:37:16.000 So I think we need an awareness of that and we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

01:37:19.000 Then in our role as teachers, we have, and here we really can call it a fiduciary duty.

01:37:24.000 These are people's children who are sent to us to educate, to enlarge their minds, to teach them skills.

01:37:31.000 If we were to use them for our sexual pleasure, it's obviously a horrific crime.

01:37:37.000 But what is it if we use them for our ideological purposes?

01:37:41.000 If we say, you've given me your children to educate, I'm waging a political battle, I'm going to try to get-

01:37:46.000 Use them as tools.

01:37:47.000 Use them as tools.

01:37:48.000 Use them as tools.

01:37:49.000 That is horrific.

01:37:50.000 That is unacceptable.

01:37:51.000 We are violating our duties.

01:37:53.000 So I think we need to-

01:37:54.000 See, right.

01:37:55.000 But the response to that, especially from the postmodernist types, is that that's all there is.

01:38:01.000 There's only ideological conflict.

01:38:02.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:38:03.000 Perfect.

01:38:04.000 So back to your original question.

01:38:06.000 Are there problem departments?

01:38:07.000 Absolutely.

01:38:08.000 So I wanted to put forth these two commitments, to truth and to educating not indoctrinating.

01:38:14.000 And universities that embrace these highest goals, like the University of Chicago, I think

01:38:19.000 is the best candidate, will probably find that they need to do something about departments

01:38:27.000 that don't live up to those goals.

01:38:29.000 Other universities, and I think Brown is leading the way on this one so far.

01:38:33.000 I mean, the-

01:38:34.000 Earlier in 2015, the president had all kinds of statements about Brown is committed to social justice,

01:38:38.000 a fundamental, a bedrock commitment to social justice, she said.

01:38:41.000 So if some universities choose to devote themselves to social justice, that's fine.

01:38:47.000 Just be upfront about it.

01:38:48.000 Say so.

01:38:49.000 So students will know.

01:38:50.000 If you want social justice training, you go to Brown.

01:38:53.000 But if you want to actually be trained to find the truth, to do research, you go to Chicago.

01:38:57.000 And I think we're going to see people flooding to Chicago, and schools like it.

01:39:02.000 So what I'm hoping, what I'm hoping-

01:39:04.000 So that's the mechanism there.

01:39:06.000 If they make their statements public, that the choice of the students will be to go to

01:39:11.000 the universities that hold the principles that you just described over the other ones.

01:39:15.000 It'll be a marketplace choice.

01:39:16.000 Exactly.

01:39:17.000 That's right.

01:39:18.000 So that's why I said when I talked about the Emperor's New Clothes, we have a situation,

01:39:21.000 we have a gigantic market failure, in which our top universities are offering a product

01:39:26.000 that most consumers don't want.

01:39:28.000 Great.

01:39:29.000 And so my prediction is that Chicago is going to see a huge surge of applications this year.

01:39:35.000 And if that's true, I think other universities are going to-

01:39:38.000 They're going to take notice.

01:39:39.000 They're going to take notice.

01:39:40.000 They're going to take notice.

01:39:41.000 So I'm hoping that we'll see a schism in the American Academy between those universities

01:39:45.000 that stand up and say, this is madness.

01:39:47.000 We are committed to providing a platform.

01:39:49.000 We don't discriminate based on viewpoint and politics.

01:39:52.000 That's the Chicago way.

01:39:53.000 And those that say, no, we're about social justice.

01:39:56.000 Come here and we will train you to fight for social justice and against the right.

01:40:00.000 So if people have clear choices, then I think we're going to see a big change.

01:40:06.000 And that's why I'm optimistic, because I think we're going to see that.

01:40:09.000 All right.

01:40:10.000 Well, thank you very much.

01:40:11.000 It was great talking with you.

01:40:22.000 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 21, 2017

The Perilous State of the University - Jonathan Haidt

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