An Atheist in the Realm of Myth | Stephen Fry | EP 169

I'd like to announce my new book "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." Unlike my previous book, "Beyond Order" explores, as its overarching theme, how the dangers of too much security and control might be profitably avoided. Because what we understand is insufficient, we need to keep one foot within order while stretching the other tentatively into the beyond. I hope that people find this book as helpful personally as they seem to have found the first set of 12 rules.

[Music]

I'm pleased to have with me today Mr. Stephen Fry, who's been described by more than one of his compatriots as a national treasure. If you want to develop a quick inferiority complex, I would recommend going and reading Stephen's Wikipedia page. He's a prolific actor, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, poet, intellectual, comedian, television presenter, advertisement presenter, magazine author, and autobiographist.

It's a remarkable body of achievement and an intellectual figure in his own right, who's known at least in part for his discussions with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the humanist atheists. It's partly for that reason that I wanted to talk to him. I met Stephen, much to my pleasure, during the Monk debates in Toronto about three years ago, when we discussed political correctness, which is one of the things I want to talk about and touch upon today. But mostly, I'm interested in talking to him about the relationship between narrative and empiricism and rationalism.

So thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me.

Stephen Fry: My pleasure! Lovely to be here.

So let me ask you, and then we'll go forward formally, what do you think would be best? What do you think would have the greatest impact with regard to our conversation, as far as you're concerned? I mean, there must have been a reason, some reason apart from just being agreeable, to do this. What do you think we might be able to accomplish?

Stephen Fry: Well, uniquely, it's a little like that Monk debate we shared a platform with. It's really because I'm so tired and distressed and worried by the great physio that has opened up the culture wars, whatever we like to call it. The assumption that there are your friends and your enemy, and no ground in between, no commonality, no cohesion of viewpoint, no shared things that can happen between people who apparently represent different ways of looking at the world or different ways of trying to organize the world or whatever it might be.

And the very fact that I knew some friends of mine who disapproved of you would think I was doing something wrong by associating with you, and I hope our debate showed that that wasn't the case. I felt this would take that further forward too. I do think the last best hope for our society, in whichever way you want to look at it—whether you want to look at it as some version of the West being able to stand up to the pressures put upon it by China and Russia and other countries that are less interested in liberality in economics and in the traditional political sense of liberality or kind of open society, whatever you want to call it—is that if we continue to fracture and we continue to find enemies amongst our own kind so much, then really it's a very, very sad look at. I mean, I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think you are a very interesting thinker and writer and talker.

But it's clear that there are many who would really admire you and like you and follow you, with whom I would have less in common than perhaps with you. I think on both sides, if you want to call them sides, it's very easy to be a bit lax about disavowing people who like one but whom one doesn't like, if you see what I mean.

It's so flattering to the ego to have followers, to have people say, "You're great! I love the things you say!" That it's quite hard to say, "No, but you've misunderstood me. That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all," to quote Eliot.

So obviously, I've spent some time pointing out what I regard as the excesses of the radical left. I've certainly spent no shortage of time pointing out the excesses of the radical right in my classes particularly, but I'm not publicly known for that specifically. It's my resistance, or, yeah, my resistance to certain maneuvers on the side of the radical left that propelled me into the public eye.

I've thought for a long while that the only people who can probably control the excesses of the radical left are people who are in the moderate left, not people on the right or on the extreme right. They're out of the argument to begin with. This is associated, in some sense, with the difficulty that you just described. If people have an affiliation with you, then it's much more difficult to differentiate perhaps where you should.

And so perhaps you see on the left the moderate leftists and then the more extreme leftists, but the extreme leftists are also on the left, and they're friends of a type. Drawing that line is extraordinarily difficult, and that's actually part of the reason why I'm leery of any attempts to restrict free speech. Because in those cases of difficult differentiation, the only possible solution we have is dialogue about the problem; about exactly where to draw the line, because otherwise we can't. No one knows how.

And I guess it's because extremism also exists in degrees. And so you say, "Where do you stop?" And, well, that's very, very difficult to say, especially among those who think like you, except for certain exceptions.

Stephen Fry: Yes, this is very true, and it's a sort of basic philosophical point, isn't it, that you can draw lines between what is reasonable, and they can be very narrow lines, but if you keep drawing them out, they become extreme.

So for example, you can have what some people might regard as a reasonable age for the termination of a pregnancy due to some issue, but if you keep adding days to it, it then becomes a serious problem. Anything in that nature of differentiating and drawing lines is bound to cause that to be a problem.

I, however, am less confident than you are that the left would be persuaded by someone like me, the hard left, if one wants to call it that, or the radical left, wherever it is. And this may sound a bit like boo-hooing, which is very easy to do, but if you're a soft liberal, as I think of myself, I can't find any other designation but that sort of thing, the centrist.

These are insults to the left. I mean, in English politics recently, for example, "centrist" was the boo word of the Corbynistas, the more socialist end of the Labour Party, a party I've been a member of since I could vote. And I felt very, very buffeted about and despised for my... Oh dear, but really. I think of myself as a sort of cardigan-slippered old fool who is loathed on both sides.

And it is, of course, historically true that in the 1930s, which is the decade we always go back to when we were very worried about the direction we're traveling in now, the communists and the Nazis both were absolutely of one mind when it came to people like me: Jewish, semi-intellectual, soft liberals who won’t... Oh no, but shush.

Because we didn't have any positivity, any certainty; we didn’t turn— and, as I say, I know it sounds like I'm taking on a victim status here, that oh poor liberals. Because after all, we've ruled the world for 200 years. And part of the political and cultural argument in the world at the moment is that the liberal project, the enlightenment project, if you want to call it that, has failed.

I would say we've cooperatively guided the world, because I think "ruled" is the wrong term. Tyrants rule. And it's a really important distinction because the power is grounded in the sovereignty of the people. And imperfect as that may be, it's more grounded in the sovereignty of the people than any other system we've ever managed to whip up.

So I mean, it's difficult. Also because it... Centrally, it's difficult to make centrism dramatic and romantic. It's much easier to make extremism dramatic and romantic, and that's one of its primary attractions. And that attraction should not be underestimated.

And it's partly why I'm so interested in talking to you, because you are this incredible dramatist. You have this unbelievable talent that manifests itself in a manner that I thought I was reading your weak Wikipedia biography in some detail, and it requires that I thought if you want to give yourself an inferiority complex quickly, going through your Wikipedia entry is a very good way of doing that.

I mean, you have 50 films and like 40 TV shows and five novels and seven autobiographies and a career in comedy that was absolutely outstanding. That would have been a lifetime achievement in and of itself, and a whole variety of honorary doctorates. And you have an intellectual end that’s not trivial as well because you were involved with Hitchens and Dawkins and the horsemen of the atheist movement.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, and I want to really talk to you about that too because I especially am interested in your opinions because of all those people, you're the one that has the most connection with drama and literature and fiction. And you just published a couple of books: "Mythos," "Heroism," "Heroes," and there's a third one in that trilogy. It just escapes my mind. "Troy."

So you're obviously extraordinarily sensitive to the power and necessity of literary accounts, but then you're also a humanistic atheist. And that's very... I'm very curious about that. I mean, someone like Dawkins, he's so rational that I think for him, and I don't know if this is fair, it might be a bit of a stereotype, but it'll do for rhetorical purposes, he's not gripped by drama in the same way you are.

And there's a truth in drama that's not trivial, and that truth is allied with religious truth. So I want to go there too.

Stephen Fry: I can't speak for Richard. It's just been his 80th birthday, so we wish him happy birthday. He's not the shrill beast of atheism that some people regard him as, but I won't speak for him, obviously.

But what I would say is that, yes, you're right. He's a rationalist, and I don't think I am. I think I'm an empiricist. And I think that's part of my love of drama and myth and story and literature and history. Even these are all to do with experience, with human experience.

The register of human experience of testing an idea against what actually happens and how people actually behave is rather than devising a system of reason. And it's not the reason and empiricism are always absolutely opposed, but they sometimes are. In the history of science, they have been. You know, you could argue that Pascal was a rationalist, and Newton was an empiricist.

For all his great mathematics and so on, he actually took a piece of cardboard and punched a hole in it, which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn’t do.

Jordan Peterson: It's experimenting in the crucible of human activity and observing what people say and hear. These are the things comedians do all the time. The comic mode is to hear somebody say something grand and then say, "Yes, but..." G.K. Chesterton is a perfect example of that.

Now he was certainly no atheist. He was a very religious man indeed and a great hero of the Catholic Church. Some people even believe he should be, if not beatified, even sanctified. But he was a huge influence on me as a teenager growing up because I read his essays.

And here's an example: he opens an essay by saying, "I read in the newspaper the other day this following sentence: 'At the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, modern woman rises to take her place in society.'" And I thought to myself, "This is very good news, very encouraging. I wonder if it's true." Let's see now, "Who's a modern woman? Oh, Mrs. Buttons. She comes in to clean every Tuesday and every Thursday. She lives in Clapham. She comes on the omnibus, and she scrubs the floors and she has three children."

And if I say to myself, "At the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, Mrs. Buttons rises to take her place in society," I realize the sentence is not only nonsense. It's pernicious nonsense.

And that's a sort of almost comical example, really, of saying you don't trust an abstract statement. You do not trust someone saying "A plus A equals 2A," because there is no such thing in the universe as "A." And although we're all capable of doing substitutional metaphorizing, or algebra, as it were, with ideas, the fact is it's much better to say one thing of something that is real that we know plus another thing of something that is real that we know, and have experienced, is two of those things. Once you start abstracting—and that's what rationalism often is—it's going off on an algebraic journey which can produce beautiful thoughts and ideas and beautiful schemes.

But for me, it is beating that out on the anvil of human experience that is the absolute key, and it's a non-intellectual tradition, empiricism. And I think we're in danger of losing it in a way because...

Jordan Peterson: Okay, I want to unpack three things that you just said that are very, very complicated.

So the first thing you did was draw a distinction between rationalism and empiricism, and you associated Dawkins more with rationalism and yourself more with empiricism. Yes, entirely, but, yeah. No, no, no, fair enough just as an example. And you did that in an attempt to also describe the effect or influence or consequence or reason for your interest in drama, or for the fact that drama grips you. So I want to start with the distinction between human or between empiricism and rationalism, so everyone listening understands.

So walk us through that first.

Stephen Fry: Well, empiricism is an intellectual tradition of using experience or trial and error, or experiment, to prove or disprove or to investigate an idea. So if you have an idea, I mean, a perfect example is in the 18th and 19th century, a lot of women were dying at childbirth— appalling deaths, what we would now call septicemia. The babies and the mothers were dying and nobody knew why, because there was no germ theory. Nobody had an idea that there were these tiny things that could infect our systems.

So people tried to reason, and they said, "Well, maybe it's the smell because it's a bad smell," and there was a miasma theory. And other people just said it was God, or other people said that it was some moral quality on the part of the women. But a man called Semmelweis in Hungary, Ignaz Semmelweis, tried lots of different experiments.

He chose a certain number of people to do different things, on what we now call cohort testing. You know, not quite random double-blind testing, such as used in medicine to prove the efficacy of something. But eventually, he got a group of medical students attending on these births to wash their hands before doing it. It was an almost random thing to do. And suddenly, the death rate dropped—I mean, absolutely plummeted. And the reward for Semmelweis? He was sent to a madhouse because nobody believed where he died.

Because the rationalists said, "There's no reason that that could be right." But a true empiricist would say, "It almost doesn't matter what the reason is; the fact is it's repeatable and verifiable." And even not understanding—because it took later till Pasteur and microscopes could show what the process was. He actually did end up in a... you know, and he's a hero, man.

I ran—actually went to Budapest to go to the Ignaz Semmelweis museum in Buda, just to sort of pay homage to this remarkable man. And I mean, it's a bit unfair on the doctors—they had no reason to know, if you like. But that's the point. They had no reason to know.

An example we all deal with, empiricism, which can be very annoying, is in insurance. What's called actuarial tables or actuaries are people in insurance companies who look at the statistics, and if they discovered that when your name is Jordan, you are 10% more likely to have a car crash, you would pay 10% more of premium on your insurance. And it's no good you saying, "But why?" They would just say, "Those are the odds." That's the empirical truth— that's the epidemiology of accidents, if you like, as that people call Jordan, or more famously, of course, actors pay more.

And you can then try and look for a reason, and that's a very valuable thing to do, of course. We all want to know the reason. But sometimes, I think there is a beauty in testing and looking and seeing and trying things out. Experimenting is not to discard reason, that the two go together in finding out the truth.

So how do you associate that with your interest in literature and your clear recognition that the dramatic end of existence is valuable?

Stephen Fry: Well, I suppose it's, I mean, in an obvious way, all literature—people, literature snobs I might say—will look at politics. I mean, all through my life, I've looked at people like, I don’t know, Margaret Thatcher or indeed, on the other side, Gordon Brown, and thought, "If only they read Shakespeare! Why do people read books on political philosophy and books on this being a good idea on how parliamentary history without actually reading about how humans behave?"

And seeing how evil and good are played out in drama, because I think, not just like teacher but ceremony and ritual are extremely important in understanding everything. And you don't have to be religious to believe in ritual. I love liturgy. I love church liturgy. I am absolutely passionate about hymns and psalms and the Eucharist and the language of it. You know, the outward invisible sign of an inward invisible grace is one of the most beautiful phrases I think ever written in the Book of the Eucharist of the Episcopalian Church, as Americans call it, all the Anglican churches, we call it.

And there are magnificent shortcuts available if you look at ceremony and the dramatization of human issues rather than attempting to abstract some essence from them, some truth that you can say that is applicable to all. In a sense, we're all children who have to be shown puppets before we understand. Do you know what I mean?

Jordan Peterson: Yes, yeah. I've stopped.

Stephen Fry: Sorry, no, no, no. Well, it's just... it's just stopped and made me think.

I mean, the reason I got interested in religious thinking, I went down the pathway that you're describing. I mean, that's why I got interested in religious thinking, because from a psychological perspective, I mean, the first thing that I realized, and I believe this is what you just pointed out, is that there are truths embedded in fiction, for example, or in spectacle, ritual, drama.

And well then you ask, "Well, what is it?" Well, those are attractive and they're entertaining, and they automatically engage our interest. But way more than that, they're also that which culture centers itself around. Greek tragedy, for example, which seemed to be integrally associated with the elusive Greek mystery, is something that we know very little about, unfortunately.

But for me—and I was influenced by Carl Jung in this mode of thinking—culture is nested inside a narrative structure by necessity. I even believe that science is nested inside a narrative structure because the narrative structure is what makes the science practically applicable and useful.

Yes, what else is the standard model but another way of saying a narrative structure? The standard model is just that, and that is the basis of physics today, isn't it? It's a story.

Well, the idea that we have that science is a useful endeavor, the fact that we're looking to the material world for redemption, that's all part of the narrative. And I was absolutely staggered by Jung’s analysis of the emergence of science out of alchemy, and his notion was that the alchemical tradition was a 2000-year-old dream, a narrative dream, counter-position to Christianity, with its emphasis on abstracted spirituality, suggesting that what we lacked could be found in the depths of the material world.

And so there was this motivational dream that if we paid enough attention to the transformations of matter, we could find that which would confer upon us eternal life, infinite health, and wealth. And Jung's point was, well, until that dream was in place, there would be no motivation to undertake the process of the painstaking analysis of the material world that didn't produce any immediate gratification.

And it took thousands of years for that idea to assemble itself with enough force so that we could start to have scientists. The narrative was operative thousands of years before the technical process was instituted, and it laid the groundwork for it.

And maybe also took that time for the brain of humans—if you believe Julian Jaynes, and I kind of do, in a metaphorical way—I don't know if you know his book?

Stephen Fry: Yes, I'm sure you do.

Yeah. That maybe our brains weren't even capable of processing in that way around the time of between language and writing. You know, that sort of time... We were finding ways of describing the world. In the Egyptian, I believe I'm right in saying that this is the derivation, "el hamet," the magic became alchemy, which then became chemistry. And it became drilled down into an investigation. But first, you had to believe that there was a "ahem"—it was a magic inside everything, inside substance, to which we could be tuned.

Stephen Fry: Yes, right, a redemptive magic, yes, if you like. And this is not to repudiate science and numbers. You know, a very good friend of mine, who was a priest, said, “You know, physics is a theology that makes machines work.” And there's some sort of truth in that.

I love, for example, the story—I tell it in a footnote in "Mythos," but it's very, very early on in Greek mythology—when the first—the primal entities, the primal deities are Uranus, the sky, or Uranus, as children we love to call him, and Gaia, the earth, who mate. The sky and the earth mate is a common theme in what they call a "mythos" in lots of different myths, as you can imagine.

The sky and the earth mate, and they produce whatever's in between, the zone which we inhabit between sky and earth, and that next generation are called the Titans, of course. And there's the famous story of the birth of Zeus. His father, the Titan, eats all his children, and the mother, Rhea, is determined that the last child, Zeus, shouldn't be eaten.

So she goes and gets a rock from close by where she lives on Mount Cythus and covers it in swaddling and hides it under her legs and then makes the child—makes the noise of childbirth. And Kronos, the Titan, comes, thinks it's a new baby, swallows it whole. The actual baby is then born on Crete and becomes Zeus, the leader of the next generation of gods.

But the stone she takes is from Magnesia, in Greece, which is near Thessaly. It's a stone that the Greeks have noticed had a very extraordinary property, which is the most interesting property that any object can have on earth and is very rare, in that it can attract things remotely from a distance without there being a physical force connecting them.

Apparently, a piece of fluff or paper could fly towards this stone from Magnesia. And so stones that have this property are named after that part of the world. They're called magnetites, and from magnetites, we get magnets.

And the story of magnets and how magnets were then joined by Thompson and Faraday and others to make and incorporate them to make the electromotive force that allows you and me to talk the way we do, and to use that action at a distance, which science is brilliant at turning into extraordinary magical machines.

The Greek for "at a distance" is "tele." So it's telecommunication, telephone, television, and teleporting. Anything that goes from one distant telegrams and tele, you know, and so on. And that is the—and gravity is the same thing.

Something moves and there's nothing between it, and it makes us thrill, and science can do that. And what we've never found a way to do is— or at least what we try to find a bit is to do the same with our fellow people, but our fellow people are surprisingly stable. There are magnets around the place, and there's gold, and there's stuff, and you dig it up, and you can do terrible damage to it, as we have.

But we have moved from small groups, clans, to tribes, to nations, to this strange myth of the nation and so on. And the individuals within it are much less controllable than the objects around us. And yet we can control those objects so superbly that it gives us an idea that we have a special place and a special power.

And it's, I suppose, really, what we want to do is to reconnect ourselves to the same motive forces that are thrilling, like magnetism and electricity, that exist in also all throughout nature. That we look at them, you know? Which of us can't honestly almost sob with joy when spring happens, and you see that once again these leaves are being pushed out of dead branches and blossoms there, and insects are flying towards them?

There's this fantastic process going on, and somehow we've allowed ourselves to feel outside it, as if we are special. We've given ourselves a godlike status, which is very dangerous, I think, and very foolish. And the more I look back, the more confidence I have in looking forward. I suppose that's one of the other reasons I love myth so much.

Jordan Peterson: So, okay, so, you described yourself as an empiricist, and then you talked about—you started to talk about the attraction that the mythological and narrative world has for you, and some of the reasons for that. But you also just differentiated between you and Dawkins to some degree, and empirics.

And so while I'm curious about—

Stephen Fry: Oh, but I mean he's— I mean, as I said, I can't speak for him, but you use the word wrestling, and I understand originally. And I don't have any particular points of disagreement with him. I'm really fond of him. He's a friend.

And I only feel sorry sometimes that—and this is a cheap point—it's, you know, where most of—it’s a bit fed up with this attitude that it's all about presentation. And I could argue that Richard's presentation, his passion is real, his love of science is real, his love of the joy and the wonder of discovery is real. He's written books on wonder, which is a huge and marvelous and much under-explored human quality and a primary religious instinct.

Yes. And yet, science has shown us—and it really can just can't be contested—that we are part of a continuum of life. DNA demonstrates this. The DNA we share, not just with our close ape-like and other mammals but also with plants and flowers that also have DNA, and as we know, soda viruses and RNA.

And yet, I don't think— I think it's fair to say that blackbirds don't look at the sunset and go, "My God, that's so beautiful. Did you see that? I want to paint it. I want to remember it. How is it?"

You know? This sense of literally of marveling—it’s the only world we know. When we're born, we don't think, "Of course, there are 70,000 other globes with much better sunsets." This is the only thing we've ever seen. And yet it staggers us, it surprises us. We're surprised by what is the case, to use the phrase that Wittgenstein loved. You know, the case is everything around us, and we don't know another one.

And yet we go, "Wow! Why should we go wow at what is absolutely ordinary?" There must be a reason. I suspect that we are astonished by the everyday, by the fact of what we see when we look out of the window or when we go for a walk.

Stephen Fry: We're astonished by buds and grass and rabbits and sky and clouds, and these things aren't... well, we're astonished. We're astonished by what we want to imitate.

Yes.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, and I mean, I've thought about that idea for a long time. It's not a casual response to your question.

Jordan Peterson: Well, the sun is a hero. The sun is the hero that fights the darkness at night and rises anew in the morning. The sun is associated with consciousness.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, and we have to imitate the hero, and we see what we have to imitate everywhere. And it reduces us to a state of awe. And awe is an invitation to imitate and imagine. So you see what you are not yet, but what you could be. And you need to see that because you need to turn into what you could be, because what you are is not sufficient to redeem you.

Stephen Fry: Well, I see that from a Jungian point of view and in a Joseph Campbell-y sort of way too, but in terms of the way myths and then religions developed. The idea of imitating these symbols of complete power and creation, like the sun, whether it's Ra or whether it's Apollo or any other deity or sense of solar greatness, you are supposed to supplicate or sacrifice to or acknowledge your weakness too.

But we could look at sacrifice. Look at sacrifice. That's a great inward point. So I ask my students, especially the children of first-generation immigrants, "What did your parents sacrifice to put you here?" And they can answer that instantly.

And sacrifice—like we look at ancient sacrifice and we think about it as something primordial or even detestable, especially in its more extreme forms, and no wonder. But we had to act out sacrifice before we could psychologize it and understand it. And what we learned—and this is absolutely crucial, this issue of sacrifice—what we learned was that if we gave up something that we valued in the present—and so that could be a false idol, that's one way of thinking about it. If we gave up something in the present that we valued, the future would improve. We learned that we could bargain with reality itself by sacrificing counterproductive values to move ahead. And so we acted that out long before we could make it into a psychological truism.

And so it’s there is that supplication element, but it's also the case that you should be prostrate in some sense in front of what's ultimately ideal because otherwise you don't have the proper humility.

Stephen Fry: Yes, I mean, I see what you're saying again, and it makes rational sense. But then the empiricist in me says, "Well, okay, I'm the mother of some of those children in Mexico who are being slaughtered to the gods in order to make the harvest better."

Lo and behold, it doesn't work, because there is no causal relation between sacrificing children on a pyramid in Texas and the harvest improving. In fact, there may well be an earthquake the next day and more people die. That very often did happen in whole civilizations. Mayan and Mexican and others disappeared, and the more they were threatened, the more they sacrificed, and the less use it was.

So there was no... It may have had a psychological purpose that I don't know. I mean, it seems to me the psychology of sacrificing your children or even your very rare cattle upon which you may depend for a year to eat to gods who will apparently placate you by making a better harvest or not send a tidal wave this year that will destroy the port and all the other things that our ancestors found in the contingent world in which they—an unstable world in which they lived.

So I can understand why a 19th-century figure like Frazer in "The Golden Bough" or like Mary McCarthy or Jung or Joseph Campbell can make wonderful myths out of myths. They're telling a story about stories and telling us what they mean.

Well, I don't refute it. I repudiate—I allow myself to believe, "No, actually, yes, it's all very well, and you can build a very nice theory about what these myths mean and what these heroes are and what these quests are and how they're only seven stories."

And yes, but again, the stand-up comedian type of empiricist in me says, "Okay, so I'm a small Roman person under those circumstances. And what is this really meaning to me? I'm sorry."

No, I've got, as Wordsworth put it, "It's getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life gets better and enjoying life with my friends."

But to erect it into a spiritual language and a theater of human meaning is delightful, but I think we have to recognize that it's a game to some extent. It may indeed be true.

I know, I'm not saying this to demolish your argument, but I'm saying it’s...

Jordan Peterson: Yes, but you know in terms of—

The buts are important.

Stephen Fry: Yeah, the skepticism is necessary because you don't want to leave anything standing except that which can't survive the onslaught.

Yes, and there's no doubt that the sacrificial idea can go dreadfully wrong.

Jordan Peterson: But I would say that that's in the nature of the attempt because it's obviously the case that sometimes you make sacrifices toward a certain end which is clearly an attempt to bargain with the future as if it's something that can be bargained with.

Stephen Fry: Yes, but sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Later, after that, the cultures of sacrifice around the world, there came a new system where it was the gods who sacrificed themselves, which is like the Christian myth or the many of the dying and re-born kings in various myths that James Frazer, in particular, wrote about.

Their Christ ransomed himself, as it was. So suddenly, it’s as if humans said, "This sacrifice is getting us nowhere. If God really loves us, he would sacrifice himself or herself for us."

And that is one of the meanings of the incarnation and the Christian story, is it not? And it's not unique in any way. There are many other stories of divine figures being sacrificed to save the society that they make themselves flash.

You sacrifice your short-term impulses for the long-term good, I suppose that’s one way of thinking about the discovery of the future.

Stephen Fry: That speaks very well to your books because underlying both your excellent books of rules and behavior is that—that I don't mean this in a bad way—the simple truth of deferred pleasure being something that seems to be—or deferred advantage being something that seems to have gone out of human culture lately.

That we, you know, we're all a bit verruckt and we want it now. And, as you said about sacrifices, you suffer or you find—in some way, you find—you know, in some way, perhaps, what pleasure might positively be yours now in order to have a future advantage.

Jordan Peterson: Right. And then we have an immense discussion that lasts forever about what that optimal future advantage is, and that’s part of this religious investigation because you might say—and this is something that's manifesting itself in Christianity—which is, "Well, we're trying to produce something better in the future."

And so then you ask yourself, "What does better mean?" That's the first question. And what, what does the future mean? Those need to be answered. And then the final question is, "Well, what's the most appropriate sacrifice?"

And so you get an extreme version of that in Christianity, hence its narrative power, which is, "Well, you sacrifice the most valuable possible thing for what's of ultimate eternal value."

That's the underlying structure, and in some sense, it hits a limit because it's God himself who sacrificed, and the purpose of the sacrifice is the establishment, the redemption of humanity and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven eternally, so that there isn't anything better than that by definition.

Stephen Fry: Well, I know if I was to raise Althusser or a Marxist view of this and say that it's about the power over the people, which basically denies them any kind of pleasure now on a promise, which is unprovable of a future glorification of some kind or another, either for their children or for themselves in a heaven whose direction they can't point to.

And then not just Althusserian Marxists, of course, many, many secularists and atheists, like myself, have said, you know, there is a story to be told about religion basically stopping ordinary citizens from having any say in their life and their world.

They are told what the truth is. They are told where power comes from and where it resides. And they are told that their poverty and their subservience and their sacrifice are for the greater good, and they must take that authority on its word.

And the meaning of the Enlightenment was the throwing off of those shackles of Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which constantly laid down these categories of authority. People began to question them and say, "I wonder..."

Because I think we might just talk about, as I know it interests you, the distinction between a hierarchy and a network in terms of how you order society. And these religions and these sacrifices all came in hierarchical societies rather, it seems, in ones that might be called networked, nodal, or some other word.

I know Neil Ferguson has written about this, hasn't he? In the book that I can’t remember its title. It's got the word tower in it. But it's one of the objections people have to the modern liberally produced world is that morality is relative, and that hierarchies are toppled, and that power and authority are no longer seen to reside in something, some agreement.

You know, the curtain is pulled away and the wizard of Oz is revealed to be nothing, a silly, foolish, snake-oil salesman. And the answer lies within ourselves.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so I have to stop you there because I can't answer. I won't be able to ask this question. There are so many things that you're saying that I want to ask about.

Stephen Fry: There's okay, so with regards to the idea of the opiate of the masses, okay, well, the first thing we might note, I think reasonably, is that Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses. And whatever flaws Judeo-Christianity might have had in terms of its corruption was certainly matched by the instantaneous corruption in its more radical manifestations.

Jordan Peterson: Yes, but the fact that a Marxist has a critique of religion does not mean that it falls because Marxism itself falls, okay? So that’s a second question there.

And so the second question would be something like, is the corruption of the church that you described intrinsic to the nature of the church and its doctrine, or is it the corruption of something that's valuable?

Now let me make two arguments for that. One is that the corruption is intrinsic, and the whole thing should be just dispensed with, and I would say that that's the perspective of the Four Horsemen fundamentally.

Stephen Fry: Yeah. And it might—and of religious people themselves. I mean, Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the prayer book during the Reformation, there's a great phrase in it: "There was not anything by the wit of man devised that hath not been in time in part or in whole corrupted."

Jordan Peterson: Absolutely, and I think that's also an existential truth. I mean, you just talked about Kronos: Kronos devours his sons. Well, Kronos is the archetypal tyrant, and he's also time. And both time and the archetypal tyrant devour their own sons. So if you're a tyrannical father or a tyrannical statesman, instead of encouraging the development of the young people in your charge, you'll crush them and destroy them.

Stephen Fry: He also castrated his own father.

Jordan Peterson: So I would say that that's something like demolition of the utility of tradition. I mean, in Egyptian mythology, you see Horus, who's the son fundamentally, both the actual son, the heavenly son, and the son of Osiris. And for the Egyptians, Horus and Osiris had to rule simultaneously. So Horus didn't castrate Osiris; he rescued him from the underworld and joined with him, so that the tradition, which was represented by Osiris, which had a Kronos-like element because it was tyrannical and destructive, had to be allied with Horus, who was essentially something like I would say something like empirical attention because the symbol is the eye.

And so it was like alert tradition. And that's different than the castration of the father. That's the rescuing of the father from the underworld when he becomes corrupt and senile.

Now, when you just published "Mythos," we refer to this mythos, heroes, and Troy. So I would say—and you tell me if I'm wrong, but from the outside, it looks to me like you're involved in a philosophical archaeological expedition to find things of value in the past and to bring them forward into the future.

And that's what I am trying to do, at least for me. I would say, with regards to Christianity, it's like I know the critiques, and I understand the critiques, and it's not like I'm not, what would you call, sensitive to their finer points.

It is an open question, right? How much of the tradition—look, I know in Britain right now, there are people who say that flying the flag is an imperialist act. And so what are they asking? They're saying, "Well, is our tradition so irredeemably corrupt that we have to abandon it wholeheartedly?"

Stephen Fry: I can speak to this very directly because it's something I find very, very interesting. Again, it’s a—so much of it is historical ignorance. For those who are obsessed with the flag and the politicians who want to fly the flag, I would urge them to read Rudyard Kipling, who is supposed to be, in some people's eyes, the poet and bard of the British Empire, of the Raj, the spokesman for this very thing.

There is a scene in one of his masterpieces, "Stalky & Co," the book set in a school, where a politician comes to the school to give a speech and he has a flag. And the school children are outraged, absolutely horrified. This takes place in the second year of Gladstone’s five-year premiership at the absolute height of the British Empire. The Queen is on the throne; her crown and her flag are fluttering all over the world.

These boys are at this special school, which is actually a kind of feeder for the British Empire. They're all being sent out to fight in Afghan wars and in India and in the Boer War later on. And Kipling describes how they die. But the idea to them that anybody would dare to wave a flag and ask them to value it was so disgusting they could barely speak.

It's a very extraordinary passage where he describes their horror at this politician using the flag and claiming to own it. He makes the point that one's relationship to one's country is intensely private. And it may be that one has great love for it, but it's a love that is complex and confounded with all kinds of disappointment, and hatred, and fear and shame, as well as love.

And it is one's own thing, but to fly it and to wave it and to say that it means this is a lie and an imposition on the personal experience of those boys in that story. And I would urge everyone to read that, because it comes from a surprising source.

Jordan Peterson: You could say the same about burning it.

Is it the same kind—because you just offered a balanced account because you said, "Well, if you're sensible, let's say, our feelings for your country—let's say your feelings for your tradition or your regard for your tradition is a complex mix of emotions from abhorrence and shame and contempt to love." That entire distribution, okay? That seems to me to be appropriate.

And my sense is that that's expressed mythologically by two figures of tradition: one, the wise king, and the other, the evil tyrant. And all cultures are a meld of both although to a greater or lesser degree because you get pure forms of tyranny and pure forms of a benevolent rule. Okay, hopefully, I think that's a reasonable proposition.

Okay, so it's complex, but you're willing to accept that complexity. But what I—and what I see, and maybe this will tie us back into the political discussion that we sort of started this off with is that in radical movements, radical critical movements, and I think I place the atheist horsemen in that category, there's no—the love is not there, the respect is not there. The pointing out of the flaws is there, and the contempt is there, but the attempt—that's not good enough.

Stephen Fry: Look, if you read a piece of literature, you want to dismiss that which is no longer relevant and extract out that which is crucial. That's critical reading, yeah.

It's, but the purpose isn't to dismiss, no. Fundamentally, the purpose is to mine.

Jordan Peterson: No, and I would say another very central piece of literature for me, higher literature than Kipling most people would say, is one of Flaubert’s short stories, “A Simple Heart,” which is about a poor peasant woman, Felicité, I think her name is. And there's a scene in which she kneels in front of a stained glass window. And this is where the parrot comes from that Julian Barnes wrote about so brilliantly in Flaubert's Parrot.

But she's incredibly simple and incredibly ignorant and uneducated, but also incredibly devout. And she kneels there with her—her knees are in desperate pain because she spends her whole life on them scrubbing floors.

And she sees this extraordinary stained glass, and Flaubert is able to describe the incredible corruption and venality that went into the spending of the money on this stained glass and the lives of the corrupt priests who did it but also showed the light coming from her rather than from behind the glass.

It's a very holy moment, and it’s anybody who dismisses religion would be well to remember that devotion and piety can be wonderful things as well as terribly brutal things.

Jordan Peterson: So I want to understand the difference, right? Okay, I'm going to read something, and forgive me. No, I want to go here.

You're face to face with God. Bone cancer in children. What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such misery? That's not our fault. It’s utterly, utterly evil.

Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world so full of injustice and pain?

Stephen Fry: And one more because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac.

Jordan Peterson: Other maniac Ivan in "The Brothers Karamazov."

Stephen Fry: Right, right now, it's in...

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so what happens in "The Brothers Karamazov" is that Ivan wins the argument.

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jordan Peterson: But Elotia is the better person completely, so—and we love it.

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jordan Peterson: It's a book very interesting. I would urge everyone to read "The Brothers Karamazov" because I do think it's a work of genius.

Stephen Fry: There's a lot about Dostoevsky I really dislike because of his influences. Again, people who don't understand Dostoevsky think he's a champion of right-wing religiosity without understanding that he went through an extraordinary life experience to come to where he did come, and that his novels show his full understanding of all kinds of different points of view.

But in terms of the dialectic of that issue about how there can be a God...

Stephen Fry: I mean, I was answering a question that I was asking. I know, and I'm not trying... I'm clearly not trying to put you on this side. My point is I don't believe there is such a being. But if there were, and he were the kind of being that has been worshipped and described by various religions around the world of monotheistic religions, then I would have many bones to pick with him.

But of course, I don't believe there is such a thing. But the argument from evil, as it's known, is a very old one. And it goes back through the medieval religious figures as well as later humanists, that this idea that it is very hard to square this loving God who has knowledge of every hair on our head and adores us and adores little kittens, but he also, as I say, bone cancer in children.

But also life cycles of insects, whose whole aim is to burrow into the eyes of children in Africa and lay their eggs there and cause blindness for those children.

Jordan Peterson: I mean, you could quite easily picture a universe in which there weren’t such an animal and in which children were not sent blind with pain and horror by the various bugs and fungi and insects and viruses in the world. There’s a worm in Africa that burrows under the skin, and it’s a long worm, and if you—you can pull it out with a pencil and wrap it, but it breaks—it’s fragile, and then it gets infected. It's a terrible thing.

And a doctor recently made it his life's work to eradicate that and did it successfully.

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jordan Peterson: So then I would read what you wrote, and I mean I take it very seriously. And it wasn’t—I wasn't throwing it in your face. I brought it up, actually, because of what you said about Flaubert's attitude. You know, because what that lacks, what your statement lacks is exactly what Flaubert highlighted in that woman on her knees.

And I'm not saying this is a simple solution, right? It’s—and I would say, so let's take the argument you made there, and there's a direction that goes in that's nihilistic and resentful and vengeful and angry and all understandable.

But to me, counter it doesn't look to me like there’s anything good in it. It looks like it’s entirely counterproductive. It makes the problem it purports to have been generated by worse.

So then the question is, what's the appropriate attitude, given that the argument you make is actually an extraordinarily powerful argument? And I don't know the answer to that. But I do know I think that resentment and anger and even the motive that would make you want to say that to God himself, I think that's probably not helpful, even though it's so...

Stephen Fry: Well, I—I came to that with great difficulty. I mean, I've had my reasons to be resentful and angry, especially recently, and because I'm suffering a lot of pain, and it makes me resentful and angry and wanting to shake my fist.

But I found upon intense consideration that there was nothing in that that didn't make it worse, and that therefore that must be wrong, even though it's justifiable, right?

Jordan Peterson: I completely understand, and you must remember that my response was to a question I didn't see coming and it was amused. It was because I don't believe in this God. It's not an issue.

Stephen Fry: I'm not really resentful and angry about the fact that there's evil in the world. I'm sorrowful very often, and I'm united in my admiration for the fact and the real belief I have that most people fundamentally, given their dysfunction or this deep trauma, most people are so good, are so anxious to be good, are deontically good, have a sense of obligation and drive in them to be better than they are.

I think that's one of the key things that I love about humanity, is not just that we are dissatisfied with things that are wrong and can be improved, but with ourselves.

We are dissatisfied, and that most of us want to be better. I know that's true of me all the time. Every time I go off to sleep, I think, "How did I screw up tonight, today? How can I be better tomorrow? Why am I so bad at this?"

If only I could manage that in moral terms. Yes, I think that's an extraordinarily common experience. Very much under-noticed, and part of the reason, as far as I can tell, that the talks that I've been giving, let's say, have had the effect that they've had is because I do point out that that's an extraordinarily common experience—that self-torture by conscience.

And it does indicate this striving towards a higher mode of being, the other question I have when I look at the response that I just read is that the amount of the world's evil that's a consequence of our voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate.

You know, so you might say hypothetically speaking, that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do and if we shirk it, the consequences are real.

And you might say, "Well, that's just an apology for God, and perhaps that's the case and perhaps there's no God at all and so what the hell are we talking about?" But I do think it's an important issue.

I mean your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant productive creativity. That’s you and you're offering that to the world.

And that seems necessary. And maybe it's because the problems are real and important and the role we have to play ethically is of paramount importance, truly.

Yeah, why else would we torture ourselves with conscience? And I would say that’s the flowering of the religious instinct within you.

Stephen Fry: Well, you could describe it as that, but then, you know, there are phrases—I mean, you used a phrase earlier that I wanted to say, "Whoa, hang on. I'm not sure I know what that means." A higher mode of existence?

I don't see—I remember having this argument with John Cleese of all people some years ago. He was a great lover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gibran and people like that. And I've always found them slightly hard to take.

And he talked about a—he, I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness. And I said, "I don't—and again, this is my empiricist thing. It sounds cynical and skeptical. It's not meant to be, but what level? Who's a—what a describer level? What is a higher mode? Why higher? What's higher than another?"

Are you saying it in terms of animals?

It's an old-fashioned Huxleyan view of evolution that most modern Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on, the ethologists would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being, a higher mode of consciousness.

Is it just like saying, "Well, you're better educated. You've read more. You know more?"

Is it you've somehow been enlightened? The Fairclough effect, as the Germans would say, which is not necessarily intellectual but is somehow spiritual.

Jordan Peterson: And if so, show me an example of it. Show me someone who has a higher mode of existence than I do.

Stephen Fry: Or...

Jordan Peterson: I think to some degree, three ways. Three ways. One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience tortures you for not attaining.

Okay, okay. I don't think my conscience tortures me for not attaining—it’s that I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn't have been. Right?

But it’s the "shouldn't" part of it. That's the obligation. It’s the—that’s exactly David Hume's problem of "ought."

Stephen Fry: Yeah.

Jordan Peterson: Well, and then you think that you think about how it manifests itself. You don't—this is why Nietzsche was wrong. You cannot create your own values, right? The values impose themselves on you independent of your will.

Now maybe there you partic—well, that's what your conscience does, and good luck trying to control it.

Stephen Fry: This is very anti-nature, isn't it?

Jordan Peterson: Well, I'm a great admirer.

Stephen Fry: I know you are. That's why I was... that's why I made the point. Well, opposite to his philosophy, but what I see...

And then you ask yourself...

Jordan Peterson: Yes.

Stephen Fry: And this is something that's manifesting itself in Christianity, which is, "Well, we’re trying to produce something better in the future."

And so then you ask yourself, "What does better mean?"

That's the first question. And what does the future mean? Those need to be answered. And then the final question is, "Well, what's the most appropriate sacrifice?"

Jordan Peterson: And so you get an extreme version of that in Christianity, hence its narrative power, which is, "Well, you sacrifice the most valuable possible thing for what's of ultimate, eternal value."

That's the underlying structure, and in some sense, it hits a limit because it's God himself who sacrificed, and the purpose of the sacrifice is the establishment, the redemption of humanity, and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven eternally, so that there isn't anything better than that, by definition.

Stephen Fry: Well, I know if I was to raise Althusser or a Marxist view of this and say that it's about the power over the people, which basically denies them any kind of pleasure now on a promise, which is unprovable of a future glorification of some kind or another, either for their children or for themselves in a heaven whose direction they can't point to.

And then not just Althusserian Marxists, of course. Many, many secularists and atheists, like myself, have said, you know, there is a story to be told about religion basically stopping ordinary citizens from having any say in their life and their world.

They are told what the truth is. They are told where power comes from and where it resides. And they are told that their poverty and their subservience and their sacrifice are for the greater good, and they must take that authority on its word.

And the meaning of the Enlightenment was the throwing off of those shackles of Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which constantly laid down these categorizations of authority. People began to question them and say, "I wonder..." because I think we might just talk about, as I know it interests you, the distinction between a hierarchy and a network in terms of how you order society.

Jordan Peterson: That and these religions and these sacrifices all came in hierarchical societies, rather—it seems—in ones that might be called networked, nodal, or some other word.

I know Neil Ferguson has written about this, hasn't he? In the book that I can’t remember its title. It's got the word tower in it. But it's one of the objections people have to the modern, liberally produced world, is that morality is relative and that hierarchies are toppled and that power and authority are no longer seen to reside in something, some agreement.

You know, the curtain is pulled away, and the wizard of Oz is revealed to be nothing, a silly, foolish snake-oil salesman. And the answer lies within ourselves.

Stephen Fry: Okay, so I have to stop you there because I can't answer.

I won't be able to ask this question. There are so many things that you're saying that I want to ask about. They're—there's—

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so with regards to the idea of the opiate of the masses, okay, well, the first thing we might note, I think reasonably, is that Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses. And whatever flaws Judeo-Christianity might have had in terms of its corruption was certainly matched by the instantaneous corruption of...

Stephen Fry: Yes, but the fact that a Marxist has a critique of religion does not mean that it falls because Marxism itself falls, okay?

So that there's a second question there, and so the second question would be something like is the corruption of the church that you described intrinsic to the nature of the church and its doctrine or is it the corruption of something that's valuable?

Now let me make two arguments for that. One is that the corruption is intrinsic and the whole thing should be just dispensed with and I would say that that's the perspective of the Four Horsemen fundamentally.

And it might—and of religious people themselves. I mean, Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the prayer book during the Reformation, there's a great phrase in it: "There was not anything by the wit of man devised that hath not been in time in part or in whole corrupted."

And I think that's also an existential truth. I mean, you just talked about Kronos: Kronos devours his sons. Well, Kronos is the archetypal tyrant and he's also time. And both time and the archetypal tyrant devour their own sons.

And what we have to do is look at these things and understand that we have to take action and learn from the past. Thank you for this wonderful discussion.

I hope we can continue this conversation in the future.

[Music]