https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L2ycjfleX7k
My meditations on the influence of systems of ideas, I thought about these as systems of animating ideas, that I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes, and so that’s why I started to become interested in archetypes. And so, I would say that the one way of conceptualizing the possession the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction is that they’re possessed by ideas that are archetypically evil. And so, here’s the question I have for you. And my sense is that you, and this is the same as Richard Dawkins, is that you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a pathological direction, the Taliban, you identify that with the religious impulse. Now, is that a fair characterization? Well, I would say that it’s not exclusively religious, but insofar as it is religious, it gets even more leverage in that context and towards end. So for instance, what is worse about jihadism than ordinary forms of terrorism, in my view, it is the religious top spin it has based on the, it’s motivating ideas. So the fact that it is in principle otherworldly, the fact that it is just anchored to prophecy and belief in the supernatural, all of that potentiates it further in the wrong direction. So the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a passage in the New Testament which said, if you die while killing pagans or Jews or any other non-Christian, you’ll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment, right? So it’s better that there’s not a passage like that in the New Testament. And it’s better that quasi-religious, political source of terrorism in the UK was not potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation. Okay, so your claim is something like the possibility of religious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of that, of the claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place. So let me put that in context. So there’s a injunction in the 10 commandments. It’s either the second or third commandment, I can’t remember which, that you’re not to use the Lord’s name in vain. And it’s the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the gospels where Christ tells his followers to not pray in public and to not be like the Pharisees where their good deeds can be seen in public. And so the first injunction, the commandment, is pointing out a deadly sin. And the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you’re actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or even worse, your worst possible motivations. And your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward, thus magnifying their dangers. Is that a reasonable way of putting it? Well, I think it depends on the specific instance we’re talking about, but I think what I’m saying is even more pessimistic than that is that given the requisite beliefs, it’s possible to create immense harm consciously, create immense harm without even having bad intentions toward anyone. I mean, it’s not that your bad intentions and your hatred of others somehow gets a sacred framing by religion. That also happens, and that’s a problem. But in the worst case, you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms. Like you can feel nothing, certainly no ill will at all for the people you’re killing. So I mean, to take the extreme case, there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children, Muslim children on purpose for a variety of reasons. I mean, there were cases where there were Western soldiers handing out candy to crowds of children during the war in Iraq at one point, and a suicide bomber would blow that whole scene up. And the whole point is manifold, but it’s obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties, but it’s also just to create the horror and apparent untenability of the whole project in Iraq. It’s just like, these are people who are gonna blow up their own children. What possible good could we do here trying to build a nation? Okay, okay, okay. But just to close the loop there, I’m not imagining that the people who did that actually hated the children, right? They just believe, they believe that there’s absolutely no possibility of making a moral error here because the children they know are gonna go straight to paradise. They’ve actually done the children a favor by the light of their beliefs. Yeah, okay, so I’m perfectly willing to accept that modification. So you’re basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions and as a consequence, produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that, but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly highness are seen as manifestations of what’s best. Okay, so here’s the problem as far as I see it, Sam. The contradiction here that I’m trying to work out is that on the one hand, we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil, because I’m gonna assume those are basically the same thing, you end up in a situation where you can’t do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of, let’s say, the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of Auschwitz because there’s nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor. But if you do posit something that’s of the highest, then you run into the problem, whereas you just pointed out that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest to justify your own evil actions, but also to skew your moral sentiment so that you take positive pleasure in this, let’s say, in the suffering of others, even the suffering of innocent children. Now, on the one hand, if you drop the notion of the highest good, you end up in the morass of moral relativism, and on the other hand, if you accept it, then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior in reference to the highest possible good. Is that a reasonable portrayal of a conundrum? I think that’s a needle that we can easily thread. And so the way I would do it is just to say that…