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  • Well, good evening, London

  • Two weeks ago Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson

  • Met in person for the first time on stage in Vancouver

  • Two nights ago the three of us got together for the first time in Dublin and it's a huge thrill for all of us

  • To now be here with you in the o2

  • As I said to Travis when these events were planned I'm not moderate enough to be a moderator

  • But I'm going to do a little bit of

  • fielding to begin with

  • so

  • Let me start by saying a little of some of the ground. We are going to be trying to cover here tonight

  • We're going to be dealing with the conflict between science and reason

  • We're going to be addressing the legitimacy did I say science and reason

  • We're not addressing that

  • We're going to be looking at the legitimacy of holding on to religion in any form and

  • We are also going to be addressing the fact that we need to hide in a sports stadium

  • to address serious issues

  • But I think to begin with I'm going to hand over to Sam and he's going to kick us off properly

  • Thank you. And first thank you all for coming out. I you really can't imagine how humbling this is

  • Be here with you

  • You really just should just take a moment to appreciate this from our side because

  • Justin Bieber is not coming out to sing and in the middle of this as amusing as that would be

  • and you know though we

  • Put a date like this on the calendar with apparent confidence

  • There's really no guarantee that you guys are going to show up and we will never take this for granted

  • So it's really an immense privilege to be here with you. So

  • I thought I could start by

  • first acknowledging how fun this has been to have this these series of dialogues

  • With Jordan now, this is the fourth event. We've done and the second with Douglas and

  • We clearly share a common project we are trying to figure out how to live the best lives possible

  • both individually and collectively and we're trying to figure out how to

  • build societies

  • that safeguard that opportunity for as many people as possible and I think we each have a sense that

  • Ideas are really the prime movers here

  • That is it's not that the world is filled with bad people doing bad things because that's what bad people do

  • Oh, there's some of that it it is mostly that

  • So much of humanity is living under the sway of bad ideas

  • And it's bad ideas that can cause good people or at least totally normal people like ourselves

  • to do bad things all the while trying to to

  • Live the best possible lives and that really is the tragedy of our circumstance that we can be that confused

  • So this is where the difference between Jordan and and me in particular opens up

  • Which is how do you view religion in this in this contest of between good ideas and bad ideas and for me religion?

  • emphatically

  • gets placed on the side of bad and old and and

  • worth retiring ideas or ideas worth retiring and

  • I

  • Guess I but by analogy I would I would

  • Ask you to consider astrology right now Hannah. Maybe I can just get a sense of what I'm talking to

  • What percentage of you I want to know believe in astrology which is to say but who among you and you can signal this by?

  • by applause or howls of

  • Enthusiasm what what percentage of you let me just spell it out. So I know you know what you're committing to

  • And you know how crazy your neighbor is in fact

  • What percentage do you believe that human personalities and human events and the difference between good and bad luck and a human life is the

  • result of

  • What the planets are doing against the background of stars?

  • Let's hear it somebody out there

  • Okay, so then you should know that something like 25% of your your neighbors believe that

  • There you go, so the

  • I'm here. Wait, wait wait, I'm hearing I'm hearing a heckler among the astrologers is that

  • Is the FIR the first?

  • Astrological heckler I've heard haha

  • You must be an aries, sir

  • So it won't surprise you I have a related question which is

  • What

  • what percentage of you I want to know our

  • religious which is say well who among you believe in God a

  • Personal God a God that can hear prayers a God that can take an interest in the lives of human beings and occasionally

  • Enforce good outcomes versus bad outcomes

  • What who among you and now again, I want to hear applause or silence believe in it that sort of God

  • Okay, so this is my concern is my concern with with what Jordan has been saying and right in

  • lo these many months

  • I

  • Feel that you're in danger of misleading these the second group of people that the way you talk about God

  • has convinced and will continue to convince some percentage of humanity that

  • It's it's fine to hold on to this old sword of God this God that can hear prayers and they can intervene or not in

  • the lives of human beings

  • And you know as we've begun to explore that I think there are a lot of problems with that kind of belief

  • If nothing else there are many such gods on offer and there and and devotion to them it becomes irreconcilable among the true believers and

  • My concern is it you could do

  • Exactly what you do with religion with astrology, right? It would be it would be no more legitimate to to

  • Obfuscate the boundary between clear thinking and and

  • superstition there because

  • the

  • This traditional God and the and the doctrines that support him or are no firmer ground

  • Than astrology is now today an astrology

  • Almost everything you say about religion

  • It's the fact that his organized human thinking for thousands of years that it's a cultural Universal

  • that every every group of people has has given rise to some form of it that it has archetypal significance that it

  • has powerful stories all of that can be said about astrology and it and in fact some additional things can be said about

  • astrology that are would argue in its favor for instance astrology is

  • Profoundly egalitarian, you know, there's there's no bad zodiac sign every whoever you are. Everyone's got a great zodiac sign and

  • You know, it's just a inconvenient fact of the discipline that if I read you Charles Manson's horoscope

  • you know 95% of the audience would find it relevant and

  • and that's just that's how easily falsifiable stralla g is but

  • My concern is that we could live in a world

  • Where societies are shattered over things like, you know different zodiac

  • Interpretations and we don't live in that world for good reason because we have beaten

  • Astrology into submission and I would say that religion in terms of revealed religion and belief in a personal God

  • is over the centuries getting the same treatment by science and rationality and should be and it is a a

  • Preferred circumstance that we live in a world that is that is shattered by religion

  • So, I think what I'll do first is adopt the

  • Exceptionally difficult and likely counterproductive position of saying something

  • Not so much in defense of religion, but in defense of astrology

  • knowing

  • knowing full well that that's fundamentally a fool's errand but there's something I want to point out is that

  • First of all

  • Astrology

  • was astronomy in its nascent form and

  • astrology was also science in its nascent form just like alchemy was chemistry in its nascent form and

  • so sometimes

  • You have to dream a crazy dream

  • with all of the error that that crazy dream entails

  • Because you have an intuition that there's something there

  • To motivate you to develop the intuition to the point where it actually becomes of genuine practical utility

  • now when we look back on the astrologers and

  • we view their contributions to the history of the world with

  • contempt we should also remember that the people who built Stonehenge for example, and the first people who decided

  • determined that our fates were in part written in the stars were people whose

  • Astrological beliefs were indistinguishable from their astronomical beliefs and you might think well in what sense is your fate?

  • written in the Stars and I would say

  • It's certainly the case insofar as there are such things as cosmic regularities

  • so it was the dream of

  • astrology that there was some relationship between the movement of the planetary bodies and the fixed stars and

  • Human destiny and that's what drove us to build the first

  • astronomical

  • observatories and to also determine that there was a proper time for planting and a proper time for

  • Harvesting and a way of orienting yourself in the world for example by using the north

  • It's also the poetic

  • ground that enabled us to identify the notion that you could look up and orient yourself towards the heavens and that there was a

  • Metaphorical relationship between that and positioning yourself properly in life and at a deeper level

  • The the the cosmos was the place that the human imaginative drama was

  • Externalized and draped itself out into the world as something that was essentially observable so that we could derive great

  • orienting fictions from the observation of our imagination and so

  • Part of the problem that that Sam is pointing to is the difficulty of distinguishing

  • Valid poetic impulse from invalid poetic impulse and that really is a tremendous problem

  • You you see that arise also in people who have religious delusions attendant upon manic depressive disorder or schizophrenia

  • but so much of what eventually

  • Manifests itself is hard core pragmatic scientific belief has its origin in wild flights of poetic

  • Fantasy and it's also the case by the way that that's actually how your brain is organized

  • As far as I can tell that when you and and it isn't just me. I actually it's it's there's a very large

  • What would you call it research literature?

  • Outlining the relative functions of the right and left hemisphere and it certainly appears to be the case that when we encounter something. Absolutely

  • unknowable or unknown

  • What we do is drape that unknown thing in fantasy as a first pass

  • approximation to the truth and then refine that fantasy as a consequence of

  • Iterative critical analysis and so Sam believes that what should happen

  • Is that the the poetic and fictional domain should be some planted by the rational domain?

  • Well, let me just close the loop there

  • it's not quite I think we we need poetry and fiction and then there's there's more to engage in with reality than being a

  • Scientist in a white lab coat, but we need to be able to clearly distinguish

  • fact from fantasy or fact from mere merely fertile flights of the imagination and

  • we want to be rigorous there and rational there and it's not that it's not that there's no place or

  • Mere creativity. That's not well, I guess well

  • then the rails of rationality look fair enough then but I mean then then partly what we are disputing is the the relevant the

  • What the relative import and the of those two domains?

  • Let's say the heretic and the fictional and the rational and status of religion now in that

  • Well, I have a hard time reconciling that to some degree with your with your more

  • What would you say formal statements about the problem?

  • because your mechanism the mechanism that you put forth above all outside of truth is

  • Rationality and it isn't clear to me if you're willing to allow the utility of spiritual experience

  • which you do and and and if you're willing to make

  • What would you say allowances for the necessity of the poetic imagination?

  • exactly how it is that that is also

  • Encapsulated under the rubric of pure rationality see

  • Let's see and here's something you can tell me what you think about this

  • And I've been thinking a lot about what Sam and I have been talking about by the way, you know

  • So I'm making the case in my writing that the democratic institutions not only grew out of the judeo-christian substrate

  • but that their that that they're properly ensconced within that substrate, but I'm also perfectly aware that

  • not every religious or poetic system gives rise to democratic institutions first and also that there are

  • Christian

  • Sub structures may be the most obviously in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church. Where the same

  • metaphysical principles apply but out of which a democracy did not emerge and so it does seem to me that

  • what we have in the West is the consequence of the interplay between the

  • fantasy predicated poetic

  • judeo-christian tradition and the

  • rational critique that was aimed at that by the

  • Enlightenment figures and that seems to me to mirror something like the proper balance between the right hemisphere and its poetic imagination

  • and the left hemisphere and it's critical capacity and

  • Then I would say that part of the way so one of the questions you brought up was. How do we

  • Decide which let's say religious in

  • Intuitions are valid and I think we do that in part through

  • negotiated agreement, you know because people have

  • Look even even among the Catholics say in the medieval time. There was an absolute horror of heresy

  • So if you were some mendicant monk

  • And you had a profound religious vision?

  • the probability that you were going to be tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake was extremely high because even the

  • gatekeepers of the religious tradition realized that

  • religious revelation untrammeled by

  • Something like community dialogue something like that was something extraordinary

  • Danger and so I would agree with you that

  • The poetic imagination and the ground of religious revelation is something that can lead people dangerously astray

  • But I would say at the same time that it constitutes the grounds of our initial exploration and that it's actually in a radically necessary

  • Okay, well briefly address that and I want to ask a question that brings Douglas directly in here

  • I I think this is an instance of what's called the genetic fallacy the idea that because

  • Something emerged the way it did historically

  • As a matter of historical contingency, it is the the the the origin is in fact good and worth maintaining

  • or that it was in fact necessary that we couldn't get these good things like democracy any other way or were unlikely to and I

  • Would say that that there's no Abrahamic religion

  • That is the best conceivable womb of democracy or anything else

  • We like science that were a great place to get Douglass involved so it but but I would just add one other category of

  • Thinking here we have what we think is factual and

  • Methods by which we derive facts and I would put rationality there and an empirical engagement with with reality

  • then we have

  • other good things in life like

  • Fiction and and flights of fancy that are pleasing for one reason or another and could be generative

  • toward the first category, but then we also have

  • I know I would acknowledge we've spoken about this before

  • Useful fictions and cases I would you know, hope rare cases where where fiction is

  • more adaptive or more useful than the truth right that there's a

  • Sometimes the truth can can be not worth knowing and I would argue that they you know, there are those cases

  • Okay

  • But they're not so they're few and far between but we should focus on that but some degree of so

  • I wanted to point to Douglas here and focus on that because I think your fear Douglas is that

  • my style or you know, Richard Dawkins or style or Christopher Hitchens a style of

  • Anti theism, you know, just let's let's just throw the vicar's from the rooftops now because it's time to end this thing

  • Literally get off Twitter now. But yeah

  • That's a hashtag. Yeah. Yes

  • Your concern has been that

  • And I think what Jordan shares this that that so much of what is good in our Western developed societies?

  • is

  • The very least maintained by mayn't maintaining

  • so-called

  • Judeo-christian values or the or the remnants of our past religiosity and that you know

  • there is a baby in the bath water that can be difficult to discern and

  • We can to empty the tub all at once because and this is very much of because there's a zero-sum

  • Contest with the the religious enthusiasm. We see coming from the Muslim world

  • And of course the Muslim world is all over the world at the moment

  • So in that contest between a very an older style of religiosity and the theocracy

  • really and modernity

  • You are not as eager as I have been to to pull up

  • Western religiosity by the roots

  • Or chocolate vicars. Yes

  • Yes, I think that's fair. I think I sit

  • metaphorically as well as literally between the two of you I

  • Realized from our conversation in Dublin some of

  • what your concerns are about what Jordan has been saying and what he is saying and I share some of the concern I

  • said to you then that I used the

  • analogy of water

  • And Eric Weinstein recently described to me as Jesus smuggling

  • But it was a consequence of a discussion about biologists. What do you do if you're discussing?

  • design intelligent design

  • You can be okay as long as your own

  • Bandwidth on this on the issue as long as your own depth of knowledge on the issue is very considerable. You can be okay

  • discussing that biology with somebody even a fundamentalist Christian

  • So long as you can follow every step of the way

  • But the fear will always be at the moment. You're not looking they're gonna smuggle Jesus in

  • Or they'll wait till the moment that you're not comfortable

  • anymore with the argument the bit when you're at the very end of your cognitive ability, and then they'll

  • Trust me. There's Jesus. There's Jesus

  • and

  • one of the things I realized from Dublin was

  • Although I think you may not think that Jordan himself is going to try Jesus smuggling on you

  • You fear that?

  • Somewhere down the line from what he's saying. Somebody else will do that trick. Yes, it's worse than that

  • I actually know the people the people who were clapping are doing that

  • I hear from those people on a daily basis

  • right so that the segment of Jordan's audience that is that is

  • Very happy to be told they can stay on the riverbanks of their traditional

  • Christianity for the most part and they don't have to get into the stream of

  • totally monitor and rigorous rational thinking about everything from first principles right that there's something that that the Iron Age

  • Scribes got right and it's right for all time

  • those are

  • those are the applause I'm hearing and and and

  • However, consciously or not Jordan is telling them it's okay to stay stick right there with a with a shard of the cross

  • Actually tried a little conscious Jesus smuggling on Sam to see how that would in a discussion we had about

  • The central archetype of superheroes, but I'm gonna try something a little different tonight

  • I'm gonna try a little direct God smuggling we won't bother with Jesus. Let's go right to God. Why not?

  • So one of the things I've really tried to do when I've been analyzing

  • Religious texts is to take them as to take them

  • seriously in the sense that I don't presume that I understand them and I presume that they're a

  • Mystery of sorts and at least the Bible for example is a mystery because we don't really understand the processes by which it was

  • constructed and we don't understand the processes by which we all agreed collectively over several thousand years to

  • Organize the book the way it

  • Is organized or to edit it the way that it's edited or the and to keep what's in it and to and to discard

  • what's not in it and why it's

  • Lasted and why it's had such a huge impact why I don't want to

  • Derail you but we do understand that the first part of the process all too

  • well

  • We know that the this there was a political and all-too-human

  • process of voting certain texts in for inclusion and some were in for centuries and then got jettisoned and

  • and sure a revelation came in far later than

  • whole

  • Generations of Christians who lived and died under the banner of the Bible and it was a different Bible at the time

  • They had the wrong Bible so well

  • But it's the same

  • It's the same issue that that we really don't just we really don't understand fair enough Sam and I'm not saying that political etcetera

  • Considerations didn't enter into it

  • I'm sure all human considerations entered into it

  • But there was some collective process of winnowing and you can attempt to reduce that to economic or political causes

  • Which is generally what secular?

  • Assessors like Freud and Marx both did and with a fair degree of success. I might add but there's still some mysterious

  • assessment of what it is that will be remembered that entered into it, but

  • It's a separate point to some degree. I'm just saying that my point my

  • My point of departure when looking at these texts is one of an essential radical ignorance. I don't

  • that I understand the mechanisms by which they were generated or edited or collected or kept or remembered or

  • Why they had the impact they had now

  • I've been thinking a lot about the idea of let's say God the Father because that's a very common archetypal

  • representation of God God the Father so I'm going to tell you an

  • Experience that I had that I've never really told any audience about I had a vision at one point

  • That and the vision had to do with a dialogue that I was having with my father and you know

  • You have a father right and when you're a little kid you

  • act out your father when you pretend to be a father and what you're doing when you're acting out your father isn't

  • imitating your father because you don't

  • Duplicate precisely the actions that your father ever took in his life

  • what you do is you you watch your father across multiple contexts and you abstract out something like a

  • spirit of the Father and then when you're a child you

  • implement that spirit of the father in your pretend play and you come to embody that

  • Deeply so the notion is that people can abstract out something like a spirit of the Father and that that's part of our min

  • Pneumatic tendency, which is a very powerful human cognitive tendency

  • and in this vision I

  • first started to talk with my father and I would say more with the spirit of my father because he wasn't actually there and

  • I would say it was the wisest part of him and then that sort of

  • transformed into a discussion that I had with a series of ancestral spirits and then that

  • transformed itself into a vision of God himself with whom I had a conversation and this was a visionary experience and

  • then that all went away and I spent months and months thinking about it and I thought

  • So you guys can tell me what you think about this and this sort of stretches my cognitive ability to to its utmost

  • Limit to contemplate such things but here's a biological argument

  • I already made the case that a child can extract out the spirit of the father and embody it and that's

  • Necessary insofar as you're going to be a father in the wise one

  • But we can also extract out the spirit of the father over much longer periods of time

  • Because my father was a father because he imitated his fall

  • Who imitated his father who imitated his father as far back in time as you can go and there's a cumulative

  • development of the Spirit of the Father across time

  • now then the question might be does this spirit of the father have any reality other than the

  • Metaphorical and I would say damn right?

  • It has a reality and I can describe a biological reality and and and I don't know what this says about any background metaphysics

  • But here's our hypothesis

  • We know

  • that human beings

  • Separated from chimpanzees over the course of the last 7 million years at least in large part because of human female sexual

  • selectivity so it was the spirit of

  • Femininity collectively that helped elevate us to the degree that we have been elevated above our chimpanzee Co ancestor

  • But here's in something interesting to contemplate

  • What is it precisely that makes men what makes men desirable to women and so I have a bit of a hypothesis about that

  • So here's what men do

  • They get together in productive groups and the orient themselves toward a certain task and they produce a hierarchy

  • around that task because whenever you implement a task you produce a hierarchy and

  • They vote up the most

  • Competent men to the top of the hierarchy and then the women select the competent men from the top of the hierarchy

  • But the vote that determines who the competent men are that are more likely to reproduce as a consequence of male

  • Evaluation of men and that's occurred over millennia

  • And so there's a spirit of the father that's embedded in the patriarchal hierarchy that acts as the primary selection mechanism

  • that offers men up to women and plays a

  • cardinal role in human evolution and it looks like we've we've

  • Personified that spirit of the father in our religious imagery and and that's that's how it looks to me

  • But then there's something that's even more mysterious and deep about that. That's worth considering is that

  • apparently the entire course of

  • evolutionary history has conspired to produce human beings and we could argue that it could have been different but it certainly hasn't been different and

  • That means that that selective spirit of the Father has been part of the process. That's

  • Generated our very being and it's certainly possible that that collective spirit of the Father

  • We fly something metaphysically fundamental about the structure of reality itself

  • Yes, well

  • Insofar as I

  • Agree with with virtually all of that. I should say that none of that

  • Should give comfort to people who want to hold on to this notion that

  • Certain of our books might have been revealed by the creator of the universe

  • Well, it depends on what you mean by the creator like well, you know

  • I'm just saying that that that the world we're living in now is one in which we have whole societies

  • Shattered over this notion that some books weren't written by human beings, right? There's a different class of book, right?

  • there's a different shelf in the library where the the products of

  • almost certainly merely human brains are

  • Venerated for all time and and considered uneditable and unag nora Bulai by the majority of human beings

  • yeah, it's it's clear clear that revelation can devolve into but

  • Unbelievers are real. But any

  • There's a risk in all this always is is it often made critique

  • But that when you're talking about religion you're talking about the Inquisition you're talking about the jihadists. You're not talking about

  • Somebody who wants to go to their local Anglican Church once a year

  • Maybe get the children to school and maybe when they're at some desolate moment of their lives

  • returns to this as the place that stores meaning

  • I mean the thing that I think Jordan and I are in agreement on in this is is that thing?

  • Quote from shop and how and the dialogue on religion when he says, you know

  • The truth may be like water and needs vessels to carry it and when we were talking about this the other night

  • You know you admitted that one of the consequences perhaps of the you know

  • The parents sort of going through the belief structures. They may not believe in anymore

  • But they keep doing it as a demonstration of what you said was the the you know

  • the non embarrassing options that atheists have come up with but it may also be that

  • That since we don't have very many vessels

  • that cracked and

  • damaged and sometimes transparent as they are what vessels you have might be worth holding on to

  • well, no, I think I think the challenge here is

  • I mean it feels that well, first of all, we should first notice that these comments very often take the form of

  • You and I don't need this stuff

  • But most other people do right and that is it can't do it. Yes

  • I mean that's inevitably and if it is it's sort of to took that format one moment the other night

  • whereas where you acknowledge that that people of low intelligence are best placed in a

  • Conservative paradigm like traditionally conservative paradigm because there's less to think through right now

  • Obviously, you don't want your your view on religion summarized by it's good for stupid people

  • well, I do I do want to summarize to some degree that way because for

  • The opportunity again to put a foot in your mouth I

  • Would say not not only I mean the thing is is that we're all stupid and and some of us are far stupider than others

  • But we're not we're not that stupid

  • Well, but there's another problem Sam I think and and and this is obviously a contentious one one of the things I I don't go

  • to church

  • But there is one thing I admire about the church and that is that it's managed to serve as a repository

  • for these

  • Fundamental underlying fictions for two millennia, and that's really something bloody. Unbelievable. I mean the great

  • What would you say is bloody? Unbelievable? Look Sam there. Everything's everything's everything's soaked in blood

  • We have no disagreement about that

  • but the secular

  • Alternatives that we produced in the 20th century were certainly no less blood sword and they produced nothing of any program within it whatsoever

  • We did not do it now, but we have to put to bed that secular canard what we are using

  • well, it's just it's just not so that

  • Stalinism was the product of secularism or atheism. And nor was that product

  • It wasn't an inevitable project or is our product

  • Well, it wasn't Bey and please anyone who has this meme in in your head

  • Please just allow the next sentences I speak to just push it out because it's I'm so sick of hearing this

  • This this idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were somehow the product of atheism, right?

  • They say when you look at what actually engineered these atrocities

  • It was something that looked very much like a religion

  • It was a religion in every way apart from an explicit commitment to other worldliness

  • It was based on that's a bit different dis dogmatism through and through it was based on a personality

  • cults that that grew up around figures like Stalin and Hitler and now

  • It's these were it was not the ideas of Bertrand Russell and David Hume

  • That brought us to the gulag or to Auschwitz, but then you say it's the thoughts of Jesus Christ. I very well know

  • It's true. No, I can say that I can say it was the thought of st

  • Augustine and I can say it was the thought of st. Thomas Aquinas

  • Explicitly that gave us the Inquisition. This is the fact

  • It can I make a suggestion? Yeah, I mean, this is a general one as well as one for tonight

  • but the whole discussion

  • I mean I said the other night in Dublin that to a great accessory

  • books are written about the period we're living in they'll probably be described as the

  • Post Holocaust period in history the post-world War two ERA in Europe. It's still going on

  • they were still we're still going through this try to work out what happened and

  • I

  • Have to say one thing that I had any rated equally tired of is the claim that this has got to be a tennis game

  • between the religious and the non-religious but people say

  • That the 20th century's crimes were committed by atheists

  • Sometimes true often wrong or that the 20th century's crimes were committed by people who are religious sometimes true often wrong

  • Why do you think nobody you're not observing a crucial distinction here because I would never be tempted to hold religion accountable

  • For the bad things that religious people do that have no connection to religion, right?

  • So if a Muslim Rob's a liquor store, I'm not gonna blame Islam for that

  • There's no job

  • Not a us

  • There's no doctrine that makes sense of that behavior what I blame religion for and likewise

  • There's no doctrine in the mere loss of religion a ie atheism that gets you the gulag, right? Oh, there is

  • No, there's not there's not I just let me just flesh out this point for one more a second

  • The only thing I blame religion for are the things that it becomes

  • rational to do by the light of these beliefs if you accept these doctrines a

  • rational and good person

  • can be tempted to join Isis

  • That's my concern a rational and good person can be tempted to support the Inquisition. But of the many things they had in common

  • This is the point that David Berlinski made in his book

  • What did the nkvd have in common with everyone who oversaw the gulag the SS

  • People who guarded the camps of people who put people on trains. What did they all have in common?

  • What are they have in common with MAO?

  • Among other things they had in common the fact that none of them thought that God was watching them

  • None of them thought that they were being observed and would be held it

  • You dick God is on your side

  • We have just as many examples where people do it because they think God is on their side, right?

  • Sure, cuz I think watching and clapping. I'm not denying that I'm saying that the attempt to make this at a tennis match

  • Over the 20th century's mistake. We we're still trying to work out what caused it religion had a role a fizz amader role

  • But that the perpetual tennis match of it

  • I think well and there is something to be said at a more sophisticated

  • level I would say for the idea that you have an obligation to a

  • Transcendent ethic now you make that claim in the moral landscape you lay out a transcendent ethic in my estimation

  • that's one that puts the

  • onus of the of

  • responsibility on the individual to act in a way that at

  • minimum

  • minimizes suffering and so and you think of that as a statement of fact that that's

  • The proper way of being and I think about it as an axiomatic statement of faith, and that's one of our differences

  • but I have

  • been very careful in my analysis of the relationship between the idea of sovereignty and the idea of

  • Religious belief and one of the things that I have worked out

  • I think partly from reading such people as le atta and Jung was that

  • the there is an emergent idea of sovereignty that does involve being accountable to a god and

  • Here's how he would justify that and I would think about this essentially from a practical and biological perspective

  • independent of any metaphysical reality that it might have so the ancient Mesopotamians for example believed that their

  • emperor was the incarnation or the representative of a god named Marduk and

  • That actually bestowed certain ethical responsibilities on the ruler

  • And so the ruler had to be a good Marduk in order to be a sovereign to be regarded as sovereign he had to be

  • the embodiment of these divine principles and it took the Mesopotamians a very very long period of time

  • perhaps several tens of thousands of years

  • they weren't Mesopotamian during that whole time obviously to work out what those principles of sovereignty should be and

  • The Mesopotamians encoded this in their fictions and their religious fictions

  • Making essentially the proposition that the proper ruler had to have eyes all the way around his head

  • because that was one of the attributes of Marduk, so he was someone who was genuinely paying attention who was capable of

  • Coming into voluntary contact with with the great

  • chaotic sub structure of being and cutting it into pieces and making the habitable world and also speaking words that were

  • truthful that that had the power the magic power of truth and

  • The the the ruler had to act that out if he was

  • going to be the sort of ruler that his people weren't entitled to slay and

  • Sacrifice and then once a year at the new year's festival

  • he would go outside the city the walled city and he would act out his role of Marduk and

  • The priests would humiliate him and ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn't been

  • good Marduk, so that he could remember that he had a

  • responsibility to undertake this this to embody this

  • Relationship with these divine principles and the thing that's so important about this

  • so absolutely crucially important is that it established the principle that even if you were at the top of a hierarchy

  • You weren't absolute

  • there was something above you that you were subordinate to and one of the extraordinarily useful ideas about the abstraction of

  • Even God as a personified spirit. Let's say is that it allows every leader to be subordinate to something

  • That's beyond him. Now. That doesn't mean it can't be misused

  • but it's a very very very

  • important idea except you can also you can get there the other way around you can realize that you

  • Even if you're at the top of the hierarchy

  • you are radically dependent on everyone else, but the

  • Tip of a hierarchy doesn't believe that sometimes they believe what they quote whatever the hell they want

  • But I'm saying if you if you're going to believe something that's compatible with with rationality

  • globally, and has the least conceivable downside I would put in that place not a

  • superstitious attachment to a notion of an invisible

  • friend

  • or Punisher

  • Who's above you? I would put in its place

  • They totally defensible and and palpably true fact

  • that we that even you could be the king of the event of the world and you are dependent on

  • Everyone around you to eat to not be murdered by them. I mean like you are like you are

  • You are I mean, it's it's amazing. It's amazing how

  • precarious

  • even a a

  • totalitarian regime is I mean the amazing thing is that that these last at all because in many cases it would just take

  • 50 people to act in unison to kill the tyrant

  • Right, but it never happens because we either so have a first mover problem

  • Everyone is afraid to be the first person shot

  • but it is it is a genuine mystery that these systems even perpetuate themselves and when they unravel when you see, you know Qaddafi being

  • Murdered in a crowd you realize wow. It really is just a matter of the restraint and fear of human beings

  • Keeping any of these things together a benign if you if you wanted a hierarchy where you had a kind of philopon. Ein philosopher-king well,

  • Pulling the reins of a society. I'm not saying we do but even there

  • You could have an ethical one. You could have one where an anon superstitious one with one where someone recognized

  • Hey, this is this is how we're doing it, but we are radically I at the top of the hierarchy. I'm radically dependent on

  • Having being surrounded by as many happy people as possible

  • Well, look, I mean I don't I don't in some profound sense. I disagree what we're actually late

  • you know, we're living this sounds like a

  • Fiction, but we're living with this problem and we encounter this more and more when you talk

  • you know in Silicon Valley as you and I occasionally do and I'm sure you do as well where you meet people who are

  • fantastically wealthy

  • who seem

  • Uncannily detached at the by the

  • detach at the fact that the there's this growing chasm between

  • Them and those they know and the rest of humanity and then and you one who begins to wonder what level of wealth inequality

  • Will everyone find alarming and some people are acting as though there is no level that is alarming that there's the kind of a law

  • of nature that this thing can grow

  • it just

  • Impossibly to the point where we have trillionaire is walking around

  • and you know in driving in their motor caves and it's kind of as sort of the libertarian religion one occasionally runs into

  • and

  • Clearly there's some level of inequality

  • That's untenable or at least would be undesirable there

  • well

  • It's it's a funny thing because that's a place where our thought loops and then agrees to some degree again because I do believe that

  • You can in some sense

  • rationally derive an an

  • ethic

  • So so let's let let's take the argument that you put forward and say that well

  • You're and this is an extension of your well-being argument to something which ever with which I've thought about a fair bit it's like well

  • Okay, what's the optimal solution for you?

  • Well, okay. Well, first of all, there isn't just you now

  • There's you now and you tomorrow and you next week and you in a year you in five years

  • So there's you and the you that propagates across time. So one of the implications

  • Of that is that you can't do anything

  • That's really good for the you now. That isn't very good for you a week from now, right?

  • so that means you have to imagine yourself as multiple individuals across multiple timeframes and

  • Then you have to figure out what's good for all those individuals across all those time frames

  • although you

  • Discount the future to some degree because of its unpredictability

  • but then

  • so that's a very tight set of constraints and

  • You might say well a rational person would calculate what was optimal across all those all those

  • Multiple timeframes then you do the same thing with other people which is the point you just made

  • well

  • It isn't just you because who's you there's you and your family

  • And most people are in a situation where they would regard damage to their family as perhaps even worse than damage to them

  • So whatever they are, obviously encapsulate s-- their family and then to some degree that flows off into the community

  • and so there is no isolated you and then that's sort of yeah point with regards to the ethic but then

  • so so I agree with all that but then one of the things that I would suggest is that

  • Because that's an incredibly in in difficult rational calculation and perhaps an impossible one. Technically speaking

  • But for certainly very difficult

  • that's what that what has happened in part as our as our great narratives havoc have emerged across time is that

  • We have observed ourself attempting to solve that multiple

  • identity multiple time frame problem and we've told stories about people who do that exceptionally well,

  • And then we've whittled out those stories and we've produced these powerful narratives that encapsulate the ethic that does in fact

  • reflect that wisdom and so so and I think you actually

  • Accept some of that in your in your moral propositions, which is something that we've talked about before

  • so for example

  • Although never really agreed on you certainly believe for example that the embodiment of truth

  • Is one of the means whereby you solve the problem of ethics and I would say that that's a deeply rooted

  • judeo-christian concept that that

  • so deeply rooted that it that it precedes any notion of

  • religious

  • Provincialism it's deeper than judeo-christian. It's deeper than our humanity on some level at one point

  • we talked about the Golden Rule and I said that you think that the the

  • Precursor to the Golden Rule can be found even among monkeys. Right? Right Golden Rule is the ground rule even for monkeys. Yes, exactly

  • Exactly and sort of let me just add to the picture you sketched out

  • I completely agree with we have a we have an ethical obligation even to our future selves, right?

  • I mean we are in relationship to who we will who's going to be the person is drinking

  • His fourth scotch tonight will be well

  • it has some ethical relationship to the person who's going to wake up with a hangover tomorrow morning and

  • We and one thing we know for sure in which we have begun to dimly understand and describe

  • Scientifically is that we're bad at all of these calculations?

  • Yes

  • hyperbolic discounting of future rewards

  • Well, that's also why I think we have these stringent limitations on rationality Sam is that we can't solve the problem through calculation

  • well, no, but we

  • Increasingly can and and even where it's best

  • Summarized not by capital what one thing I'll grant you is that it's not always best conveyed or rendered

  • indelible and actionable by being given a nature paper or you know

  • a saw an abstract from from a paper in the literature and being told

  • This is the way you want to behave to maximize your well-being

  • It may best be conveyed by certain stories, right or certain books that are that are in the philosophy section of the bookstore

  • not the science section and

  • maybe where you and I were at the book signing the other night and someone came up with with a copy of the

  • meditations of Marcus Aurelius write a

  • Fantastic book there's so much wisdom in that book

  • Right, and there's nothing about stoning a girl to death if she's not a virgin on her wedding day now

  • we all recognize that Marcus Aurelius was a human being who wrote this book and

  • that that

  • Providence is no barrier to take in the book

  • deadly, seriously

  • it's an incredibly useful book and stoicism a

  • stoicism could be

  • the quote religion or the guiding philosophy of the West it could it would be a much better one than Judaism or Christianity and

  • and as have not virtue aliy none of the downside and and so that's my point that we're in this perverse circumstance of

  • Being held hostage by certain

  • products of literature and

  • We need to break the spell and if and if we're finding it this hard to break

  • What do we think is gonna happen in the Middle East or in the sub-saharan Africa? I mean we the

  • Moral progress we need to engineer is a common humanity coming together those shared values

  • Those are perfectly credible arguments

  • but but the weakness in the argument I think is the one that we started to talk about earlier, which is that

  • When you talked with Dave Rubin a while back and Michael Shermer said the same thing recently

  • He he basically said that atheism is it is a doctrine of negation

  • That's what I said with Rubin is that there isn't that positive a ethos? And atheism? All it says is that there's no there's nothing

  • Personified there's nothing personified

  • Transcendent, it's something like that. There is no God

  • And so and so the problem with the Atheist, it's not even the assertion that there is no God

  • It's just that it's a failure to be convinced by any of the gods on offer fuck

  • It's just like not believing in Zeus fine. And it's not like it's a weak. It's not like it's a weak argument

  • I mean I'm perfectly aware that

  • Making a de istic case or a case for religion in the face of the claims of the rationalist

  • Atheists is perhaps. Well, it's a very very difficult thing to manage but

  • it is also the case that

  • and and this is where I think we differ with regards to what happens say in the Soviet Union and perhaps to to

  • also in Nazi Germany is that

  • when when when when your doctrine demolishes the

  • That's called it the literary or fictional sub structure and leaves nothing behind

  • an F Oh an ethos needs to be provided because something will rush in to fill the void and

  • it's certainly the case and this is what Nietzsche warned about even though he was a strident anti-christian and it's also what

  • Dostoevsky first saw he said if we knock out

  • The logos from the substructure of Western society and we need to believe that it was

  • Christianity's emphasis on truth that destroyed Christianity which was an extremely an interesting criticism, you know

  • The Christian adhere the elevators to truth to such a degree that it was it actually

  • resulted in the demolition of its own dogmatic sub structure, but be that as it may Nietzsche's

  • prognostication was that if we allowed

  • God to die and perhaps there were reasons for that that the consequence would be that would we would be awash in both nihilism and

  • Totalitarian bloodshed and that is what happened in the 20th century. And so so and there's another there's another aspect to that

  • Which is if you may you may try to knock out the whole thing take out some of the substructure but not the whole thing

  • that's what Nietzsche also shows but his prediction I think is

  • Blindingly, obviously true that you might in this post Christian era have a remand of Christianity such as guilt

  • overbearing guilt and

  • no means of alleviation or redemption which is actually part of the problem of Protestantism, by the way, because it's you know,

  • and and and there are other things to that it seemed to be that it seemed to be fundamental religious issues that the

  • secularists I think have a difficult time accounting for it's like so you actually have to

  • grapple seriously with the problem that a

  • Doctrine that's essentially one of negation doesn't offer a positive ethos

  • And now an E and you are doing now to be perfectly fair. You said that reading a nature paper about the necessity of

  • Calculating your ethic across multiple

  • Multiple time frames and multiple persons doesn't have the motive force that's going to drive you to act ethically in life and I do believe

  • That's true. But I think the fact that the rationalist ethos doesn't have

  • Motivational push is actually a fatal flaw. They don't every week to read marcus aurelius

  • Yeah, and they don't

  • Like there's no music that goes along with it. There's no art that goes along with it

  • there's no architecture that goes along with it like

  • Weifare, but to be fair to the present most music and most art and most architecture

  • yes is no longer religious that it has flown the perch provided by religion traditionally and

  • most of what we care about

  • in

  • increasingly

  • cosmopolitan at the end secular societies is not

  • tied to religion in any direct way and there's even whole religions like Judaism where you have to look long and hard to find

  • Anyone who believes much of anything that is religious. I have literally sat on stage

  • Debating what I thought was a religious rabbi who was a conservative rabbi

  • And when I asked when I said something that assumed that he believed in a God who could hear prayers

  • He threw up his hands and he said what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers?

  • And I thought I was just you know, I practically lost the debate just in in my astonishment, you know

  • It's like wait wait, you know, what does it mean to be a conservative rabbi in this case? There are religions that have made that

  • transition to a an increasingly

  • attenuated

  • Commitment to the truth of the doctrine and there are religions who haven't moved an inch

  • right and we and and it but I think we have to acknowledge that that

  • this this movement in this direction is progress because what it what it actually is at bottom is

  • Increasing sensitivity to the difference between having good reasons and bad reasons for what you believe

  • Right and and the fact that that this book has been around forever is not a good reason

  • The fact that mommy hates it so well

  • It's actually it's not a terrible reason though because the fact that something has lasted for that length of time at least

  • Makes the fact that it's lasted a mystery and you can't just attribute that to casual politicking or economic circumstances

  • There's through something

  • look

  • You can say about many of the biblical stories is that they're incredibly memorable and that means that in some sense

  • They're adapted to the memory structures of boys. So is the the mythology of ancient Greece?

  • It's incredibly memorable, but I'm but I don't know luck. All those gods are dead. The stories still can be useful

  • Yeah, the gods on let's say yeah, but it lives on in a way that is benign. It lives on in a way where

  • You learn about them in mythology class in school, right? You you don't have it. You don't have a fear of

  • Hades drummed into you as a child by your parent

  • No

  • the other thing that is lacking as far as I can tell in the in the

  • rationalist doctrine and this is something that I've observed in my clinical practice and

  • so one of the things that's happened over the last year is that I've had many people especially

  • Ex-soldiers come to my lectures who have post-traumatic stress disorder and they say that listening to my lectures

  • especially the ones on good evil and tragedy there's a

  • particularly sure that I suppose you might be you might think about as devoted to people at post-traumatic stress disorder and that

  • the language of good and evil that I lay out in those lectures is

  • Actually what allows them to recover from the post-traumatic stress disorder and dealing with people like that in my clinical practice

  • The same thing has been the case if we can't

  • Transcend the language of the merely rational and move into an intense conversation

  • About good and evil in some sense as metaphysical realities. We can't enter a realm of seriousness conceptual seriousness

  • That's of sufficient depth to help heal

  • someone who's been touched by malevolence because that actually is what happens to people with post-traumatic stress disorder is that

  • Inevitably the reason that there are so shattered isn't because something tragic has happened to them

  • Although that does happen upon occasion

  • it's because someone malevolent has made contact with them and sometimes that

  • malevolent being let's say orb level and force or spirit for lack of a better word is something that resides within them and

  • So there we have these limits on rational debt

  • And the reason I'm making this case is because we've already identified another limit of rational discourse. It's like it doesn't have the

  • motivating power of great fiction and great literature and great poetry, but it also doesn't have the healing power of

  • language that that

  • takes the ethical realm to its

  • Extreme in some sense and and then the next problem with that and this is something that Douglas has been has been

  • Contemplating I would say is that

  • What what evidence do we have that a merely secular?

  • representation a rational

  • representation of our ethic is going to provide us with a motive force that would be sufficient for us to do such things as

  • identify what's valuable about our culture and be motivated to

  • sufficiently protected assuming that we do something of protection, but we know it what a few of those things are and

  • They have they have nothing to do with what's on the inside of a church or a synagogue or a mosque

  • they have to do with things like free speech right like

  • the trench we are all fighting in is at least one of them is

  • Defense of the free exchange of ideas and that is put in peril by many kinds of orthodoxies

  • But some are the old orthodoxy is the blasphemy laws and the people who want, you know apostates to be killed

  • We're leaving in this case Islam. So it's it's a

  • That those are some of the sacred I would even if we were gonna list the

  • The sacred artifacts of art that that keeps that keep our society

  • worth living in

  • There it's I think the list is gonna be very long before we start getting to the the actual

  • sacred objects of any one faith, but we'll be things like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and and

  • the the

  • The free exchange of ideas across boundaries the fact that we are no longer

  • religiously or

  • Linguistically or geographically partitioned in the ideas. We can entertain well, it seems to me though like and this may be my own my own

  • idiosyncratic reading of the of the of the domain but when I look at something like like I

  • And considered a cathedral dome

  • Let's say and there are very very old cathedral domes that have an image of Christ put up against the dome, right?

  • So as as creator of the cosmos, okay

  • and I'm trying to look at that from a psychological and even a biological perspective and what I see is the

  • elevation of a particular image that represents an ideal and so the the the Christ that's

  • Represented on the on the on the dome of a cathedral is something that's projected up into celestial space

  • So it's it's an ideal to which you are supposed to be

  • Subordinate or that you're supposed to embody and the ideal is the ideal of the logos

  • Technically speaking the logos the word made flesh, which is not only the word free speech for lack of a better term

  • but also the embodiment of that elevated to the highest principle and and

  • and that is given status as the creator of the universe and the reason for that in part and this is written into the

  • judeo-christian doctrine right from line one is the idea that it's through the discourse that you value so much that we actually

  • engender the world as such and that is a divine principle and it's it's also in my reading the divine image of God that

  • men and women are made in and so what I see in the underlying metaphysic where you see superstition and and

  • Fundamentalism and look fair enough and it's not like I would ever argue that that's not a danger

  • I see the imagistic and and and dramatized

  • Representation of exactly the idea that you hold to be paramount above all else, which is your commitment to truth expressed in speech

  • Okay, what's my concern? And this is this is where I started with you is that you could give the same charitable reading of

  • Astrology and you'd even be tempted to do it as we as we talk about astrology as you showed at the outset now

  • But I don't why is it a charitable reading Sam?

  • How else would you explain the existence of something like a cathedral with that? Hey, what the hell I'm people going when they built

  • I'm saying we could is it's by dint of mere historical contingency and

  • Questionable look that we're not living in a world where the cathedrals

  • Have stained-glass windows with signs of the zodiac on them

  • right

  • We could be in that world. What we are we?

  • were very close to being in our in that world to some degree because the astrological

  • endeavor in the judeo-christian landscape expanded to incorporate

  • Christianity and there's an entire astrology of Christianity including

  • representation

  • Yes, but my point is is that we recognize that the literal claims of astrology the the mechanism by which

  • astrologers think it works is

  • intellectually bankrupt

  • Right and if any significant mayhem were being caused by people's commitment to astrology if we had presidents of the United States

  • Who couldn't get elected unless unless they paid lip-service to a literal belief in astrology

  • If we had presidents who were consulting their astrologers to figure out when to meet with other world leaders

  • right the this this would be a problem that that

  • Rational people would recognize me astrology can be disproven in a single hour

  • You simply have to go to a one hospital in one city sometime and find find two unrelated

  • children born in the safe within 20 feet of each other and

  • follow their lives

  • and if they have different lives than then there's then signs of the zodiac mean nothing part of your argument is and

  • Invalidly so is how in the world do we determine which revelatory?

  • Axioms are worthy of respect and of maintenance and fair enough salmon, maybe none. Well, maybe a revelatory

  • Maybe that's not it is just a matter of K conscious agents like ourselves having better and better conversations

  • Well that well, it is certainly partly that it is certainly partly that but let me again revelation

  • The I in my book is nothing other than the record of past conversations

  • so you've either got Iron Age conversations shaping your worldview or you have conversations like these shaping your or you have both

  • You could have both but then you have a dialogue with the past. Let's beautiful which brings me to Marcus Aurelius

  • I read him with great pleasure and great and and and astonishment frankly, I mean that yeah

  • it is such a modern and edifying take on ethics and

  • and one's own personal well-being and just not getting just not being encumbered by by thoughts and and

  • and vanities that that are that are so easy to cut through once you notice them but so

  • captivating and arranging of your life when you don't and he I mean

  • There's no wisdom in that book then then then almost any book I can name and you don't have to believe any

  • Bullshit to honor. Okay. Let me offer you a continued explication here

  • so and you didn't answer my question about what all these crazy medieval people were doing spending almost all of their excess capital building a

  • Representation of the sky and putting an image on that. So just hang on a sec

  • So so let's talk about what it would mean to embody the truth

  • So there's a deep idea in Christianity that this is what it would mean it would mean to confront the suffering of life

  • voluntarily to its fullest which would mean to accept the necessity of death and betrayal at the hands of your fellow men without

  • undue bitterness

  • to accept that

  • voluntarily and to still understand that your

  • fundamental ethical task is to work towards the redemption of the world and that's associated with that image that's cast upon the heavenly dome and

  • And that isn't a charitable reading Sam that's that that's an essential analysis of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity

  • Yes, but I could do the same thing with Buddhism and give you a slightly different story

  • but nonetheless inspiring and edifying and I could do the same thing with

  • It but we can't do it with rationality, but I can do it. I can do it with Greek. No, no

  • No, that's not true. I yeah, I can do it with Greek mythology

  • I can do with any of these domains

  • But the the crucial bit for me is that in order to make use of those stories? I

  • Don't have to believe in Revelation. I don't have to put I don't have to believe that you get everything you want after you die

  • No, no

  • But but I'm talking about the applause of conventionally religious people who think that their conventional religion is in some way

  • cashed out or redeemed or

  • Supported by the reading you're given now of the of Christ in starry heavens

  • it's not unless you're adding this other piece, which is

  • Some probabilistic claim that yes

  • This book probably was dictated by an omniscient Dean unlike any other book well

  • Or maybe the Muslims are right that our angel Gabriel did show up to Muhammad in his cave and give him the one

  • final revelation never to be superseded and

  • Just on the merits of the text. We know that's not true

  • We know for all it gets wrong and all it fails to get right about the nature of our circumstance

  • We know that book is not the best book ever written on any topic and here I'm speaking of the Quran

  • But it's true of the Bible. It's true

  • It's true of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius

  • But the book but but no one's claiming that about the meditations and that's a crucial difference. It's a difference that that

  • explains so much unnecessary suffering in our world and

  • again what I fear about the way you talk about religion is that

  • At the end of all these conversations I'm still not sure what you believe on that point frankly and

  • if I'm not sure no one out there is

  • Well, I don't know why I don't know why you would expect to be sure about what someone believes how do you think that any?

  • One of you are capable of fully articulating what you believe you certainly aren't you are. No I it's completely ridiculous

  • You're not transparent to yourself by any stretch of the imagination

  • You act out all sorts of things that you can't articulate butthat, but how about if how about a best-guess?

  • Ya

  • Know if you look let's go all cognitive neuroscience on this. Shall we?

  • Ninety-nine percent of your processing is unconscious. You're not capable of articulating yourselves if you were you'd be omniscient

  • Okay, but that's gonna give me any nonsense about that for that. That is a

  • I've never heard so many people applaud an evasion of a simple question

  • It was a good yeah

  • okay, I

  • honestly

  • Yes, everything you just said about not being fully transparent to yourself is true

  • And you are ruled by committee in there all the time

  • No doubt, but I'm at I'm asking what you actually believe

  • I mean, there's several things I can ask. I mean almost any one of these threads can can pull the whole tapestry, but

  • To take Christianity as an example

  • What do you believe about?

  • This the origin of this sacred book the Bible old a New Testament

  • Do you believe that just maybe it has a status?

  • Unlike any other book or is it?

  • Simply old writing of human beings just like ourselves. I think it's both

  • Okay, so, but but but so what does that mean that you're saying?

  • You're saying that there's somebody who's taking dictation that is unlike any other dictation

  • So it's so Homer though creators or Shakespeare is operated within

  • Hours of inspiration, okay

  • Everyone's been inspired if you talk to creative people

  • Yes, they say they often describe themselves as something approximating a conduit through which higher wisdom is pouring again

  • You're dodging shakes that Shakespeare could say that and yeah, and any writer can say that

  • Yeah, and it's also the case that we would or we would rank organize

  • we would rank order those writers, which is why you pointed to Shakespeare in terms of the

  • Generalizable validity of their revelations sure, and so well look so you run into the same issue, you know

  • You criticize the Bible and look fair enough, you know, man, but you're you're also evading a very important issue

  • Which is how do you how do you?

  • Quantitatively rank the contributions of literature without assuming that there's a hierarchy of Revelation you although this a hierarchy of wisdom. Sure

  • There's a heart a hierarchy of human wisdom

  • I will grant you that every day of the week, but this it is but we're talking about

  • primates like ourselves having conversations and

  • This is the most important game we can play

  • this is the best game in town and it has always been so but

  • People are imagining and it includes as you said at the outset

  • what I would call spiritual experience and spiritual experience is

  • Admits of a fact-based discussion about the nature of human consciousness. And why do you allow that as an

  • Exception like because it's not an exception as part of that the data set. So it's possible to have the e ritual

  • So this is spiritual experience without the possible of possibility of concretize revelation

  • So it's a formless spirituality that you're advocating

  • No, no it you can have a money

  • Even I'm not even discounting the possibility that there are invisible

  • entities out there in the universe far smarter than ourselves who we could possibly be in dialogue with I mean

  • There are many strange ideas that we could defend to one or another degree of you that they're people walking around

  • Speculating that we might be living in a computer simulation that all of this is being run on some

  • hard drive of the future or or some you know

  • Alien supercomputer now that you can actually I mean Nick Bostrom at Oxford gives a very cogent argument in defense of that thesis

  • Right now you can you can deal with that on its merits I'm not saying the universe isn't stranger than we suppose or even can

  • suppose but

  • one thing we know is that when you read the Bible you can turn every page of that book and

  • You will not find evidence of omniscience. You will not find anything in there that

  • Someone as smart as Shakespeare or actually a little bit dumber could have written

  • No, I don't think that's true Sam. They're incredibly potent. There's whatever I'd say about the biblical writings that are incredibly potent

  • But so it's impossible to write something virtually impossible to write something like Cain and Abel. It's a paragraph in shame

  • You're saying the Shakespeare the Shakespeare of the two 3,000 years ago couldn't have written Genesis

  • He couldn't have written to Cain and Abel not intends it so that so then it's okay enable is 10 sentences long

  • So then who gains more wisdom than you can then you can dig?

  • Okay, let's go now, but now we're getting to the nub of it

  • Then you think because that it was not the product of a human mind

  • I think it was the product of a vast collection of human minds working over millennia, okay

  • so we have a

  • city of Shakespeare's so but still which is really what we so we've just got people about this and this but this

  • concession if indeed

  • You're making it and I'm still not sure is the eradication of traditional Christianity if something is deeply wise its

  • reflective of a deeper reality

  • Otherwise, it wouldn't be what I've okay. I'm in love with deeper realities

  • The deeper reality that something is wise is the story of Cain and Abel reflection. It's the real

  • a landscape of mind that we we are

  • That either takes great training great luck or pharmacological

  • bombardment of the human brain to explore

  • Right there. There's a way there are ways to get there. There are ways to have the beatific vision, right? And and if and

  • We will we understand this to some degree but experientially and we can understand it to some degree by by this

  • third-person methods of science and

  • It's not it's not like I don't know

  • I've had many experiences that

  • If I had them in a religious context would have counted for me as evidence of the truth of my religion

  • right

  • but because I I

  • have was not brought up up in a religious context and because I spend a lot of time seeing the downside of

  • That form of credulity. I have never been tempted to interpret these experiences. That way try a higher dose

  • Yeah, I've tried believe me. Yes. Oh, I'll go I'll play that game of poker with you all day long

  • You know surprise. Yes. Well, maybe

  • Maybe maybe there's our next podcast. Yeah

  • Did you just see a card that I've got to ask all of you a question now, so we're an hour and

  • 15 minutes into this discussion and

  • hypothetically, what we will do is stop and

  • and go to Q&A but our

  • Experience so far has been that when we asked the audience because we have done that each time

  • Whether we've asked the audience whether we should continue or whether we should go to Q&A

  • so the first thing I'm going to do and you can

  • Vote on this by making a certain amount of noise if you're inclined to do

  • So how many of you would like us to stop talking and go to Q&A?

  • How many of you would like us to continue this discussion for 45 more minutes

  • It's it seems to me that it's an objective fact, it's louder people have the floor

  • So it really is gonna be a rude awakening when those applause are reversed. However, yeah, we know it's timeless

  • Was I gonna ask something? Yeah

  • Something let's go back to let's go back to thee to one of the core problems that we've been trying to address which is the

  • the apparent

  • failure perhaps of the

  • The the rationalist atheist types to develop a an active ethos that has

  • Sufficient beauty and motivational power to serve as a credible replacement for the religious rituals

  • So there seems there must be a reason why that's that failure has occurred

  • right, so

  • Maybe a short list of reasons one is that

  • Traditionally the impulse to do that in a religious context has been fatal

  • Right. So to declare your apostasy has been the almost as reliable a way of committing suicide as jumping off a building

  • in most

  • cultures and most

  • societies for the longest time and still is in many places as you know in the Muslim world, so

  • if there's been a barrier to entry to thinking creatively about alternatives to religion and

  • so much of atheism and secularism is just a a

  • pitched battle against the the

  • Eroding power of religion and when religion really has its power, right?

  • We know what it's like, you know

  • they again I think what we spoke about this at one point it just yet at the moment that it makes this most salient is

  • You know Galileo being shown the instruments of torture by men who wouldn't look through his telescope, right?

  • I mean that's that was the point of contact between

  • untrammeled human rationality and

  • The womb that bore it right give the religious awe at the beauty of the heavens, right?

  • So the moment was a person like Galileo stepped a little too far and to connect us to astrology again

  • Galileo was a court astrologer, right? Mr

  • Doe did they were there was a cunt there was a point of contact between astronomy and astrology at that point. So

  • We're still under the shadow of that kind of dogmatism and oppression in much of the world

  • And for the longest time, I mean, it's still in the United States

  • You cannot run for the presidency without pretending to believe in God

  • It's amazing. It's amazing fact, right?

  • When will that change it?

  • Someday it will

  • But we have we have just had almost no time talks if it's to experiment in this base and intervals means some time

  • I mean some decades I suppose the thing that unites Sam it would be nice to Auden to me on this is

  • If if we face some of the problems some of the enemies might even say that you identify as well

  • And the question is whether you should face them in the midst of an experiment that may or may not work

  • ie a leap into pure rationality or

  • Whether you might decide it's worth among other things

  • Taking some of the versions of things that you've had that have been of worth in your past and using them where they're useful

  • Well, but what do you picture in there because there really is no leap. There's no global leap to pure rationality

  • There's just there's this incremental

  • erosion of

  • Religious answers to terrestrial questions. So there's that. Yeah, I guess at the moment

  • You you have a science of neurology. You begin to look at epilepsy

  • Not as demonic possession, but as a neurological problem before there's a science of neurology. You don't know what the hell is happening, right?

  • So so into them say something obviously drove Douglas. I would say in some sense

  • surprisingly

  • to make the assumption that one of the things that we need to do to

  • Defend whatever it is that we have a value in the West assuming that we have anything of value

  • was

  • something like the

  • reincorporation of this

  • Religious substructure, so white it's not something that I would have expected you to conclude. Oh, wait, what are you?

  • Why did you conclude it? Well?

  • Partly for the reason I just suggested

  • That the leap into pure rationality

  • There's no evidence yet that it's going to work or there's gonna be enough for enough people are gonna be able to partake

  • Give me the precise amount place where you're worried that it's gonna fail and what can you what are you imagining?

  • Well, you wake it now

  • Yeah

  • Let me give you one example and we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing

  • Worse than religion is its absence?

  • When we're where are we discovering that look at the religions that people are making up as we speak

  • I mean every day there's a new dogma and you and I and Jordan have repeatedly tripped over his dogmas

  • some are usually survived it has to be said but

  • They're stampeding to create new religion all the time at the moment every every new heresy that's invented and

  • They're not as well thought through as past terraces

  • they don't always have the bloody repercussions yet, but you can easily foresee a situation in which they do a

  • New religion is being created as we speak by a new generation of people who think they are

  • non-ideological who think they're very rational who think their past myth who think their past story who think they're better than any of their

  • Ancestors and have never bothered to even study their answers

  • But

  • Can't you say that

  • Dogmatism is the problem

  • okay, the generic problem here is dogmatism a firm belief in the absence of good argument and good evidence and

  • Absolutely, we can agree that dogmatism of any kind has that danger or will always have that danger

  • but the void

  • Also has a danger the void that you can create if you throw out all the stories that help get you to where you are

  • also has this danger because people come up with these news stories and

  • Every day's news now is about this every hour politics is now basically about this

  • up, I mean well and what and what's flown in to fill the gap seems to be something like a new tribalism absolute is exactly

  • What you'd expect in some sense, right?

  • If you if you demolish the superordinate system, you know religion divides people no doubt, but it also unites people

  • yes, and so one of the things that

  • Arguably unites people above their mere tribalism is their Union and an abstract religious

  • superstructure and then if you demolish that well then one of the things that does seem to happen is the emergence of a

  • Reflexive tribalism because people need to need a group identity of sorts

  • And the easiest thing to do seems to be to revert to ethnicity and race and gender and sex, etc. Etc

  • And then we do end up and have ended up in this situation that Douglass outlines and you know

  • One of the things I think that distinguishes us temperamental II

  • possibly maybe because you're a little more on the liberal side and I'm a little more on the conservative side even temperamentally speaking is that

  • your

  • Fundamental terror, is that of fundamentalism?

  • although you also state in the moral landscape that you understand that the perils of nihilism and I would say my

  • fundamental terror, is that of nihilism even though I'm

  • Susceptance ative to the catastrophes of fundamentalism, but I don't think you do address the problem of the void sufficiently

  • because I don't think that you have anything to offer except an

  • And I'm not trying to minimize your offering you you make a case that people should work to

  • Alleviate suffering and that we should live in truth. But Jesus Sam you can summarize that in two sentences

  • it doesn't have the potency of the

  • Fictional literary artistic substructure that seems necessary to make that into something. That's that's a compelling story

  • So it's the this is where we might disagree. This could be a fundamental disagreement

  • because I actually I don't see the problem of nihilism the way you do or the way it's advertised like

  • once you rip out

  • the false certainties and the bad evidence and the bad arguments and the and the the mere dog was imposed on us by

  • prior generations

  • That hole

  • never closes

  • Safely with anything else you have to put something in its place that's shaped just like that some other false certainty or some other story

  • I simply don't think that's the case

  • I think there's so many things we outgrow both individually a you know, if in art your own childhoods and

  • Culturally that where there is. No, there is no void left

  • there's no Santa Claus shaped void that we have to fill with the

  • Experience but people certainly experienced some people you people I'm not discounting the fact that it is hard to be happy in this world

  • I mean we are living in a world that seems designed perfectly designed to frustrate our efforts to find

  • Permanent happiness, so you asked me

  • What my answer is I just think there's the recipe for a good life or least least a

  • Minimal recipe for a good life. That's not that this is all that's entailed. But this is this is this is certainly necessary

  • If not sufficient is to live a life that is

  • Increasingly motivated by love and guided by reason

  • Right, you can't go very far wrong if you are motivated by love and guided by reason, right? And and the problem is is that

  • Well, okay

  • Well, the first thing I would say about that is to me. That's a

  • recapitulation of the judeo-christian ethic which is be guarded by love and up and use logos to serve that that you gotta

  • Regenerate the fine print on reason. Oh, yeah clever didn't say reason I said logos cuz that's the that's something that's deeper there

  • There's the Jesus smuggling. Yes, exactly. Well, yes. Yes, definitely

  • Okay, so but but so look I've been I've been trying to part of the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is to try

  • to address the void

  • Let's say and I suspect that many of you are actually here because you would like to have the void

  • addressed and so the way it looks to me is something like this and this is what I've derived in part from my studies of

  • Religious tradition so I could say that at the beginning of Genesis

  • for example

  • there's a proposition that it's truthful speech that generates habitable order from

  • chaotic potential that seems to me to be the fundamental

  • Narrative and I do believe there's something dead accurate and real about that because we do

  • generate the world as a consequence of our

  • communicative

  • Effort and then there's a second proposition

  • which is that the world that we generate from the the chaos of potential is

  • habitable to the degree that the communication that we engage in is

  • truthful and that's why God who uses the logos at the beginning of time to generate the world is

  • Able to say that his creation is good. The proposition is the world you bring into being through truthful. Speech is good

  • and that's the image of God that's implanted in man and woman and

  • There's a grandeur about that idea and you think well, you don't need the grandeur because it's just a fiction

  • It's like just wait a second here

  • It's not just a fiction

  • unless you don't believe that in some manner you partake in the creation of the world and that you have an

  • Ultimate responsibility that might well be described as divine to participate in that process properly

  • truthfully and with love and there's every reason to think that that's an

  • elevated ideal so high that it's worthy of conceptualizing as divine and also to presume that it represents some

  • fundamental metaphysical

  • And that's a lot more powerful than you need to be good. Yes, but that the problem here Jordan

  • It's that I could do exactly what you just did with

  • Buddhism or Hinduism

  • and it is just as grand and

  • just as deep and just as anchored to the the first person experience of

  • Contemplatives who have taken that as far as they could take it, you know, well then ask Sam

  • You should do that and see how people respond to it. Well, no, no because I yes seriously

  • No, no because I see the end of at the end of the game

  • it's not that doesn't arrive where I want to get to where we need to get to because it is

  • it's

  • It would be to different effect

  • It's to it they're they're different claims

  • Ultimately about the status of truth and good and evil and about the beginning of the world and the fate of a human

  • Consciousness after death, it's completely they're completely irreconcilable

  • worldviews, you know, I also do not that we're if there are Hindus in the audience, they believe something that is totally

  • Irreconcilable to what Christians believe I don't think that you can offer

  • pardon me a watered-down version of Buddhism as a consequence of psychedelic experience as a cut as an

  • acceptable and credible alternative to the power of the fundamental founding myths of the Western culture and if you think you can

  • Try no I'm trying. Well, I'm not trying that but that's that's not

  • That's not what I thought. Well, first of all just to just to get my biography straight. It's not just the psychedelic experience, right?

  • And I'm also not making light of the psychedelic experience

  • Listen to take this

  • we're having most of this conversation on the side of

  • Where we're in it seems reasonable to worry about the faith of civilization

  • Right you we could have started at a very different point with just the nature of consciousness

  • Right just the just our first person encounter with being itself, right you wake we all of us wake up each morning

  • we are thrust from a condition of deep sleep which we've seen nothing about and

  • Would just have pushed through the veil of dreams into this apparently

  • solid reality that we call the world and we're engaging one another in this space of

  • just consciousness and its contents and we're trying to make sense of it and science is

  • The best language game we play I would argue in trying to make truly rigorous sense of it

  • But it's not doesn't exhaust all the language games. We play we play

  • others that are also fact-based we talk about what happened historically before we arrived here we talk about

  • Facts as we can understand them that we just didn't witness but others did and we call that journalism, right?

  • So we're trying to have a family

  • Yes we use to call that journalism

  • It's getting harder and harder to discern what's actually going on now, but we are we are

  • thrust into this condition of

  • Being our apparent selves moment by moment and we notice the difference between happiness and suffering

  • Right, and this is not merely sensory

  • it's not merely that you know, I don't like the feeling of a hot stove and I do like a

  • warm bath, it's

  • ideas

  • the ways of thinking about ourselves and the world can can

  • Open the door or close the door to various states of happiness and suffering and religion comes into religion

  • leverages that

  • people it that the difference between believing that your dead child is in heaven with Jesus and

  • Not being able to believe that is enormous right? I want to ask a specific though

  • You've expended a certain amount of reputational energy and much more on the jihadists

  • in your

  • battles should we say there how much allie ship to use a

  • Very vougish term have you found from fellow secular rational people who want to love and reason like you?

  • Well, that is a leading question, isn't it I've got fingers if you need more I

  • Know you your fingers are safe

  • No, unfortunately but it's but this is a problem of I wouldn't describe this too

  • Well, the Allies you can easily find among deeply religious Christians. Say are

  • well not surely not all of them

  • There for the wrong reasons right? I mean I can find you know them

  • Well know note that the reason they're there for the wrong that will they they see the problem clearly

  • For the wrong reasons. So for instance I so I meet

  • secular

  • scientist types, you know

  • Anthropologists say who?

  • Are so far from knowing what it's like to believe in revelation

  • That they don't believe anyone else does right. So when you tell them that members of Isis really believe that

  • if you die in the right circumstances

  • You get 72 virgins and you're you're in you know surrounded by rivers of milk and honey and all the rest

  • If you go into the ivory tower

  • You meet people who don't believe that anyone believes that stuff

  • But if you go into a megachurch, they know people believe that's not because they believe their own dogmas, right?

  • that's

  • That's what it's like to be to be effortlessly right for not especially good

  • reasons the fact that you believe a book the fact that you believe a book was written by God and

  • Therefore it's trivially easy for you to understand that someone else believes that but they just have the wrong book

  • That's not the rational basis for understanding our circumstances

  • We're looking for I'm not saying whether one is right and one is wrong

  • But one seems to have more commitment in that and in one battle, you're fighting commitment, maybe important

  • Yeah, there may be many reasons why the people who?

  • Deeply want to love and be rational

  • Are absolutely no damn use in that fight

  • because they want to

  • preserve their happiness a bit longer

  • Preserve their comfort a bit longer cannot understand people who genuinely come from a fundamentalist standpoint

  • Yeah, and then there's also other well there to steal man their case for a moment it is

  • understandable to be

  • sensitive to and guilty about the history of colonialism and the reality of racism and

  • to be so committed to

  • tolerance as your master

  • Virtue that you're tempted to tolerate intolerance and not recognize it to be cowardice

  • Which in fact it making tolerance your core value is much different than making truth your core value

  • yes, which is an interesting thing because and perhaps this is one of the places where you and the

  • Fundamentalist radical leftists, let's say differ

  • is that the core value that's emerging there is definitely one of tolerance whereas the core value that you espouse is one of truth and

  • Truth and tolerance are not the same thing. And so it might have been yeah

  • Yeah

  • As more as the pursuit of truth and the belief that as a result truth can be found

  • That it's not a single thing on its own. You just pursue it as a hobby

  • There's just something you do but that you believe that at the end of it. There is a truth to be found

  • Yeah, you know, so it's over Douglas, what what do you fear is the case here if if there were more people like me

  • In the West right? Well, maybe I'm not maybe I'm the I'm the outlier here. I'm I'm

  • somehow infected by this over waning commitment to truth and

  • Rationality and science and yet, I'm still motivated to worry about jihad

  • But you're you worried that there are many people like me who are oblivious to the bomb

  • Are you worried about it when so many other people who are hypothetically the question you ask?

  • Why are you so worried about when there's so many people who are hypothetically like you that don't seem to be worried about it

  • I mean, maybe you're wrong you shouldn't be worried about

  • It's a possibility that's my worry at any rate that we may be living in an era when we are discovering that

  • the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment values never went very wide and didn't go terribly deep and

  • this is a very painful realization to make

  • But not only do we go all around the world and discover that we find that at home

  • The roots turn out not to have gone very deep in even this society and the problem it is a problem

  • But but hence my my commitment to making them deeper and and to reiterate the point

  • I'm very happy if it was entirely Sam Harris's all the way down

  • Ok, I'd have no problem with that. It's just that underneath Sam Harris. Its he'll

  • Know me too. Well, yeah, and that has to be very carefully edited on

  • Rationality in the service of love, like this isn't interesting. Like I'm not sure you get to get away with that because

  • Like is it rationality or is it love?

  • because well

  • I don't understand the place in your conceptual system for love given your emphasis on

  • Rationality as the ethic of as the mechanism of ethics

  • So I would say to the degree that I smuggle in Jesus which by the way isn't

  • Accidental in some sense and I'm fully conscious when I'm doing it you smuggle in love and it plays the same role. No

  • No the love but love is a an experience reality. I mean love love is its state of consciousness?

  • It's a state of and I wouldn't ultimately act. Oh, it's a it's a fact that one can experience it or not. Well, yeah

  • There are the fact that you can experience something but their apparent you're experiencing is

  • there's also the thing that you're experiencing as a fact well know that there are facts about the the

  • the range of human experiences

  • Not even just human just conscious experiences that if we can build

  • Computers they can feel loved and that's not inconceivable and will either succeed in doing that or not

  • but consciousness admits of a range of experiences and

  • Love is

  • One of the best on offer it's not the only one we care about but it's the one that anchors us to a

  • positive commitment to the well-being of other conscious systems and

  • But but the crucial thing is those are far I agree no snow do you know what it is

  • It is a fact that loving someone

  • entails a

  • Really of it's their their love and it's counterfeits right there. People can confuse, you know romantic

  • You know attachment or lust with love, right?

  • so I've been and the Buddhists are especially good at differentiating these various states of consciousness and and

  • It's a II

  • a

  • This this true pleasure

  • mental pleasure in the company of another that is colored by a

  • Commitment to their well-being I wanting them to be happy a wanting them wanting to have their hopes realized a nonzero-sum

  • commitment

  • Or sense of your entanglement with them and you can see your failures to love me

  • You can be with people who you think you love

  • You know

  • I'm with my best friend say and I just find out something fantastic has happened for him into let's say in his career and

  • I feel a moment of envy say well then you see well

  • Okay. What I just how much do you love this person if the for your first reaction?

  • To this something good happening to them is you feel poorer for it, right? That's the Cain and Abel story exactly

  • So so this is these are all kinds of defects you can witness in your own mind

  • and yes, you pay enough attention to the Nate to what it's like to be you the full horror show of

  • An almost, you know biblical unwinding of all possibility is available, you know

  • And it's and you add psychedelics to that cocktail and it gets even more vivid. Alright?

  • So are we do you think this is it but but the painting attacks of you know?

  • the fact these are facts about the human mind and it is also factual to say

  • That it is possible to navigate in this space. It is possible to design

  • Institutions and and social systems and ethical commitments that help us navigate in the space

  • It's not that we all have to get up every morning

  • naked and

  • try to

  • rebuild civilization and all of human wisdom for ourselves each day you we inherit we inherit the most useful tool the

  • tools you don't have to figure this all out for yourself and my appeal to you is that

  • What we should want to use all the best tools available

  • without hamstrung in ourselves by this notion that certain tools are

  • Must be the best for all time or certain books

  • must be read in on every page with equals to diligence because

  • It that this book came from the creator of the universe

  • when we're reading Marcus Aurelius if he gets something catastrophic ly wrong on page 17 we say well what the hell he

  • Lived 2,000 years ago. There's no way he knew everything right and we turned the page

  • okay, so we can't do that with the Bible's the

  • mythological

  • representation of that

  • so there's an ancient idea a

  • Very ancient idea that when you face the void

  • what you do is confront it and leap into it and

  • What you discover at the bottom is a beast and inside that beast you discover your father

  • Lying dead and then you reanimate your father and you bring him back to the surface and that's the means of dealing with the void

  • Right and so in his in essence in some sense, that's just what you said

  • you said that if we accept accept that again this

  • there's something

  • confabulate ory about that because you can do you I could change the valence of virtually every word you use there and

  • It would also sound profound and true

  • I could I could swap father for mother and I could swap void from mountaintop and I and I could it could be the same

  • seemingly archetypal journey and

  • Somebody makes a it's not that easy sound like that's the same damn easy

  • I've done with a cookbook, but look if it's that easy, then you can write great novels

  • Great story, so these things can't be swapped out with these

  • well

  • There is a reason that it's your father that you rescue from the belly of the beast and not your mother in those sorts of

  • situations you

  • Can't I give you buddhism and hinduism that had that have completely different

  • Iconographies and mythologies and other different variables but not at all

  • It's like languages, but there's but there they're not they're crucially opposite in many of these cases

  • I'm just saying that this is this kind of

  • Reading meaning into story is

  • There's a reason why it's not science

  • Because it's because it is in some basic sense unfalsifiable

  • I

  • There's nothing you and I can do

  • for the rest of our lives to be sure that the mother isn't at the bottom of that void and it's really the bottom to

  • Develop a factual approach to the analysis of literature

  • well, yes on its own terms you can say well it but that that extends to things like it is a fact that

  • Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark and now I'm a in terms of the writing of literature

  • Well, yeah, but that you can make true and and false claims or more and less plausible claims about literature

  • But that's what I'm trying to do or it takes more its effects on you. But again,

  • But this is a very different game than what most religious people think is on offer

  • Well, look if you look at the domain of science most scientists aren't very good at what they do

  • And if you look at the domain of religious thinking most religious thinking people aren't very good at what they do

  • But that doesn't mean that the whole damn thing should be thrown out

  • There's relations of religious revelation and and and and wisdom. But but there's that word. Obey because a

  • Revelation if revelation is something that we can all do

  • You know you me and Marcus Aurelia's right? That is a very different world than the world that

  • Muslims think they're living in but you just said Sam that we have to go in

  • This is why I use the the going down into the void to rescue your father metaphor

  • You just said that we have to and you've said this before it

  • I know you believe it as well that we have to go it back into the past and find

  • The the wisdom that can help guide us because we don't have to do this as if we're encountering

  • Everything for the first time and that's exactly the idea of going into the void to rescue your father

  • that's how bad in that is the

  • eternal age-old

  • Medication for the confrontation of the void and you said it yourself?

  • And so I don't know which it is is like do we have to go into the past to rescue what's best?

  • Given the understanding that there is something there worth rescuing or not. Is it pure rationality and nothing else moving forward?

  • unconstrained by convention it is it's it's just

  • again, it's it's I want our certainties and

  • I think we all in every other area of our lives

  • We agree about this effortlessly, right? If I'm pretending to be certain of something that you can sense

  • I have no good reason to be certain about you begin to mistrust me in

  • Every area if it's in business if it's in in sports

  • Or if I told you I knew that France was gonna win the World Cup

  • And I was absolutely sure and and and yet I magically didn't bet any money on it

  • I mean these are these are conversations we can have that everything else and yet on this topic of religion

  • people change the rules right and I'm just arguing that the rules should never the rules of by which we

  • Dole out our our credence

  • shouldn't change and

  • and if they don't it and again

  • It's we couldn't be misled by the the duration of the past. Maybe this is what this is

  • the the

  • the comparison of something like Scientology to Christianity is so

  • Invidious because we can practically meet l ron Hubbard, right? We've got film of him

  • Confabulating about the galaxies the ruled by by overlords whose names he magically knew right?

  • We we see we see the man behind the curtain

  • we don't see that with the Apostle Paul or anyone else who brought us the the the quote real religions and

  • Yet it's always just been human beings doing this

  • right

  • and and and if you go back far enough

  • They were doing it in a in a situation. That was completely

  • uncontaminated by the kinds of concerns we have as scientists and

  • Secular rational people for evidence and consistency and a knowledge of the past. I mean they had nothing even recorded

  • It had no mechanism by which to record their observations. No, and I'm going drop to you

  • Yes, because festival I saw was signs saying five minutes. Yes, and I'm very conscious of a number of things

  • apart from my own silence

  • And the

  • We had a long

  • Session on love just then and I refused to finish this evening on such a positive note

  • and

  • I'd like to turn that round. We're all them

  • in agreement on certain aspects free speech

  • civilized discourse on the most important matters and much more

  • but there's also I'm sure a lot we have in common of what we just can't bear and

  • I just wanted to hand over to both of you at some point

  • To give an idea not of your loves but of your present hates

  • That's Jordan

  • Hates

  • Well, I would say

  • That I spent a lot of time over the last thirty years

  • Trying to understand

  • The part of me that could be deeply satisfied as an ostrich prison guard and

  • I would say

  • that

  • That part is something that's worthy of hate and

  • I think the best way to overcome it

  • is to

  • Recognize it in yourself and to do everything possible

  • to constrain it and that's what's given me an

  • Overwhelming

  • horror both of the

  • nihilistic void and

  • the catastrophes of totalitarianism and

  • The reason that I've turned to the degree that I have to the analysis of religious traditions

  • Not losing my scientific perspective in the meantime is because I've done everything I could to

  • To extract out the wisdom necessary to understand how to deal with that bit of unredeemed evil that every bit of us possess

  • Well, I would say that I hate

  • Unnecessary suffering and especially my capacity for it and I see so much of my time

  • Conscious time moment a moment devoted to

  • This experience that should be familiar to all of you which is it to be captured by thoughts of the past or the future

  • which are

  • Which almost by definition have a

  • Mediocrity

  • so

  • Transcendent that it's just a it

  • it is what makes human life just

  • Just pure monotony and pettiness and and everything that religion

  • advertises itself as a corrective - right say that what I'm sensitive to is that someone like

  • SCI Utica - when he came to

  • This is Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher

  • When he came to America in the in the 50s, he saw his hosts and their neighbors

  • spending all their time

  • You know bragging about how well mowed their lawns were and and what just what new?

  • Chevrolet as they had purchased and he looked at all of this as just it's just the quintessence of

  • Desecration and lost opportunity and the lack of profundity and

  • For which for him? The the corrective obviously was Islam and

  • Half of that is right

  • It's possible to be totally captivated by the wrong things in this life and to make yourself not

  • it's so obviously being a guard at Auschwitz with a clear conscience is the

  • Extreme of the extremes of that happiness all that or being a guard at Auschwitz with happiness. Yes, okay

  • Yeah, even worse still right. So that's the extreme case enter and to realize that that is

  • that that that job was not only filled by psychopaths right that

  • Psychologically normal people could could be brought to that point. That's yeah. I recognize that

  • That's the situation we're in but most of us live our lives

  • in a different place where it's just

  • mediocrity and pettiness and and

  • and needless anxiety and

  • very dimly, we recognize the possibility of overcoming that on a day-to-day basis and

  • you know, honestly, I think

  • The atheism the lack of belief the lack of faith in an afterlife for instance the lack of the lack of belief in the notion

  • That you get everything you want or may get everything you want after you die

  • And helps

  • Lalit's leads to greater depth rather than to

  • Superficiality here. It's like when I kiss my daughter's goodnight

  • Right. It is with the understanding that

  • I

  • May never see them again

  • right

  • It's not with the assumption that if the roof caves in where we'll all be reunited in heaven along with our pets

  • Right, which is what both many people find consoling about faith

  • but that and and so what I would say what I hate in myself and what I hate in our

  • culture is

  • Everything that conspires to make the the preciousness and and and sacredness of the present moment

  • Difficult to realize and that's that's what I as the tide against which I keep slipping

  • Iemon I'm not going to answer my own question primarily because of the length of the list and the knowledge of the time

  • But I would say that if there's one thing I hate it's the fact that conversations like this

  • Civil discussion on the most important matters between people who have enormous amounts in common and have important

  • disagreements which engage with the past and

  • Which are going to be facilitated for a long time by knowledge of all the extraordinary progress. We're about to hit

  • Can take place in an arena like this?

  • with an audience like you

  • Who have all come out and now set sat here for?

  • two hours

  • And I think it's at any rate from my point of view

  • One of the most positive things I can imagine in the world at the moment that an evening like this is happening

  • with an audience like you

  • And

  • Unless either of you want to say anything I think on behalf of all of us

  • I just like to say what a thrill this is for us and

  • thank you to you and

  • I hope that this is an example of a constructive discussion of a kind that might even at some point catch on

  • So, thank you

  • Everyone please put your hands together for sam Harris Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. Hi

Well, good evening, London

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ADハリス/マレー/ピーターソンの議論。ロンドン (AD Harris/Murray/Peterson Discussion: London)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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