AD Harris⧸Murray⧸Peterson Discussion： London (YfdaAGZvYsA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YfdaAGZvYsA

Well, good evening, London. Two weeks ago, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson met in person for the first time on stage in Vancouver. Two nights ago, the three of us got together for the first time in Dublin, and it’s a huge thrill for all of us to now be here with you in the O2. As I said to Travis when these events were planned, I’m not moderate enough to be a moderator, but I’m going to do a little bit of fielding to begin with. So let me start by saying a little of some of the ground we are going to be trying to cover here tonight. We’re going to be dealing with the conflict between science and reason. We’re going to be addressing the legitimacy. Did I say science and reason? Science and reason, yes. Occasionally there is. 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. Sure. Well, thank you. First, thank you all for coming out. You really can’t imagine how humbling this is to be here with you. You really should just 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 though we put a date like this on the calendar with apparent confidence, there’s really no guarantee that you guys are going to show up, and we will never take this for granted. So it’s really an immense privilege to be here with you. So I thought I could start by first acknowledging how fun this has been to have this series of dialogues with Jordan. Now this is the fourth event we’ve done, and the second with Douglas. And we clearly share a common project. We are trying to figure out how to live the best lives possible, both individually and collectively. And we’re trying to figure out how to build societies that safeguard that opportunity for as many people as possible. And I think we each have a sense that ideas are really the prime movers here. It’s not that the world is filled with bad people doing bad things, because that’s what bad people do, though there’s some of that. It is mostly that so much of humanity is living under the sway of bad ideas. And it’s bad ideas that can cause good people, or at least totally normal people like ourselves, to do bad things all the while trying to 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 between good ideas and bad ideas? And for me, religion emphatically gets placed on the side of bad and old and ideas worth retiring. And I guess by analogy, I would ask you to consider astrology. Maybe I can just get a sense of who I’m talking to. What percentage of you, I want to know, believe in astrology? Which is to say, who among you? And you can signal this by applause or howls of enthusiasm. What percentage of you? Let me just spell it out so you know what you’re committing to. And you know how crazy your neighbor is, in fact. What percentage of 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 you should know that something like 25% of your neighbors believe that. There you go. So I’m here. Wait, wait, wait. I’m hearing a heckler among the astrologers. Is that possible? This is the first astrological heckler I’ve heard. 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. This is my concern with what Jordan has been saying and writing low these many months. I feel that you’re in danger of misleading the human world. I feel that you’re in danger of misleading this 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 sort of God, this God that can hear prayers and they can intervene or not in the lives of human beings. And as we’ve begun to explore, 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 true believers. And my concern is that 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. This traditional God and the doctrines that support him are on no firmer ground than astrology is now today. And astrology, almost everything you say about religion, it’s the fact that it has 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. And in fact, some additional things can be said about astrology that would argue in its favor. For instance, astrology is profoundly egalitarian. There’s no bad zodiac sign. Whoever you are, everyone’s got a great zodiac sign. And it’s just an inconvenient fact of the discipline that if I read you Charles Manson’s horoscope, 95% of the audience would find it relevant. And that’s how easily falsifiable astrology is. But my concern is that we could live in a world where societies are shattered over things like different zodiac interpretations. And we don’t live in that world for good reason, because we have beaten astrology into submission. And I would say that religion, in terms of revealed religion and belief in a personal God, is over the centuries getting the same treatment by science and rationality, and should be. And it is a perverse circumstance that we live in a world 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, is that first of all, astrology was astronomy in its nascent form. And astrology was also science in its nascent form. Just like alchemy was chemistry in its nascent form. And so sometimes you have to dream a crazy dream, with all of the error that that crazy dream entails. Because you have an intuition that there’s something there to motivate you to develop the intuition to the point where it actually becomes a genuine practical utility. Now when we look back on the astrologers, and we view their contributions to the history of the world with contempt, we should also remember that the people who built Stonehenge, for example, and the first people who decided, determined that our fates were in part written in the stars, were people whose astrological beliefs were indistinguishable from their astronomical beliefs. And you might think, well, in what sense is your fate written in the stars? And I would say it’s certainly the case insofar as there are such things as cosmic regularities. So it was the dream of astrology that there was some relationship between the movement of the planetary bodies and the fixed stars and human destiny. And that’s what drove us to build the first astronomical observatories and to also determine that there was a proper time for planting and a proper time for harvesting. And a way of orienting yourself in the world, for example, by using the North Star. It’s also the poetic ground that enabled us to identify the notion that you could look up and orient yourself towards the heavens and that there was a metaphorical relationship between that and positioning yourself properly in life. And at a deeper level, the cosmos was the place that the human imaginative drama was externalized and draped itself out into the world as something that was essentially observable so that we could derive great orienting fictions from the observation of our imagination. And so part of the problem that Sam is pointing to is the difficulty of distinguishing valid poetic impulse from invalid poetic impulse. And 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 hardcore pragmatic scientific belief has its origin in wild flights of poetic fantasy. And it’s also the case, by the way, that that’s actually how your brain is organized as far as I can tell that when you…and it isn’t just me, I actually… There’s a very large, what would you call it, research literature outlining the relative functions of the right and left hemisphere. And it certainly appears to be the case that when we encounter something absolutely unknowable or unknown, what we do is drape that unknown thing in fantasy as a first pass approximation to the truth and then refine that fantasy as a consequence of iterative critical analysis. And so Sam believes that what should happen is that the poetic and fictional domain should be supplanted by the rational domain. Let me just close the loop there. Not quite. I think we need poetry and fiction. And there’s more to engaging 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 merely fertile flights of the imagination. And we want to be rigorous there and rational there. It’s not that there’s no place for mere creativity that’s not on the rails of rationality. Well, fair enough then. But then partly what we are disputing is the relative import of those two domains, let’s say the poetic 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, what would you say, formal statements about the problem because 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 allowances for the necessity of the poetic imagination exactly how it is that that is also encapsulated under the rubric of pure rationality. See, and here’s something, you can tell me what you think about this. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what Sam and I have been talking about, by the way. You know, so I’m making the case in my writing that 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 obviously in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church, where the same metaphysical principles apply, but out of which a democracy did not emerge. And so it does seem to me that what we have in the West is the consequence of the interplay between the fantasy-predicated, poetic Judeo-Christian tradition and the rational critique that was aimed at that by the Enlightenment figures. And that seems to me to mirror something like the proper balance between the right hemisphere and its poetic imagination and the left hemisphere and 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? And 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. So if you were some mendicant monk and you had a profound religious vision, the probability that you were going to be tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake was extremely high. Because even the gatekeepers of the religious tradition realized that religious revelation, untrammeled by something like community dialogue, something like that, was something of extraordinary danger. And so I would agree with you that the poetic imagination and the ground of religious revelation is something that can lead people dangerously astray. But I would say at the same time that it constitutes the grounds of our initial exploration and that it’s actually ineradicably necessary. Okay, well, I’ll briefly address that. And then 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. And I would say that there’s no Abrahamic religion that is the best conceivable womb of democracy or anything else we like, science or… That’s 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. I would put rationality there and 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. Sometimes the truth can be not worth knowing. And I would argue that there are those cases, but they’re few and far between. We should focus on that to some degree. Yeah, so I want to just point to Douglas here and focus on that, because I think your fear, Douglas, is that my style or Richard Dawkins’ style or Christopher Hitchens’ style of anti-theism, let’s just throw the Vickers from the rooftops now, because it is time to end this thing. Not literally, get off Twitter now. That’s a hashtag, if I’ve read that. 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. There is a baby in the bath water that can be difficult to discern, and we can’t empty the tub all at once. And this is very much because there’s a zero-sum contest with the religious enthusiasm we see coming from the Muslim world. And of course, the Muslim world is all over the world at the moment. So in that contest between an older style of religiosity and theocracy, really, and modernity, you are not as eager as I have been to pull up Western religiosity by the roots. Or Chuck the Vickers. 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 what our friend Eric Weinstein recently described to me as Jesus smuggling, that it was a consequence of a discussion about biologists. What do you do if you’re discussing design, intelligent design? You can be OK as long as your own bandwidth on the issue, as long as your own depth of knowledge on the issue is very considerable. You can be OK discussing that biology with somebody, even a fundamentalist Christian, so long as you can follow every step of the way. But the fear will always be that the moment you’re not looking, they’re going to 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. And one of the things I realized from Dublin was, although I think you may not think that Jordan himself is going to try Jesus smuggling on you, you fear that somewhere down the line from what he’s saying, somebody else will do that trick. Yeah, it’s worse than that. I actually know the people who are clapping are doing that. I hear from those people on a daily basis. So the segment of Jordan’s audience that is very happy to be told they can stay on the riverbank of their traditional Christianity, for the most part, and they don’t have to get into the stream of totally modern, rigorous, rational thinking about everything from first principles, that there’s something that the Iron Age scribes got right, and it’s right for all time, those are the applause I’m hearing. And however consciously or not, Jordan is telling them, it’s okay to stick right there with a shard of the cross. In Dublin, 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, and at least the Bible, for example, is a mystery because we don’t really understand the processes by which it was constructed, and we don’t understand the processes by which we all agreed collectively over several thousand years to organize the book the way it is organized or to edit it the way that it’s edited and 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. I don’t want to derail you, but we do understand 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 and revelation came in far later. There were 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. 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 an essential radical ignorance. I don’t assume that I understand the mechanisms by which they were generated or edited or collected or kept or remembered or why they had the impact they had. Now, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of, let’s say, God the Father, because that’s a very common archetypal representation of God, God the Father. So I’m going to tell you an experience that I had that I’ve never really told any audience about. I had a vision at one point that and the vision had to do with a dialogue that I was having with my father. And, you know, you have a father, right? And when you’re a little kid, you act out your father when you pretend to be a father. And what you’re doing when you’re acting out your father isn’t imitating your father because you don’t duplicate precisely the actions that your father ever took in his life. What you do is you watch your father across multiple contexts and you abstract out something like a spirit of the father. And then when you’re a child, you implement that spirit of the father in your pretend play and you come to embody that deeply. So the notion is that people can abstract out something like a spirit of the father. And that’s part of our mimetic tendency, which is a very powerful human cognitive tendency. And in this vision, I first started to talk with my father and I would say more with the spirit of my father because he wasn’t actually there. And I would say it was the wisest part of him. And then that sort of transformed into a discussion that I had with a series of ancestral spirits. And then that transformed itself into a vision of God himself with whom I had a conversation. This was a visionary experience. And then that all went away and I spent months and months thinking about it. And I thought, so you guys can tell me what you think about this. And this sort of stretches my cognitive ability to 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 and a 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, who imitated his father as far back in time as you can go. And there’s a cumulative development of the spirit of the father across time. Now then the question might be, does this spirit of the father have any reality other than the metaphorical? And I would say, damn right it has a reality. And I can describe a biological reality. And I don’t know what this says about any background metaphysics. But here’s a hypothesis. We know that human beings separated from chimpanzees over the course of the last seven 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, what makes men desirable to women? And so I have a bit of a hypothesis about that. So here’s what men do. They get together in productive groups. And they orient themselves toward a certain task. And they produce a hierarchy around that task. Because whenever you implement a task, you produce a hierarchy. And they vote up the most competent men to the top of the hierarchy. And then the women select the competent men from the top of the hierarchy. But the vote that determines who the competent men are that are more likely to reproduce is a consequence of male evaluation of men. And that’s occurred over millennia. And so there’s a spirit of the father that’s embedded in the patriarchal hierarchy that acts as the primary selection mechanism that offers men up to women and plays a cardinal role in human evolution. And it looks like we’ve 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 is that apparently the entire course of evolutionary history has conspired to produce human beings. And we could argue that it could have been different, but it certainly hasn’t been different. And that means that that selective spirit of the father has been part of the process that’s generated our very being. And it’s certainly possible that that collective spirit of the father reflects something metaphysically fundamental about the structure of reality itself. Wait, I was with you up until the last sentence. 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. 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. There’s a different class of book. 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 unignorable by the majority of human beings. Yeah, well, it’s clear that revelation can devolve into fundamentalism. But I’m not that’s a real but any problem. But there is a risk in all this always is an often made critique, but that when you’re talking about religion, you’re talking about the Inquisition, you’re talking about the jihadists, you’re not talking about somebody who wants to go to their local Anglican church once a year, maybe get the children to school and maybe when they’re at some desolate moment of their lives returns to this as a place that stores meaning. I mean, the thing that I think Jordan and I are in agreement on in this is, is that thing was quoted from Schopenhauer in the Dialogue on Religion when he says, you know, the truth may be like water and needs vessels to carry it. And when we were talking about this the other night, you know, you admitted that one of the consequences perhaps of the, you know, the, the parents sort of going through the belief structures, they may not believe in anymore, but they keep doing it as a demonstration of what you said was the, the, the non embarrassing options that atheists have come up with. But it may also be that, that since we don’t have very many vessels that cracked and damaged and sometimes transparent as they are, what vessels you have might be worth holding on to. Well, no, I think, I think the challenge here is, I mean, it feels that, well, first of all, we should first notice that these comments very often take the form of you and I don’t need this stuff, but most other people do. Right. And that is, it can do that. Yes. I mean, that’s inevitably, and it’s sort of took that form at one moment the other night, whereas where you acknowledge that, that people of low intelligence are best placed in a conservative paradigm, a traditionally conservative paradigm, because there’s less to think through. Right. Now, obviously, you don’t want your, your view on religion summarized by it’s good for stupid people. Well, I do. I do want it summarized to some degree that way, because one of the things we do, I’m giving you the opportunity again to put this foot in your mouth. But I would say not, not only. I mean, the thing is, is that we’re all stupid and some of us are far stupider than others. But we’re not, but we’re not that stupid. Well, well, 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? It is bloody unbelievable. Look, Sam, everything’s everything’s everything’s soaked in blood. We have no disagreement about that. But the secular alternatives that we produced in the 20th century were certainly no less bloodsword. And they produced nothing of any product whatsoever. We need not do it now, but we have to put to bed that secular canard. What would you say? It’s just, it’s just not so that Stalinism was the product of secularism or atheism and nor was it a product. It wasn’t an inevitable product or the 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. 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 dogmatism through and through. It was based on a personality cults that grew up around figures like Stalin and Hitler and Mao. It’s these were it was not the ideas of Bertrand Russell and David Hume that brought us to the Gulag or to Auschwitz. But then you can’t say it’s the thought of Jesus Christ either. No, it’s true. No, I can say that I can say it was the thought of St. Augustine. And I can say it was the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly that gave us the Inquisition. This is the fact. 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 when the history books are written about the period we’re living in, they’ll probably be described as the post Holocaust period in history. The post World War Two era in Europe. It’s still going on. So we’re still we’re still going through this trying to work out what happened. And I have to say one thing that I had any rate of 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. One thing 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. So if a Muslim robs a liquor store, I’m not going to blame Islam for that. There’s no doctrine. 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. Hang on. There is. There’s not. There’s not. But let me just 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. But of the many things they had in common, this is the point that David Berlinski made in his book. What did the NKVD have in common with everyone who oversaw the gulag, the SS, people who guarded the camps, 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 one of them. None of them thought that they were being observed and would be held accountable. It doesn’t help when you think 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. God is watching and clapping. I’m not denying that. I’m saying that the the attempt to make this a tennis match is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a good thing over the 20th century. We’re still trying to work out what caused it. Religion had a role. Atheism had a role. But the the perpetual tennis match of it, I think. Well, there is something to be said at a more sophisticated level, I would say, for the idea that you have an obligation to a transcendent ethic. Now, you make that claim in the moral landscape. You lay out a transcendent ethic in my estimation. That’s one that puts the onus of the of responsibility on the individual to act in a way that at minimum minimizes suffering. And so and you think of that as a statement of fact that that’s the proper way of being. And I think about it as an axiomatic statement of faith. And that’s one of our differences. But I have been very careful in my analysis of the relationship between the idea of sovereignty and the idea of religious belief. And one of the things that I have worked out, I think, partly from reading such people as Eliade and Jung, was that there is an emergent idea of sovereignty that does involve being accountable to a god. And here’s how I would justify that. And I would think about this essentially from a practical and biological perspective, independent of any metaphysical reality that it might have. So the ancient Mesopotamians, for example, believed that their emperor was the incarnation or the representative of a god. Named Marduk. And that actually bestowed certain ethical responsibilities on the ruler. And so the ruler had to be a good Marduk in order to be a sovereign, to be regarded as sovereign. He had to be the embodiment of these divine principles. And it took the Mesopotamians a very, very long period of time, perhaps several tens of thousands of years. They weren’t Mesopotamian during that whole time, obviously, to work out what those principles of sovereignty should be. And the Mesopotamians encoded this in their fictions, in 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. And the ruler had to act that out if he was going to be the sort of ruler that his people weren’t entitled to slay and sacrifice. And then once a year at the New Year’s Festival, he would go outside the city, the walled city, and he would act out his role of Marduk. And the priest would humiliate him and ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn’t been a good Marduk, so that he could remember that he had a responsibility to undertake this, to embody this relationship with these divine principles. And the thing that’s so important about this, that’s so absolutely crucially important, is that it established the principle that even if you were at the top of a hierarchy, you weren’t absolute. There was something above you that you were subordinate to. And one of the extraordinarily useful ideas about the abstraction of even God as a personified spirit, let’s say, is that it allows every leader to be subordinate to something that’s beyond him. Now that doesn’t mean it can’t be misused, but it’s a very, very, very important idea. Except you can also, you can get there the other way around. You can realize that you, even if you are at the top of the hierarchy, you are radically dependent on everyone else. But the tip of the pyramid… Yeah, but everybody at the tip of a hierarchy doesn’t believe that. Sometimes they believe that they can do 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 the totally defensible and palpably true fact that you could be the king of the world and you are dependent on everyone around you to eat, to not be murdered by them. It’s amazing how precarious even a totalitarian regime is. The amazing thing is that these last at all. Because in many cases it would just take 50 people to act in unison to kill the tyrant. But it never happens because we either have a first mover problem. 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 Gaddafi 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. If you wanted a hierarchy where you had a benign philosopher king 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, and a non-superstitious one, the one where someone recognized, hey, this is how we’re doing it, but we are radically, I, at the top of this hierarchy, am radically dependent on being surrounded by as many happy people as possible. Look, I mean, I don’t, in some profound sense, I don’t disagree with that. This sounds like a fiction, but we’re living with this problem and we encounter this more and more when you talk in Silicon Valley, as you and I occasionally do, and I’m sure you do as well, where you meet people who are fantastically wealthy, who seem uncannily detached at the, by the, detached at the fact that there’s this growing chasm between them and those they know and the rest of humanity. And one begins to wonder what level of wealth inequality will everyone find alarming? I mean, some people are acting as though there is no level that is alarming, that there’s kind of a law of nature that this thing can grow just impossibly to the point where we have trillionaires walking around and, you know, driving in their motorcades. And it’s kind of, I mean, it’s 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. Well, 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 some degree, which I’ve thought about a fair bit. And it’s like, well, okay, what’s the optimal solution for you? Well, okay, well, first of all, there isn’t just you now. There’s you now and you tomorrow and you next week and you in a year, you in five years. So there’s you and the you that propagates across time. So one of the implications of that is that you can’t do anything that’s really good for the you now that isn’t very good for you a week from now. Right. So that means you have to imagine yourself as multiple individuals across multiple timeframes. And then you have to figure out what’s good for all those individuals across all those timeframes, although you discount the future to some degree because of its unpredictability. But then so that’s a very tight set of constraints. And you might say, well, a rational person would calculate what was optimal across all those all those multiple timeframes. Then you do the same thing with other people, which is the point you just made. Well, it isn’t just you because who’s you there’s you and your family. And most people are in a situation where they would regard damage to their family as perhaps even worse than damage to them. So whatever they are obviously encapsulates 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 your point with regards to the ethic. But then so I agree with all that. But then one of the things that I would suggest is that because that’s an incredibly difficult rational calculation and perhaps an impossible one, technically speaking, but certainly very difficult, that’s what that what has happened in part as our as our great narratives have have emerged across time is that we have observed to solve that multiple identity, multiple time frame problem. And we’ve told stories about people who do that exceptionally well. And then we’ve winnowed out those stories and we’ve produced these powerful narratives that encapsulate the ethic that does, in fact, reflect that wisdom. And so so and I think you actually accept some of that in your in your moral propositions, which is something that we’ve talked about before. So, for example, although never really agreed on, you certainly believe, for example, that the embodiment of truth is one of the means whereby you solve the problem of ethics. And I would say that that’s a deeply rooted Judeo-Christian concept that that the truth is rooted that it precedes any notion of religious provincialism. It’s deeper than Judeo-Christian. It’s deeper than our humanity on some level. At one point, we talked about the Golden Rule and I said that the precursor to the Golden Rule can be found even among monkeys. Right. Right. Right. The Golden Rule is a good rule even for monkeys. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so let me just add to the picture you sketched out. I completely agree with we have a we have an ethical obligation even to our future selves. Right. I mean, we are in relationship to who we who’s going to be the person who’s drinking his fourth scotch tonight will be what has some ethical relationship. To the person who’s going to wake up with a hangover tomorrow morning. And we and one thing we know for sure in which we have begun to dimly understand and describe scientifically is that we are bad at all of these calculations. Yes. Like we do the 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, no, but we increasingly can. And even where it’s best summarized, not by Cal. Well, one thing I’ll grant you is that it’s not always best conveyed or rendered indelible and actionable by being being given a nature paper or 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 that are in the philosophy section of the bookstore, not the science section. And you were you and I were at the book signing the other night and someone came up with with a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 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 provenance is no barrier to taking the book deadly seriously. It’s an incredibly useful book. And and stoicism, stoicism could be the, quote, religion or the guiding philosophy of the West. It could it would be a much better one than Judaism or Christianity. And and have not virtually none of the downside. And so that’s my point that we’re in this perverse circumstance of being held hostage by certain products of literature. And we need to break the spell. And if and if we’re finding it this hard to break, what do we think is going to happen in the Middle East or in sub-Saharan Africa? I mean, we the moral progress we need to engineer is a common humanity coming together. Those are shared values. Those are perfectly credible arguments. But but the weakness in the argument, I think, is the one that we started to talk about earlier, which is that when you talk with Dave Rubin a while back and and Michael Schirmer said the same thing recently, he basically said that atheism is a doctrine of negation. That’s what that’s what you said with Rubin is that there isn’t a 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 that and so the problem with the atheist is 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. It’s just like not believing in Zeus. Fine. And it’s not like it’s a week. It’s not like it’s a weak argument. I mean, I’m perfectly aware that making a dayistic case or a case for religion in the face of the claims of the rationalist atheists is perhaps. Well, it’s a very, very difficult thing to manage. But it is also the case that and this is where I think we differ with regards to what happened, say, in the Soviet Union and perhaps to also in Nazi Germany is that when when when when your doctrine demolishes the. Let’s call it the literary or fictional substructure and leaves nothing behind an ethos an ethos needs to be provided because something will rush in to fill the void. And it’s certainly the case. And this is what Nietzsche warned about, even though he was a strident anti-Christian. And it’s also what Dostoevsky first saw. He said if we knock out the logos from the substructure of Western society, Nietzsche believed that it was Christianity’s emphasis on truth that destroyed Christianity, which was an extremely interesting criticism. You know, Christianity had elevated truth to such a degree that it was 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 that we would be awash in both nihilism and totalitarian bloodshed. And that is what happened in the 20th century. And so so there’s another there’s another aspect to that, which is that you may you may try to knock out the whole thing and take out some of the substructure, but not the whole thing. That’s what Nietzsche also showed. 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 and and there are other things, too, that seem to be that seem to be fundamental religious issues that that that secularists, I think, have a difficult time accounting for. 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 and you are doing that, to be perfectly fair. You said that reading a nature paper about the necessity of calculating your ethic across multiple multiple timeframes 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 meet every week to read Marcus Aurelius. That’s a big problem. And they don’t write music. 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, well, I don’t know why exactly. But to be fair to the president, most music and most art and most architecture. Yes. Is no longer religious. That is flown the perch provided by religion traditionally. And most of what we care about in increasingly cosmopolitan and secular societies is not tied to religion in any direct way. And there are 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 when I said something that assumed that he believed in a God who could hear prayers, he threw up his hands and he said, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers? And I was just, you know, practically lost the debate just in my astonishment. You know, it’s like, you know, what does it mean to be a conservative rabbi? In this case, there are religions that have made that transition to a an increasingly attenuated commitment to the truth of the doctrine. And there are religions who haven’t moved an inch. Right. And we have. But I think we have to acknowledge that this this movement in this direction is progress because what it what it actually is at bottom is. Increasing sensitivity to the difference between having good reasons and bad reasons for what you believe. Right. And the fact that this book has been around forever is not a good reason. The fact that mommy. Well, it’s actually it’s not a terrible reason, though, because the fact that something has lasted for that length of time at least makes the fact that it’s lasted a mystery. And you can’t just attribute that to casual politicking or economic circumstances. There’s something at look the least that you can say about many of the biblical stories is that they’re incredibly memorable. And that means that in some sense, they’re adapted to the memory structures of our minds. So is the mythology of ancient Greece. It’s incredibly memorable. But I but I don’t I don’t know. All those gods are dead. The stories still can be useful. Yeah, but the gods are dead. It lives on, let’s say. Yeah, but it lives on in a way that is benign. It lives on in a way where you learn about them in mythology class in school. Right. You don’t have it. You don’t have a fear of Hades drummed into you as a child by your parents. 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 lecture that I suppose you might be you might think about as devoted to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. And that the language of good and evil that I lay out in those lectures is actually what allows them to recover from the post-traumatic stress disorder. And dealing with people like that in my clinical practice, the same thing has been the case. If we can’t transcend the language of the merely rational and move into an intense conversation about good and evil in some senses, metaphysical realities, we can’t enter a realm of seriousness, conceptual seriousness, that’s of sufficient depth to help heal someone who’s been touched by malevolence. Because that actually is what happens to people with post-traumatic stress disorder, is that inevitably the reason that they 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 malevolent force or spirit, for lack of a better word, is something that resides within them. And so we have these limits on rational, 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 the 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 there’s something worthy of protection. But 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? The trench we are all fighting in, 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 apostates to be killed for leaving, in this case, Islam. So it’s a… That, those are some of the sacred… If we were going to list the sacred artifacts that keep our society worth living in, I think the list is going to be very long before we start getting to the actual sacred objects of any one faith. It’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, and this may be my own idiosyncratic reading of the domain, but when I look at something like… I’ve often considered a cathedral dome, let’s say, and there are 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 it’s also, in my reading, the divine image of God that men and women are made in, and so what I see in the underlying metaphysic, where you see superstition and 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, my concern, and 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 talk about astrology, as you showed at the outset. Now, I’m living in… But I don’t think it’s a… Why is it a charitable reading, Sam? So how else would you explain the existence of something like a cathedral with that image? What the hell were people doing when they built that? I’m saying we could, it’s by dint of mere historical contingency and questionable luck, that we’re not living in a world where the cathedrals have stained glass windows with signs of the zodiac on them, right? We could be in that world. Well, we are. We were very close to being in that world. We are in that world to some degree, because the astrological endeavor in the Judeo-Christian landscape expanded to incorporate Christianity, and there’s an entire astrology of Christianity, including representation of Christ as the sun. So we are in that world. Yes, so 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 just simply have to go to one hospital in one city sometime and find two unrelated children born within 20 feet of each other and follow their lives. And if they have different lives, then the 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 let me… But maybe none. Maybe not revelatory. Maybe 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… Because 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 world. Or you have both. You can have both. Then you have a dialogue with the past. Which brings me to Marcus Aurelius. I read him with great pleasure and astonishment, frankly. It is such a modern and edifying take on ethics and one’s own personal well-being. And just not being encumbered by thoughts and vanities that are so easy to cut through once you notice them, but so captivating and deranging of your life when you don’t. And he… I mean, there’s no wisdom in that book than almost any book I can name. And you don’t have to believe any bullshit to honor it and use it. Let me offer you a continued explication here. So… And you didn’t answer my question about what all these crazy medieval people were doing, spending almost all of their excess capital, building a representation of the sky and putting an image on that. So just hang on a sec. So… So let’s talk about what it would mean to embody the truth. So there’s a deep idea in Christianity that this is what it would mean. It would mean to confront the suffering of life voluntarily to its fullest, which would mean to accept the necessity of death and betrayal at the hands of your fellow men without undue bitterness. To accept that voluntarily and to still understand that your fundamental ethical task is to work towards the redemption of the world. And that’s associated with that image that’s cast upon the heavenly dome. And 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… But you can’t do it with rationality. But I can do it with Greek… No, no, no, that’s not true. I can do it with Greek mythology. I can 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 believe that you get everything you want after you die. I’m not sure John’s suggesting that you do. 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 giving now of Christ in the 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. Or maybe the Muslims are right that Archangel Gabriel did show up to Muhammad in his cave and give him the one final revelation never to be superseded. And just on the merits of the text, we know that’s not true. We know for all it gets wrong and all it fails to get right about the nature of our circumstance, we know that book is not the best book ever written on any topic. And here I’m speaking of the Quran, but it’s true of the Bible. It’s true of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but no one’s 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. 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 not. 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 a best guess? You know, if you look, let’s go all cognitive neuroscience on this, shall we? Ninety-nine percent of your processing is unconscious. You’re not capable of articulating yourselves. If you were, you’d be omniscient. Don’t give me any nonsense about that. But that is a… I’ve never heard so many people applaud an evasion of a simple question. It was a good one, though. Okay. Honestly, yes, everything you just said about not being fully transparent to yourself is true. And you are ruled by committee in there all the time, no doubt. But I’m asking what you actually believe. There’s 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 and 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 what does that mean? You’re saying that there’s somebody who’s taking dictation that is unlike any other dictation. So Homer, though creative, or Shakespeare, though creative, was doing something else. Well, Sam, it’s not like we understand the sources of inspiration. But 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 could say that, and any writer can say that, ultimately. And it’s also the case that 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 criticize the Bible, and look, fair enough. 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? This is 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. I mean, this is the best game in town, and it has always been so. But people are imagining, and it includes, as you said at the outset, what I would call spiritual experience. And spiritual experience is, admits of a fact-based discussion about the nature of human consciousness. And why do you allow that as an exception? Like, because it’s not an exception. It’s part of the data set. So it’s possible to have the spiritual. So this is spiritual experience without the possible of possibility of concretized revelation. So it’s a formless spirituality that you’re advocating. No, no, you can have. 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. 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 alien supercomputer. Now, that you can actually, I mean, Nick Bostrom at Oxford gives a very cogent argument in defense of that thesis. Right. Now, you can you can deal with that on its merits. I’m not saying the universe isn’t stranger than we suppose or even can suppose. But one thing we know is that when you read the Bible, you can turn every page of that book. And you will not find evidence of omniscience. You will not find anything in there that someone as smart as Shakespeare or actually a little bit dumber could have written. No, I don’t think that’s true, Sam. They’re incredibly powerful. Whatever else you might say about the biblical writings are incredibly potent narratives within them. It’s impossible to write something virtually impossible to write something like Cain and Abel. It’s a paragraph long. You’re saying the Shakespeare of 2000, 3000 years ago couldn’t have written Genesis? He couldn’t have written Cain and Abel, not in 10 sentences. So then Cain and Abel is 10 sentences long. So then it contains more wisdom than you can dig out in a lifetime. But now we’re getting to the nub of it. Then you think that it was not the product of a human mind. I think it was the product of a vast collection of human minds working over millennia. Okay, so we have a committee of Shakespeare’s. So but still we’re just dealing with people. We’ve just got people. Well, but that’s 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 wise. I’m in love with deeper realities. What’s the deeper reality that something as wise as the story of Cain and Abel reflect? What’s the reality? A landscape of mind that we are that either takes great training, great luck or pharmacological bombardment of the human brain to explore. Right. 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, experientially and we can understand it to some degree by by third person methods of science. And it’s not it’s not like I don’t know. I’ve had many experiences that if I had them in a religious context would have counted for me as evidence of the truth of my religion. Right. 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 believe me. Yes, I’ll go. I’ll play that game of poker with you all day long. You’d be surprised. Yes. 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 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 that the latter people have the floor. It really is going to be a rude awakening when those applause are reversed. However, yeah, we know it’s highly stop. Just get off the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So so so let let let me Douglas. I want to say something. What was that? Ask something. I was I was I going to ask something. Yeah. Yes. That’s I forgot. Okay, I’ll ask you something. Let’s go back to the let’s go back to the to one of the core problems that we’ve been trying to address which is the the apparent failure perhaps of the the the rationalist atheist types to develop a an active ethos that has sufficient beauty and motivational power to serve as a credible replacement for the religious rituals. So there’s there seems to there must be a reason why that’s that failure has occurred. Right. So yeah, I can give you a short list of reasons. One is that traditionally the impulse to do that in a religious context has been fatal. Right. Declare your apostasy has been the almost as reliable a way of committing suicide as jumping off a building in most cultures and most societies for the longest time and still is in many places as you know in the Muslim world. So there’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 the eroding power of religion. When religion really has its power, right? We know what it’s like. Again, I think we spoke about this at one point, you know, the moment that it makes this most salient is Galileo being shown the instruments of torture by men who wouldn’t look through his telescope. Right. I mean, that’s that was the point of contact between untrammeled human rationality and the womb that bore it. Right. The religious awe at the beauty of the heavens. Right. So the moment a person like Galileo stepped a little too far and to connect us to astrology again, Galileo was a court astrologer. Right. They were there was a con. 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. I mean, for the longest time, I mean, it’s still in the United States. You cannot run for the presidency without pretending to believe in God. It’s amazing. It’s amazing fact. Right. When will that change? Someday it will. But we have just had almost no time to experiment in this space and innovate. Well, there’s been some time. There’s been some decades. I suppose the thing that unites Jordan and me on this is if we face some of the problems, some of the enemies, you 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 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. But what are you picturing there? Because there really is no leap. There’s no global leap to pure rationality. There’s just there’s this incremental erosion of religious answers to terrestrial questions. So there’s 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 that space. Something obviously drove Douglas, I would say, in some sense, surprisingly, to make the assumption that one of the things that we need to do to defend whatever it is that we have a value in the West, assuming that we have anything of value, was something like the reincorporation of this religious substructure. So it’s not something that I would have expected you to conclude. But why did you conclude it? Well, partly for the reason I just suggested that the leap into pure rationality, there’s no evidence yet that it’s going to work or it’s going to be enough or enough people are going to be able to partake in it. But give me the precise small place where you’re worried that it’s going to fail. And what can you what are you imagining doing? Well, you think it’s failing now. Yeah, let me give you one example. And we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is its absence. And where where are we discovering that? Look at the religions that people are making up as we speak. I mean, every day there’s a new dogma and you and I and Jordan have repeatedly tripped over those dogmas. Some usually survived, it has to be said. But they’re stampeding to create new religion all the time at the moment. Every every new heresy that’s invented and they’re not as well thought through as past heresies. They don’t always have the bloody repercussions yet, but you can easily foresee a situation in which they do. I mean, a new religion is being created as we speak by a new generation of people who think they are non ideological, who think they’re very rational, who think they’re past myth, who think their past story, who think they’re better than any of their ancestors and have never bothered to even study their ancestors. So, but can’t you say that dogmatism is the problem? The generic problem here is dogmatism, a firm belief in the absence of good argument and good evidence. And absolutely, we can agree that dogmatism of any kind has that danger or will always have that danger. But the void also has a danger. The void that you can create if you throw out all the stories that helped get you to where you are also has this danger because people come up with these new stories and every day’s news now is about this. Every politics is now basically about this. I mean, well, yeah. And what and what’s flown in to fill the gap seems to be something like a new tribalism, which is exactly what you’d expect in some sense, right? If you demolish the superordinate system, you know, religion divides people, no doubt, but it also unites people. And so one of the things that arguably unites people above their mere tribalism is their union in an abstract religious superstructure. And then if you demolish that, well, then one of the things that does seem to happen is the emergence of a reflexive tribalism because people need a group identity of sorts. And the easiest thing to do seems to be to revert to ethnicity and race and gender and sex, etc, etc. And then we do end up and have ended up in this situation that Douglas outlines. And, you know, one of the things I think that distinguishes us temperamentally, possibly, maybe because you’re a little more on the liberal side and I’m a little more on the conservative side, even temperamentally speaking, is that your fundamental terror is that of fundamentalism, although you also state in the moral landscape that you understand the perils of nihilism. And I would say my fundamental terror is that of nihilism, even though I’m sensitive to the catastrophes of fundamentalism. But I don’t think you do address the problem of the void sufficiently, because I don’t think that you have anything to offer except, and I’m not trying to minimize your offering, you make a case that people should work to alleviate suffering and that we should live in truth, but Jesus, Sam, you can summarize that in two sentences. It doesn’t have the potency of the fictional literary artistic substructure that seems necessary to make that into something that’s a compelling story. So this is where we might disagree. This could be a fundamental disagreement, because I actually I don’t see the problem of nihilism the way you do or the way it’s advertised. Like once you rip out the false certainties and the bad evidence and the bad arguments and the mere dogmas imposed on us by prior generations, that hole never closes safely with anything else. You have to put something in its place that’s shaped just like that, some other false certainty or some other story. I simply don’t think that’s the case. I think there’s so many things we outgrow, both individually, in our own childhoods and culturally, that where there is no void left, there’s no Santa Claus shaped void that we have to fill with the exact same thing. But people certainly experience that void. Some people, yeah, I’m not discounting the fact that it is hard to be happy in this world. We are living in a world that seems designed, perfectly designed to frustrate our efforts to find permanent happiness. So you asked me, you put me on the spot a while back. But let me just add my answer to this. I just think that there’s the recipe for a good life, or at least a minimal recipe for a good life. It’s not that this is all that’s entailed, but this is certainly necessary, if not sufficient, is to live a life that is increasingly motivated by love and guided by reason. You can’t go very far wrong if you are motivated by love and guided by reason. And the problem is that… Well, okay. Well, the first thing I would say about that is to me, that’s a recapitulation of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is that you should be guided by love and use logos to serve that. You’ve got to read the fine print on reason. No, I didn’t say reason. I said logos, because that’s something that’s deeper than reason. There’s the Jesus smuggling. Yes, exactly. Well, yes, yes, definitely. I said it would happen. Okay, so, but so look, I’ve been trying to… Part of the reason that I’m doing what I’m doing is to try to address the void, let’s say. And I suspect that many of you are actually here because you would like to have the void addressed. And so the way it looks to me is something like this. And this is what I’ve derived in part from my studies of religious tradition. So I could say that at the beginning of Genesis, for example, there’s a proposition that it’s truthful speech that generates habitable order from chaotic potential. That seems to me to be the fundamental narrative. And I do believe there’s something dead accurate and real about that, because we do generate the world as a consequence of our communicative effort. And then there’s a second proposition, which is that the world that we generate from the chaos of potential is habitable to the degree that the communication that we engage in is truthful. And that’s why God, who uses the logos at the beginning of time to generate the world, is able to say that his creation is good. The proposition is the world you bring into being through truthful speech is good. And that’s the image of God that’s implanted in man and woman. And there’s a grandeur about that idea. And you think, well, you don’t need the grandeur because it’s just a fiction. It’s like, just wait a second here. It’s not just a fiction unless you don’t believe that in some manner you partake in the creation of the world that you have an ultimate responsibility that might well be described as divine to participate in that process properly, truthfully and with love. And there’s every reason to think that that’s an elevated ideal so high that it’s worthy of conceptualizing as divine and also to presume that it represents some fundamental metaphysical reality. And that’s a lot more powerful than you need to be good. Yes, but the problem here, Jordan, is that I could do exactly what you just did with Buddhism or Hinduism. And it is just as grand and just as deep and just as anchored to the first person experience of contemplatives who’ve taken that as far as they could take it. Well, then I would say, Sam, you should do that and see how people respond to it. Well, no, no, no, because I. Yes, seriously. No, no, because I see the end of the end of the game. It’s not it doesn’t arrive where I want to get to where we need to get to because it is it’s. It would be to different effect. It’s there. There are different claims ultimately about the status of truth and good and evil and about the beginning of the world and the fate of a human consciousness after death. It’s completely completely irreconcilable worldviews. But I also do not swear if there are Hindus in the audience, they believe something that is totally irreconcilable to what Christians believe. I don’t think that you can offer. Pardon me, a watered down version of Buddhism as a consequence of psychedelic experience as a as a as a acceptable and credible alternative to the power of the fundamental founding myths of the Western culture. And if you think you can, you should try. Well, no, no, I’m trying. Well, I’m not trying that. But that’s that’s not that’s not what I do. First of all, just to just to get my biography straight. It’s not just the psychedelic experience. I know I know. And I’m also not making light of the psychedelic experience. Listen, to take this, we’re having most of this conversation on the side of where and it seems reasonable to worry about the fate of civilization. Right. You we could have started at a very different point with just the nature of consciousness, right? Just the just the first person encounter with being itself. Right. You wake all of us wake up each morning. We we we are thrust from a condition of deep sleep, which we seem to know nothing about. And we just got pushed through a veil of dreams into this apparently solid reality that we call the world. And we’re engaging one another in this space of of just consciousness and its contents. And we’re trying to make sense of it. And science is the best language game we play. I would argue in trying to make truly rigorous sense of it. But it doesn’t exhaust all the language games we play. We play others that are also fact based. We talk about what happened historically before we arrived here. We talk about facts as we can understand them that we just didn’t witness. But others did. And we call that journalism. Right. So we were trying to have a fact based. We used to call that journalism. Yes. Yes. It’s getting harder and harder to discern what’s actually going on now. But we are we are thrust into this condition of being our apparent selves moment by moment. And we notice the difference between happiness and suffering. Right. And this is not merely sensory. It’s not merely that, you know, I don’t like the feeling of a hot stove and I do like a warm bath. It’s ideas, the ways of thinking about ourselves and the world can can open the door or close the door to various states of happiness and suffering. And religion comes into religion leverages that people the difference between believing that your dead child is in heaven with Jesus and not being able to believe that is enormous. Right. I want to ask a specific though. You’ve expended a certain amount of reputational energy and much more on the jihadists in your battles. So we say that how much allyship to use a very bogus term. Have you found from fellow secular rational people who want to love and reason like you? Well, that is a leading question, isn’t it? I’ve got fingers if you need more. I know you get your fingers are safe. No, unfortunately, but it’s but this is a problem of I wouldn’t ascribe this to. Well, the allies you can easily find among deeply religious Christians say are there for the wrong reasons. Right. So I can find, you know, I can. Well, not all of them. Well, no, no, they’re there for the wrong. They see the problem clearly for the wrong reasons. So, for instance, I meet secular scientist types, you know, anthropologists say who are so far from knowing what it’s like to believe in revelation that they don’t believe anyone else does. Right. So when you tell them that members of ISIS really believe that if you die in the right circumstances, you get 72 versions and you’re surrounded by rivers of milk and honey and all the rest. You go into the ivory tower, you meet people who don’t believe that anyone believes that stuff. But if you go into a megachurch, they know people believe that stuff because they believe their own dogmas. Right. That’s that’s what it’s like to be to be effortlessly right for not especially good reasons. The fact that you believe a book, the fact that you believe a book was written by God and therefore it’s trivially easy for you to understand that someone else believes that. I just have the wrong book. That’s not the rational basis for understanding our circumstances that we’re looking for. I’m not saying whether one is right and one is wrong, but one seems to have more commitment in that. And in one battle you’re fighting, commitment may be important. Yeah, indeed. There may be many reasons why the people who deeply want to love and be rational are absolutely no damn use in that fight because they want to preserve their happiness a bit longer, preserve their comfort a bit longer. Cannot understand people who genuinely come from a fundamentalist standpoint. Yeah. And there’s also other to steel man their case for a moment. It is understandable to be sensitive to and guilty about the history of colonialism and the reality of racism and to be so committed to tolerance as your master virtue that you’re tempted to tolerate intolerance. And not recognize it to be cowardice, which in fact it is making tolerance. Your core value is much different than making truth your core value, which is an interesting thing because and perhaps this is one of the places where you and the fundamentalist radical leftists, let’s say, differ is that the core value that’s emerging there is definitely one of tolerance. Whereas the core value that you espouse is one of truth and truth and tolerance are not the same thing. Yes. I would might also. Yeah. Nor is the pursuit of truth and the belief that as a result, truth can be found, that it’s not a single thing on its own. You just pursue it as a hobby. It’s just something you do, but that you believe that at the end of it, there is a truth to be found. Yeah. So, but Douglas, what do you fear is the case here? If there were more people like me in the West, well, maybe I’m the outlier here. I’m somehow infected by this overweening commitment to truth and rationality and science. And yet I’m still motivated to worry about jihad. But you’re worried that there are many people like me who are oblivious to the problem. Why are you worried about it when so many other people who are hypothetically? This is the question you asked. Why are you so worried about when there’s so many people who are hypothetically like you that don’t seem to be worried about it? I mean, maybe you’re wrong. You shouldn’t be worried about it. Douglas is obviously worried about it too. One answer is a possibility. It’s my worry at any rate. That we may be living in an era when we are discovering that the enlightenment and the enlightenment’s values never went very wide and didn’t go terribly deep. And this is a very painful realization to make. But not only do we go all around the world and discover that, we find that at home. The roots turn out not to have gone very deep in even this society. And that’s a problem. It is a problem. But hence my commitment to making them deeper. And to reiterate the point, I’d be very happy if it was entirely Sam Harris’s all the way down. Okay. I’d have no problem with that. It’s just that underneath Sam Harris, it’s hell. You know me too well. I’m curious about something that you said. Yeah, that has to be very carefully edited on YouTube. In the metaphysic that you outlined, rationality in the service of love. This is an interesting… I’m not sure you get to get away with that. Is it rationality or is it love? Because I don’t understand the place in your conceptual system for love. Given your emphasis on rationality as the mechanism of ethics. So I would say to the degree that I smuggle in Jesus, which by the way isn’t accidental in some sense. And I’m fully conscious when I’m doing it. You smuggle in love and it essentially plays the same role. No, no, no. Love is an experienced reality. I mean love is a state of consciousness. It’s a state of… And I wouldn’t ultimately… Is it a state of consciousness? Well, it’s a fact that one can experience it or not. Yeah, but that’s not the same thing. No, it is. There are facts… It’s a fact that you can experience something, but the thing that you’re experiencing is… There’s also the thing that you’re experiencing as a fact. Well, there are facts about the range of human experiences. I say not even just human, just conscious experiences. I mean, I think that’s the thing that you’re experiencing. I mean, if we can build computers that can feel love, then that’s not inconceivable and we’ll either succeed in doing that or not. But consciousness admits a range of experiences and love is one of the best on offer. It’s not the only one we care about, but it’s the one that anchors us to a positive commitment to the well-being of other conscious systems. But the crucial thing is… But the thing is, it’s not a fact. I agree with you, Seth. No, it is a fact that loving someone entails a… Really, there are love and its counterfeits. People can confuse romantic attachment or lust with love. And the Buddhists are especially good at differentiating these various states of consciousness. And the Buddhists are especially good at differentiating these various states of consciousness. This true pleasure, mental pleasure in the company of another that is colored by a commitment to their well-being, a wanting them to be happy, a wanting to have their hopes realized, a non-zero-sum commitment or sense of your entanglement with them. And you can see your failures to love. You can be with people who you think you love. I’m with my best friend, say, and I just find out something fantastic has happened for him, let’s say, in his career, and I feel a moment of envy. Well, then you see, well, okay, how much do you love this person if your first reaction to something good happening to them is you feel poorer for it, right? That’s the Cain and Abel story. Exactly. So these are all kinds of defects you can witness in your own mind. And yes, you pay enough attention to what it’s like to be you. The full horror show of an almost biblical unwinding of all possibility is available. And you add psychedelics to that cocktail and it gets even more vivid. So are you saying that you’re claiming that that’s a… These are facts about the human mind. And it is also factual to say that it is possible to navigate in this space. It is possible to design institutions and social systems and ethical commitments that help us navigate in this space. And it’s not that we all have to get up every morning naked and try to rebuild civilization and all of human wisdom for ourselves each day. We inherit the most useful tools. You don’t have to figure this all out for yourself. And my appeal to you is that we should want to use all the best tools available without hamstringing ourselves by this notion that certain tools are… must be the best for all time or certain books must be read on every page with equal diligence because this book came from the creator of the universe. When we’re reading Marcus Aurelius, if he gets something catastrophically wrong on page 17, we say, well, what the hell? He lived 2,000 years ago. There’s no way he knew everything, right? And we turn the page. We can’t do that with the Bible and the Quran. So here’s a mythological representation of that. So there’s an ancient idea, a very ancient idea, that when you face the void, what you do is confront it and leap into it. And what you discover at the bottom is a beast. And inside that beast, you discover your father lying dead. And then you reanimate your father and you bring him back to the surface. And that’s the means of dealing with the void, right? And so in essence, in some sense, that’s just what you said. You said that. Except that, again, there’s something confabulatory about that because I could change the valence of virtually every word you use there. And it would also sound profound and true. I could swap father for mother and I could swap void for mountaintop. And it could be the same seemingly archetypal journey. It’s not that easy, Sam. That’s the same thing as… It’s damn easy. I’ve done it with a cookbook. But look, if it’s that easy, then you can write great novels. No, no, there are other abilities involved. Well, if it’s that easy, it’s not that easy to write a great story. So these things can’t be swapped out with ease. And there is a reason that it’s your father that you rescue from the belly of the beast and not your mother in those sorts of situations. But again, I give you Buddhism and Hinduism that have completely different iconographies and mythologies. Well, they’re different at some levels, but not at all. It’s like languages. They’re different at some levels and not at all. They’re crucially opposite in many of these cases. I’m just saying that this kind of reading meaning into story is…there’s a reason why it’s not science. It’s because it is in some basic sense unfalsifiable. There’s nothing you and I can do for the rest of our lives to be sure that the mother isn’t at the bottom of that void and it’s really the father. Is it possible to develop a factual approach to the analysis of literature? Well, yes, on its own terms. You can say, well, but that extends to things like it is a fact that Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark and not the King. No, I meant in terms of the meaning of literature. Well, yeah, but you can make true and false claims or more and less plausible claims about literature. Well, that’s what I’m trying to do is to make more plausible claims. Or it’s effects on you. But again, this is a very different game than what most religious people think is on offer. Well, look, if you look at the domain of science, most scientists aren’t very good at what they do. And if you look at the domain of religious thinking, most religious thinking people aren’t very good at what they do. But that doesn’t mean that the whole damn thing should be thrown out. There’s gradations of religious revelation and wisdom. But there’s that word. Because revelation… If revelation is something that we can all do, you know, you, me and Marcus Aurelius, that is a very different world than the world that Muslims think they’re living in. But you just said, Sam, that we have to go… This is why I used the going down into the void to rescue your father metaphor. You just said that we have to… And you’ve said this before, and I know you believe it as well, that we have to go back into the past and find the wisdom that can help guide us because we don’t have to do this as if we’re encountering everything for the first time. And that’s exactly the idea of going into the void to rescue your father. That is the eternal age old medication for the confrontation of the void. And you said it yourself. And so I don’t know which it is. It’s like, do we have to go into the past to rescue what’s best given the understanding that there is something there worth rescuing or not? Is it pure rationality and nothing else moving forward? Unconstrained by convention. Unconstrained by convention. It’s just… Again, I want our certainties. And I think we all… In every other area of our lives, we agree about this effortlessly. If I’m pretending to be certain of something that you can sense I have no good reason to be certain about, you begin to mistrust me in every area. If it’s in business, or if it’s in sports, or if I told you I knew that France was going to win the World Cup and I was absolutely sure and yet I magically didn’t bet any money on it. These are conversations we can have about everything else and yet on this topic of religion, people change the rules. And I’m just arguing that the rules by which we dole out our credence shouldn’t change. And they don’t change. And again, we shouldn’t be misled by the duration of the past. The comparison of something like Scientology to Christianity is so invidious because we can practically meet L. Ron Hubbard. We’ve got film of him confabulating about galaxies ruled by overlords whose names he magically knew. We see the man behind the curtain. We don’t see that with Apostle Paul or anyone else who brought us the quote real religions. And yet it’s always just been human beings doing this. And if you go back far enough, they were doing it in a situation that was completely uncontaminated by the kinds of concerns we have as scientists and secular rational people for evidence and consistency and a knowledge of the past. They had no mechanism by which to record their observations. Now, I’m going to interrupt you. Yes. Because first of all, I saw a sign saying five minutes. And I’m very conscious of a number of things, apart from my own silence. And the main one is this. We had a long session on love just then. And I refuse to finish this evening on such a positive note. And I’d like to turn that round. We’re all in agreement on certain aspects. We speech civilized discourse on the most important matters and much more. But there’s also, I’m sure, a lot we have in common of what we just can’t bear. And I just wanted to hand over to both of you at some point. To give an idea not of your loves, but of your present hates. That’s Jordan. Hates. Well, I would say that I spent a lot of time over the last 30 years trying to understand the part of me that could be deeply satisfied as an Auschwitz prison guard. And I would say that that part is something that’s worthy of hate. And I think the best way to overcome it is to recognize it in yourself and to do everything possible to constrain it. And that’s what’s given me an overwhelming horror, both of the nihilistic void and the catastrophes of totalitarianism. And the reason that I’ve turned to the degree that I have to the analysis of religious traditions not losing my scientific perspective in the meantime is because I’ve done everything I could to to extract out the wisdom necessary to understand how to deal with that bit of unredeemed evil that every bit of us possess. Thank you. 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, it is what makes human life just pure monotony and pettiness and everything that religion advertises itself as a corrective to. What I’m sensitive to is that someone like Sayyid Qutb when he came to, this is 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 bragging about how well mowed their lawns were and what new Chevrolet’s they had purchased and he looked at all of this as just the quintessence of desecration and lost opportunity and the lack of profundity and 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, so obviously being a guard at Auschwitz with a clear conscience is the extreme, the extreme case of that. I was thinking more of happiness. What was that? More of 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 is, 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 needless anxiety and very dimly we recognize the possibility of overcoming that on a day-to-day basis and that’s the problem. On a day-to-day basis and honestly I think the atheism, the lack of belief, the lack of faith in an afterlife for instance, the lack of belief in the notion that you get everything you want or may get everything you want after you die helps, leads to greater depth rather than to superficiality here. 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 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 the tide against which I keep pushing. 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 was 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 a knowledge of all the extraordinary progress we’re about to hit can take place in an arena like this with an audience like you who have all come out and now sat here for two hours and I think it’s at any rate from my point of view one of the most positive things I can imagine in the world at the moment that an evening like this is happening with an audience like you and unless either of you want to say anything I think on behalf of all of us I’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 Thank you Everyone please put your hands together for Sam Harris Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray Thanks, buddy Well done Be continued