https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qACfzssXukg
People, going all the way back to our primate forebears, organize themselves into functional hierarchies. Okay, and the hierarchies are complex, and they’re not just based on power, despite what the idiot Marxists say. Even DeWall has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they’re only based on power. They don’t last. They degenerate into violence. So you have a hierarchy that works, but it’s acted out. No one knows why it works. It works because everyone seems to be happy with it. Okay, and so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated, and then people start to observe them and talk about them. It’s like, oh, we’ve got this hierarchy here. What’s it like? And then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy. Here’s a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here’s what a hero looks like. Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy, and then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy and generates it. Okay. And out of that, you get the extraction of the idea of the hero, and then you get development of that idea, and it’s out of that that you get the monotheistic religions. And so it’s like the procedure and the hierarchy come first. No one knows what the rules are. It’s all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack or chimpanzees play it out in a troop. Then we wake up and think, oh, we live in a structure. Here’s the structure. That would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythologies. Here’s the structure. Here’s how the structure goes wrong. Here’s what the structure does. Here’s its tyrannical aspect. Here’s what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it. Okay, that’s even more important. The hierarchy is important enough, but what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy. Okay, that’s where you get the mythologies of the hero. And so then this generates all sorts of different heroes because there’s different ways of being successful. Then you have a panoply of heroes. Then you think, okay, well, now we’ve got all those heroes. That’s a set. We can pull back and say, okay, something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes. That’s when you extract out the monotheistic savior. That’s why in Christianity Christ is the king of kings. It’s actually, you can think about it as a literal statement. Forget about the religious overlay. It’s like, okay, you’ve got a bunch of people. Some of them are kind of king-like. Okay, so you admire them. It’s like, for whatever reason that is, it’s not easy to figure out why you admire someone. It’s complicated. But let’s say you’ve got admirable people. You start telling stories about them. That’s why you go to a movie. You want to go watch someone you don’t care about, you’re bored by? No, you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting, or maybe the opposite of that. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. Then you think, okay, well, we’ve got all these admirable people. They’re generating the world properly. That’s what makes them admirable. There’s a principle they embody. And that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated. That’s the logos. That’s the thing that’s operative at the beginning of time. So here’s my question about all of this. Because now we’re really not talking about 12 Rules for Life as much as Maps and Meaning, which is your first book, which you’re doing the audio read of it now. It’s definitely a harder book than 12 Rules for Life and a much more complex book in a lot of ways than 12 Rules for Life. So how universal are these systems? Meaning, why is it that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history and one place in human history, as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across humanity, then why is it that if at the apex of the levels you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is where we started this particular question, then why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time as opposed to arriving in a variety of places in a variety of different times and different cultures? Okay, the first thing we would say is the process by which the hierarchy itself and success within the hierarchy is generated, that’s to be accounted over millions of years. At least hundreds of thousands of years, but I would push it back because you can see analogues in the chimps. So 20 million years, let’s say. That’s a long time. On that time scale, the fact that the Enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else, it’s like, well, who cares? It’s five old men long, right? If you put five 100-year-old men in line, it’s like, it’s yesterday, it’s this morning. So we’ve evolved these hierarchical structures, that’s our culture. We’ve evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful. And now we’ve started to evolve ways of mapping our adaptation, not just adapting, but mapping it. Okay, so how does the mapping occur? First, admiration. Second, imitation of admiration. And that would be drama. You dramatize. Shakespeare extracts out what’s admirable and interesting and plays it out. So that’s the use of the body as a representational structure of the body. So we act out what’s admirable. We think, okay, now we’ve kind of got the drama down. We’re all captured by this drama. It’s like, well, then the literary critics come along, the philosophers, and they say, oh, what are the principles by which the admirable people operate? It’s like chimps woke up and said, oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others. What are the rules of success? It’s like, well, there were no rules because they weren’t running by rules. There aren’t rules until you describe the patterns. Then you have a rule. That’s what happens with Moses, by the way. Moses has a revelation. Here’s the rules. It’s like, yeah, we’ve been living out those rules forever, but we didn’t know what they were because they weren’t rules. They were customs. Okay, so you start by mapping your customs in drama and story, and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them. Then once you have them in your grip, say, they’re represented now, not just acted out, well, then you can move one step backward from them and you can say, well, what’s the commonalities among these? What are the general principles? That would be the development of something like the Code of Hammurabi, right? It’s like, well, we’ve got all these customs. What are they? Right. Revelation. It’s like, oh, here’s how you map the customs. That’s the decalogue. It’s the same idea. So it took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies, to evolve their structures of success, and then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure. That all emerges in mythology and drama. Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy. Then the philosophers could come in, especially once it’s written, like in the Judeo-Christian pantheon. It’s like, oh, now we’ve got it written down. Oh, well, we don’t have to remember it. We can read it. And while we’re reading, we can think about it. And so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes. Well, then you get the enlightenment. It’s like, oh, well, here’s a bunch of semantic codes. It’s like, yeah, yeah, those are great. So this is really interesting because if you read Pinker or if you read Jonah Goldberg’s new book, essentially they attribute the enlightenment to Jonah Goldberg calls it the miracle. It’s almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time. Jonah doesn’t quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him. But I think that that philosophy that this sort of sprang up randomly here is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris’s thinking, a lot of Pinker’s thinking. And you’re taking it further back. But I do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreement between the two of us. It should be fun. Are you attributing the growth of the Judeo-Christian ethic that emerges into the enlightenment as also accidentally just pushing the timeline further back? No, I don’t think it’s accidental. I’m not making a reductionist argument. So the first thing is I’m going to say this is how religion evolved. But I’m not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon because it’s a very strange phenomenon. It’s very, very strange. But that doesn’t mean we can’t generate a plausible evolutionary account. It’s like if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources, including the resource of cooperation, which can generate more resources, not a zero-sum game, there are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerge from that that are similar. So here’s a way of thinking about it. If you put a bunch of kids together, they’re going to evolve games. Right. Well, a bunch of different games. Yeah, but they’re all games. Right. So even though, so that’s the moral relativist element. A bunch of different games. Okay. But the moral absolutist element is, yeah, yeah, but they’re all games. And the games have to be playable, which means they have to continue in an iterated way. Right. So that’s a big constraint. People have to want to play them. So not only do they have to be games, and comprehensible to everybody and enjoyable, but they have to be self-maintaining and everyone has to want to play them. Okay. That’s the answer to the postmodern conundrum. A plethora of potential ethical implications of the world. An infinite variety. Yeah, okay. Fine. Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations. You instantly constrain the universe to, well, to what? Well, this is why there’s commonalities in mythologies. Like, if you put enough people together in enough different places, the commonality of the groups of people, because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment, because we’re embodied, means that they’re going to generate hierarchies that are broadly similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar, with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar. And so you could say in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere. Now it’s tricky because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system. Some of them can degenerate into tyranny. We’re talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games or something like that, and that can degenerate. Out of that, you’re going to get common hero myths. You have to. And then that lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate. And this is the Enlightenment guys. They’re not getting that.