AD Harris/Murray/Peterson Discussion: London

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're 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. You really can't imagine how humbling this is to be here with you. You really just should take a moment to appreciate this from our side because Justin Bieber is not coming out to sing 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 these series of dialogues with Jordan. Now, this is the fourth event we've done and the second with Douglas. 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. 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 is mostly that so much of humanity is living under the sway of bad ideas. Bad ideas can cause good people, or at least totally normal people like ourselves, to do bad things all the while trying 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 me in particular opens up, which is how do you view religion in this contest of between good ideas and bad ideas? For me, religion emphatically gets placed on the side of bad and old and worth retiring ideas. By analogy, 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, who among you? You can signal this by applause or howls of enthusiasm. 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 in 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 neighbors believe that. There you go. I'm hearing—wait, wait, I'm hearing a heckler among the astrologers. Is that 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 percentage of you, I want to know, are religious? Which is to say, 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? Who among you? And now again, I want to hear applause or silence—believe in that sort of God?

Okay, so this is my concern. It's my concern with what Jordan has been saying in all these many months. I feel that you're in danger of misleading 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 fine to hold on to this old sword of God—this God that can hear prayers and can intervene or not in the lives of human beings. 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 devotion to them becomes irreconcilable among the true believers.

My concern is you could do exactly what you do with religion with astrology, right? It would be no more legitimate to obfuscate the boundary between clear thinking and superstition there because the traditional God and the doctrines that support him are no firmer ground than astrology is now today. Astrology—almost everything you say about religion—it's the fact that it's organized human thinking for thousands of years, that it's a cultural universal, that every group of people 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. In fact, some additional things can be said about astrology that would argue in its favor. For instance, astrology is profoundly egalitarian. You know, there's no bad zodiac sign. Whoever you are, everyone’s got a great zodiac sign.

It's just an 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 that’s just how easily falsifiable astrology is. But my concern is that we could live in a world where societies are shattered over different zodiac interpretations, and we don't live in that world for a 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. It is a preferred circumstance that we live in 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 full well that that's fundamentally a fool's errand, but there's something I want to point out: 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. 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 determined that our fates were in part written in the stars were people whose astrological beliefs were indistinguishable from their astronomical beliefs. You might think, "What in what sense is your fate written in the stars?" 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. 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. At a deeper level, 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. Part of the problem that Sam is pointing to is the difficulty of distinguishing valid poetic impulse from invalid poetic impulse. That really is a tremendous problem.

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 as hard-core pragmatic scientific belief has its origin in wild flights of poetic fantasy. It's also the case, by the way, that that's actually how your brain is organized, as far as I can tell. When you—and it isn't just me; there’s a very large research literature outlining the relative functions of the right and left hemispheres—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.

So Sam believes that what should happen is that the poetic and fictional domain should be supplanted by the rational domain. Well, let me just close the loop there: it's not quite. I think we need poetry and fiction, and there's more to engage 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. We want to be rigorous, there, and rational there. It's not that there's no place for mere creativity—well, I guess we're on the rails of rationality—fair enough then. But I mean, partly what we are disputing is the relative import of those two domains, let's say the heretic and the fictional and the rational, and the status of religion now in that.

Well, I have a hard time reconciling that to some degree with your more 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 if you're willing to make what would you say allowances for the necessity of the poetic imagination. Exactly how is that also encapsulated under the rubric of pure rationality?

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. So I'm making the case in my writing that democratic institutions not only grew out of the Judeo-Christian substrate, but 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 substructures—maybe the most obvious in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church—where the same metaphysical principles apply, but out of which a democracy did not emerge.

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. That seems to me to mirror something like the proper balance between the right hemisphere and its poetic imagination and the left hemisphere and its 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 intuitions are valid? I think we do that in part through negotiated agreement.

You know, because people have—look, even among the Catholics, say in the medieval time, there was an absolute horror of heresy. 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, was something extraordinary dangerous. 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, let me briefly address that, and I want to ask a question that brings Douglas directly in here. 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, 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. I would say 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 Douglas involved. So, 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 reality. Then we have other good things in life, like fiction 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 would acknowledge we've spoken about this before—useful fictions and cases, I would hope rare cases, where fiction is more adaptive or more useful than the truth, right?

That sometimes the truth 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' style or Christopher Hitchens' style of anti-theism—let's just throw the vicars 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 Jordan shares this—that so much of what is good in our Western-developed societies is at the very least maintained by maintaining so-called Judeo-Christian values or the remnants of our past religiosity and that there is a baby in the bathwater that can be difficult to discern.

We can’t empty the tub all at once because—and this is very much of—because there's a zero-sum contest with the religious enthusiasm we see coming from the Muslim world. Of course, the Muslim world is all over the world at the moment, so in that contest between a very older style of religiosity and theocracy and modernity, you are not as eager as I have been 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 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—when you're at the very end of your cognitive ability—and then they'll trust me, there's Jesus.

There's Jesus. 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 those 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 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 modern and rigorous rational thinking about everything from first principles, right? There’s something that the Iron Age scribes got right, and it's right for all time. Those are the applause I’m hearing.

However consciously or not, Jordan is telling them it's okay to stay, stick right there with a shard of the cross. I actually tried a little conscious Jesus smuggling on Sam to see how that would go in a discussion we had about the central archetype of superheroes, but I’m going to try something a little different tonight. I'm going to 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 seriously in the sense that I don't presume that I understand them and I presume that they're a mystery of sorts. 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 to keep what's in it, and to discard what's not in it, and why it's lasted and why it's had such a huge impact.

Well, I don't want to derail you, but we do understand that the first part of the process all too well. We know that 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. Sure, 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 issue that we really don’t understand. Fair enough, Sam, and I’m not saying that political, etc. 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 of departure when looking at these texts is one of essential radical ignorance. I don't know 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, and the vision had to do with a dialogue that I was having with my father. 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 watch your father across multiple contexts and you abstract out something like a spirit of the father. 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 Pneumatic tendency, which is a very powerful human cognitive tendency. 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. 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. This was a visionary experience, and then that all went away, and I spent months and months thinking about it.

So you guys can tell me what you think about this. It sort of stretches my cognitive ability 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 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, the question might be: does this spirit of the father have any reality other than the metaphorical? I would say damn right it has a reality.

And I can describe a biological reality, 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 something interesting to contemplate: what is it precisely that 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 orient themselves toward a certain task, and they produce a hierarchy around that task because whenever you implement a task, you produce a hierarchy. 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 is a consequence of male evaluation of men, and that’s occurred over millennia.

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 personified that spirit of the father in our religious imagery, and 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: apparently, the entire course of evolutionary history has conspired to produce human beings. We could argue that it could have been different, but it certainly hasn't been different.

That means that that selective spirit of the father has been part of the process that generated our very being, and it’s certainly possible that that collective spirit of the father might reflect something metaphysically fundamental about the structure of reality itself. Yes, well, insofar as I agree 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 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 products of almost certainly merely human brains are venerated for all time and considered uneditable and unagnorable by the majority of human beings.

Yes, it’s clear that revelation can devolve into but unbelievers are real. But there's a risk in all this, always is, and it often made critique. But 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, return 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 that thing—quote from Schopenhauer in the dialogue on religion when he says, you know, "The truth may be like water, and it needs vessels to carry it." When we were talking about this the other night, 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, you know, the non-embarrassing options that atheists have come up with. But it may also be 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 onto.

Well, no. I think the challenge here is—I mean, it feels that—well, first of all, we should notice that these comments 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 inevitably—and if it is, it's sort of took that format one moment the other night, whereas where you acknowledged that people of low intelligence are best placed in a conservative paradigm, like a traditionally conservative paradigm, because there’s less to think through, right?

Now, obviously, you don’t want your view on religion summarized by "It's good for stupid people." Well, I do—I do want to summarize it to some degree that way, because the opportunity again to put a foot in your mouth—I would say not only, I mean, the thing is we're all stupid. Some of us are far stupider than others. But we're not that stupid.

Well, but there's another problem, Sam, I think, 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, 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-soaked, 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! It's just not so. That Stalinism was the product of secularism or atheism, and nor was that product—it wasn't. And please, anyone who has this meme in your head, please just allow the next sentences I speak to just push it out, because I'm so sick of hearing 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 otherworldliness. It was based on—that’s a bit different—dogmatism through and through. It was based on a personality cult that grew up around figures like Stalin and Hitler. And now, these were—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 a fact! 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 extent, 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 II era in Europe. It’s still going on. We’re still going through this trying to work out what happened. And I have to say one thing I had—and you know I’m 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 were 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 robs 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, i.e., atheism, that gets you the gulag, right? Oh, there is! No, there’s not! I just—I let me just flesh out this point for one more 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, the people who guarded the camps, the people who put people on trains? What did they all have in common? What do 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 accountable.

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, because I think—I am watching and clapping. I’m not denying that! I’m saying that the attempt to make this a tennis match over the 20th century is a mistake. We’re still trying to work out what caused it. Religion had a role, a fizz-amader role, but the perpetual tennis match of it, I think—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 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. One of the things that I have worked out, I think partly from reading such people as Lévi-Strauss and Jung, was that there is an emergent idea of sovereignty that does involve being accountable to a god.

Here’s how I would justify that: 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. That actually bestowed certain ethical responsibilities on the ruler. And so, the ruler had to be a good Marduk in order to be considered 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 the great chaotic substructure of being and cutting it into pieces and making the habitable world, and also speaking words that were truthful—that had the power, the magic power of truth. 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.

The priests would humiliate him and ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn’t been a good Marduk, so he could remember that he had a responsibility to undertake this—this embodied relationship with these divine principles. 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. 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 important idea! Except you can also—you can get there the other way around. You can realize that 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—whatever the hell they want! But I’m saying if you’re going to believe something that’s compatible 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 a totally defensible and palpably true fact that even you could be the king of the universe and you are dependent on everyone around you to eat, to not be murdered by them.

I mean, it’s amazing—it’s amazing how precarious even a totalitarian regime is! I mean, the amazing thing is that these lasts 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 everyone is afraid to be the first person shot. But 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 wanted a hierarchy where you had a kind of philosopher-king who was 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 unsuperstitious one, where someone recognized, "Hey, this is how we’re doing it, but we are radically dependent on having being surrounded by as many happy people as possible." Well, look, I mean I don’t—in some profound sense, I disagree. What we’re actually late, you know, we’re living—this sounds like 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 moment there’s this growing chasm between them and those they know and the rest of humanity, and you wonder what level of wealth inequality will everyone find alarming? Some people are acting as though there’s no level that’s alarming, that there’s a kind of a law of nature that this thing can grow just impossibly to the point where we have trillionaires walking around, you know, driving in their motor caves, and it’s kind of 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.

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 ethic. So, 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 with which I’ve thought about a fair bit.” It’s like, “Well, okay, what’s the optimal solution for you?” Well, okay, 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 time frames, 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 multiple time frames.” Then you do the same thing with other people, which is the point you just made.

Well, it isn't just you because of who you are; there’s you and your family. 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 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—that point with regards to the ethic. But then one of the things that I would suggest is that because that’s an incredibly difficult rational calculation—and perhaps an impossible technical one, but certainly very difficult—that what has happened in part as our great narratives have emerged across time is that we have observed ourselves attempting to solve that multiple-identity, multiple-timeframe 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—and I think you actually accept some of that 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’s so deeply rooted that it precedes any notion of religious provincialism. It’s deeper than Judeo-Christian; it’s deeper than humanity on some level. At one point we talked about the Golden Rule, and I said that you think that 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.

Let me just add to the picture you sketched out. I completely agree with you; 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 who’s drinking his fourth scotch tonight? Well, that person will have some ethical relationship to the person who’s going to wake up with a hangover tomorrow morning. And 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 even where it’s best summarized not by capital. 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 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 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 a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, right? 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 taking the book deadly seriously. It’s an incredibly useful book, and 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 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 we’re finding it this hard to break, what do we think is going to happen in the Middle East or in sub-Saharan Africa? I mean, the moral progress we need to engineer is a common humanity coming together, those shared values. Those are perfectly credible arguments—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, Michael Shermer said the same thing recently. He basically said that atheism is a doctrine of negation. That's what I said with Rubin, that there isn't that positive ethos in 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 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 argument. I mean, I’m perfectly aware that making a deistic case or a case for religion in the face of the claims of the rationalist atheists is perhaps a very, very difficult thing to manage. But it is also the case that—and this is where I think we differ with regards to what happens, say, in the Soviet Union and perhaps also in Nazi Germany—is that when your doctrine demolishes the so-called literary or fictional substructure and leaves nothing behind, well, a doctrine needs to be provided because something will rush in to fill the void.

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 interesting criticism. You know, the Christian adherents elevators to truth to such a degree that it actually resulted in the demolition of its own dogmatic substructure. 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 we would be awash in both nihilism and totalitarian bloodshed.

And that is what happened in the 20th century. And so—and there’s another aspect to that, which is—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 remnant 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 there are other things to—that seem to be those 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—that! 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—that 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 welfare! But to be fair to the present, most music and most art and most architecture is no longer religious— that it has flown the perch provided by religion traditionally—and most of what we care about in increasingly cosmopolitan and, at the end, secular societies is not tied to religion in any direct way. 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 said, “What makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers?” And I thought—I practically lost the debate just 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 an increasingly attenuated commitment to the truth of the doctrine, and there are religions who haven’t moved an inch, right?

But I think we have to acknowledge that this movement in this direction is progress because what it actually is, at bottom, is increasing sensitivity to the difference between having good reasons and bad reasons for what you believe! And the fact that this book has been around forever is not a good reason. The fact that mommy hates it—well, it’s actually 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 something you can say about many of the biblical stories: they’re incredibly memorable, and that means that in some sense they’re adapted to the memory structures of boys. So is the mythology of ancient Greece. It’s incredibly memorable. But I don’t know. Look, all those gods are dead. The stories still can be useful. Yeah, the gods are, let’s say. 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 don’t have a fear of Hades drummed into you as a child by your parents.

No, the other thing that is lacking, as far as I can tell 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 particular one, I suppose you might think about as devoted to people with 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.

In 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. 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, or 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 takes the ethical realm to its extreme, in some sense. And then the next problem with that—and this is something that Douglas has been contemplating, I would say—is that 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 protect it?

Assuming that we do something of protection—I mean, we know what a few of those things are, and 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 orthodoxies— the blasphemy laws and the people who want, you know, apostates to be killed. We’re living in this case, Islam. So it’s that those are some of the sacred—I would even if we were going to list the sacred artifacts of art that keep our society worth living in.

It’s—I think the list is going to be very long before we start getting to the actual sacred objects of any one faith, but they’ll be things like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and 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 idiosyncratic reading of the domain—but when I look at something like 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 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 Christ that’s represented on the dome of a cathedral is something that’s projected up into celestial space. So 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 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 that’s also, in my reading, the divine image of God that men and women are made in. So what I see in the underlying metaphysic where you see superstition and fundamentalism—and look, fair enough! It’s not like I would ever argue that that’s not a danger. I see the imagistic 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? 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, 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 are people going when they built? I’m saying we could be in that world. What are we—? 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 representations. Yes, but my point is that we recognize that the literal claims of astrology—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 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, this would be a problem that rational people would recognize. I mean, astrology can be disproven in a single hour! You simply have to go to one hospital in one city sometime and find two unrelated children born in the same day within 20 feet of each other and follow their lives! And if they have different lives, then, 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, Sam, but maybe none. Well, maybe a revelatory—maybe that’s not it. It is just a matter of conscious agents like ourselves having better and better conversations? Well, it is certainly partly that! It is certainly partly that, but let me again—revelation, 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! That’s beautiful, which brings me to Marcus Aurelius. I read him with great pleasure and great— and amazement frankly! I mean that! It is such a modern and edifying take on ethics and one’s own personal well-being and just not being—just not being encumbered by thoughts and vanities 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 that—than almost any book I can name, and you don’t have to believe any bullshit to honor it!

Okay, let me offer you a continued explication here. 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, 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.

That’s associated with that image that’s cast upon the heavenly dome, and that isn’t a charitable reading, Sam! 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 with Greek! No, no, no, that’s not true! I could do it with Greek mythology! I could do it with any of these domains! But 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 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 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 being 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!

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—none is claiming that about the Meditations! And that’s a crucial difference! It’s a difference 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 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!

But how about if—how about a best-guess? Ya know! I know! Yes! 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 asking what you actually believe! I mean, there are several things I can ask! I mean, almost any one of these threads can pull the whole tapestry! But to take Christianity as an example, what do you believe about the origin of this sacred book, the Bible—old or 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, but so what does that mean? That you’re saying, you’re saying, 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, they often describe themselves as something approximating a conduit through which higher wisdom is pouring! Again, you’re dodging—! Shakespeare can say that! Yeah! Any writer can say that! Yeah! And it’s also the case that 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 also evading a very important issue, which is how do you quantitatively rank the contributions of literature without assuming that there’s a hierarchy of revelation? Although this a hierarchy of wisdom! Sure! There’s a hierarchy of human wisdom! I will grant you that every day of the week! 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 admits of a fact-based discussion about the nature of human consciousness! And why do you allow that as an exception? Because it’s not an exception as part of that data set! So it’s possible to have—! You can have spirituality! Even I’m not—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 there are 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 some, you know, alien supercomputer! Now, you can actually—I mean Nick Bostrom at Oxford gives a very cogent argument in defense of that thesis! Right now! You can deal with that on its merits!

I’m not saying the universe isn’t stranger than we suppose or 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—whatever I’d say about the biblical writings that are incredibly potent!

But so it’s almost—virtually impossible to write something! It’s virtually impossible to write something like Cain and Abel! It’s a paragraph in shame! You’re saying the Shakespeare of two, three thousand years ago couldn’t have written Genesis! He couldn’t have written Cain and Abel! Not in ten sentences?! 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 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—what 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, it’s reflective of a deeper reality! Otherwise, it wouldn’t be!

What I’m—okay, I’m in love with deeper realities! The deeper reality that something is wise is the story of Cain and Abel’s reflection! It’s the real landscape of mind that we are—that either takes great training, great luck, or pharmacological bombardment of the human brain to explore! There’s a way—there are ways to get there, there are ways to have the beatific vision, right?

And if—and we will—we understand this to some degree, but experientially—and we can understand it to some degree by the third-person methods of science. And 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! But because I was not brought 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 play that game of poker with you all day long! You know, surprise! Yes! Well, 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 go to Q&A.

But our experience so far has been that when we ask 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 seems to me that it’s an objective fact—it's louder—people have the floor! So really, it’s going to be a rude awakening when those applause are reversed!

However, yeah, we know it’s timeless! Was I going to ask something? Yeah! Something—let's go back to one of the core problems that we’ve been trying to address, which is the apparent failure perhaps of the rationalist atheist types to develop an active ethos that has sufficient beauty and motivational power to serve as a credible replacement for the religious rituals. There seems—there must be a reason why 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 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 that’s been a barrier to entry to thinking creatively about alternatives to religion, and so much of atheism and secularism is just a pitched battle against the eroding power of religion!

And when religion really has its power, right? We know what it’s like, you know! Again, I think what we spoke about this at one point, 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 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! There was a—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 an amazing fact, right?

When will that change? Someday it will! But we have just had almost no time to talk! If it’s—to experiment in this base, and it involves 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 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, i.e., a leap into pure rationality, or whether you might decide that 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 that’s—yeah, I guess at the moment! 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 into them say something, and obviously driven to it. I saw was signs saying five minutes! Yes, and I’m very conscious of a number of things apart from my own silence! And we had a long session on love just then, and I refuse to finish this evening on such a positive note! 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.

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 extract out the wisdom necessary to understand how to deal with that bit of unredeemed evil that every bit of us possesses. 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-to-moment—devoted to this experience that should be familiar to all of you, which is 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 is what makes human life just pure monotony and pettiness.

And everything that religion advertises itself as a corrective—right—say that what I’m sensitive to is that someone like S.I. Utica—when he came to—Osama bin Laden’s favorite philosopher—when he came to America 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 about what new Chevrolet 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!

For him, 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—it’s the extreme of the extremes of that happiness! So all that, or being a guard at Auschwitz with happiness! Yes! Okay, yeah, even worse still, right? So that’s the extreme case, and to realize that that job was not only filled by psychopaths, right? That psychologically normal people 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 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 leads to—greater depth rather than to superficiality!

Here’s like, when I kiss my daughters 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 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 so what I would say, what I hate in myself and what I hate in our culture is everything that conspires to make the preciousness and sacredness of the present moment difficult to realize!

And that’s—that’s what I—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!

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’d 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.