Conversation between Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Waking Up Podcast No67 (31Ud7-EkZEI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=31Ud7-EkZEI

Welcome to the Waking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well today, back by popular demand, I have Jordan Peterson. Jordan is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University and he has published articles on drug abuse and alcoholism and aggression, but he has made a special focus on tyranny and of late he has been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada and he’s attracted a lot of support and criticism on that front. As I said last time around, he is far and away the most requested guest I’ve ever had. And we did a podcast about four or so episodes back entitled What is True, podcast number 62, and that to the disappointment of everyone was a fairly brutal slog through different conceptions of epistemology. If ever the phrase bogged down applied to a podcast, it applied there. Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn’t. But as I say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll online and 30,000 of you responded and 81% wanted us to try again because there was much more to talk about. And as it turns out there was, we had a much better conversation this time around. It was very collegial and if you have anything to say about it, feel free to reach out to Jordan and me on Twitter or make noise wherever you want. And now I bring you Jordan Peterson. I am back here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. Let’s just take a moment to bring people up to speed while we can assume many have heard our previous effort at this. All won’t have, so we did a podcast a little over a month ago. It was podcast 62, I believe, on my list and it went fairly haywire. We intended to speak about many things, but got bogged down on the question of what it means to say that a proposition is true. And I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy, but it seemed to me that we got stuck at a point that wasn’t very interesting and many of our listeners felt the same. And at the time, I didn’t let the conversation proceed to other topics because I felt that it would just be pointless. I knew you wanted to talk about things like the validity of religious faith and Jungian archetypes and many other controversial things. And I felt if we couldn’t agree on what separates fact from fantasy, we would just be doomed to talk past one another. I think it’s still possible we are doomed to talk past one another, but we ran a Twitter poll after our first podcast and despite all the complaints I received about our conversation, 81% of people wanted us to make a second attempt. I think 30,000 people answered that poll, so it was a considerable number of people. I decided we should give our people what most of them claim to want and we’ll just see how it goes because I don’t want us to fight the same battle all over again. I think listeners who are curious about how that last conversation went can listen to it and I’m sure the topic of truth and falsity will come up, but if it does, I think the best thing to do is kind of flag it on the fly and move on. I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can profitably be said across differing epistemologies. With that warning about the various road hazards, I think we should just see where we wind up. And I think it could be someplace interesting because you and I appear to share many of the same concerns. I think we both find the question of how to live in this world to be the most important one and I think we’re equally concerned about some of the very well-subscribed answers to that question that are obviously wrong. And so I think we should just do our best to make sense and see where it goes. Well, I hope so too. That seems right. I mean, you place a tremendous emphasis on the moral necessity of the spoken truth and That’s certainly something that I’m in accord with. And you’re also concerned with ethics in relationship to the alleviation of suffering from what I’ve been able to understand, from what I’ve read of your writings. And you’re also very much concerned with the relationship between scientific fact and value. And so we do share this intense concern about the same domain and I think for many of the same reasons. I think that you’re an outstanding exponent of your particular position and that makes you an excellent person to talk about these things with. I was actually going to start with a bit of an apology because I listened to our talk twice trying to figure out where it went off the rails. It actually went okay for the first hour and then we got bogged down in the truth issue. And I think I made a couple of strategic errors, which I hope not to repeat. The first one was that I started the conversation by more or less accusing you of being insufficiently Darwinian and that was designed to be, I thought, playful and provocative. But when I listened to our conversation again, I thought that that wasn’t a very wise strategic move. So that was one mistake I made. And the second mistake I made was that I had just read a number of things that you had written and I told you a lot about what you thought instead of letting you say it. And I was doing that partly, well, partly because there is an argument to be had here. And I suppose partly because I was nervous, but also partly to demonstrate that I had actually familiarized myself with what you had read and I wanted to indicate or what you had written. And I wanted to indicate to you that I was taking it seriously. But I’m going to try to not be the least bit provocative in that manner during this conversation, because I really do think that we have something important to talk about. And I think that that’s why so many people actually want to listen to us talk. So anyways, hopefully we get bogged down. Yeah, just in the interest of completing that bit of housekeeping. I don’t think the first was an error at all. I mean, to say that I’m insufficiently Darwinian is provocative and I don’t take it in the least bit personally. We just didn’t find a path through that particular thesis that we could converge on. As far as the second point telling me what I think in advance of our actually hitting that topic, I think that is that’s almost certainly a mistake with me or anyone. And that’s fine that you did that post-mortem and I agree with that bit. So let’s just start with a clean slate here. I think kind of a natural starting point would be to ask you, and again, I’ve heard a few of the things you’ve said on this topic, but I’ll just let you invent yourself anew, however it strikes you. What is the relationship in your view between science and religion? Well, I think that religious systems are descriptions of how people ought to act. I think that those arose in a quasi-evolutionary manner. So imagine the dominance hierarchy structure of a chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack. Okay, so we’ll use the wolf idea first and then switch if it’s okay to the chimpanzee idea. So as a consequence of the behavioral actions and interactions among social animals, you could think of something as a something that might be described as a procedural covenant arising. And that would be the animal’s knowledge of the structure of the dominance hierarchy, which is kind of ill-named, but we’ll use that for now. So there’s a hierarchy of rank, and every animal in the social community understands that hierarchy of rank. That’s essentially the culture of the troop or the pack. And there’s an implicit recognition of the value of each individual within that troop such that, for example, if two wolves square off in a dominance dispute, of course, they puff themselves up to make themselves look large and they growl at each other and they engage in ferociously threatening displays. And generally speaking, the wolf that has the lowest threshold for anxiety activation will capitulate first, generally without much more than the pose of a fight, and roll over and expose his neck. And then the dominant wolf will not deign to tear it out, basically. And you could think of the wolves acting out what you would describe propositionally as respect for each individual’s value. And then in the chimp troops, Franz de Waal’s research has indicated, for example, that if the dominance hierarchy is only based on brute force, and the chimp at the top, who’s generally male, is there because he’s a barbarian dictator, let’s say, then he’s very likely to be taken out by two male chimps, three-quarters his power, who are much better at social bonding and who made a very tight compact between one another. And so the chimp troop that’s based on a tyranny is unstable. What de Waal indicated was that the chimp troops that tend to be more stable are run by dominant males who actually are very good at social bonding and reciprocity and who pay a fair bit of attention to the females and infants in the troop. So the dominance isn’t power so much as you might think of as good politics. And so there’s an emergent ethic that, and I truly believe it’s emergent ethic, that’s very similar to what Piaget described as emerging among children when they play games, that not only specifies the nature of the social contract, let’s say, but also is structured as if the individuals within the social contract have some implicit value. So imagine that as human beings diverged away from their chimpanzee progenitors, they’re the common ancestor we have with chimpanzees, we already started to act out this ethic. It was coded in our procedures to speak technically because we have a procedural memory. And then as we developed cortically, we watched each other and ourselves very, very intently. And once we developed language, we were able to start encapsulating that procedural ethic first in stories. And those stories were partly about what a very well-structured procedural ethic might be and how it might go wrong, but also about how an individual within that procedural ethic should be treated and should act. And the storytelling, which was the mapping of that procedure, was the birthplace of the image and story basis of religious ideation, as far as I can tell. So that’s the basic thesis. It’s like Piaget’s notion that children, when they first come together to learn a game, if they’re young enough, they can play the game when they’re together. But if you take them out of the game and ask them individually about the rules, they give widely disparate accounts. So they’ve got the procedure in place, but they haven’t got the episodic representation, technically speaking. It’s only once they become more linguistically sophisticated that they can actually come up with a coherent representation of the rules. And then it’s only later when they start to construe themselves, not merely as followers of the rules, but also as originators of the rules. And that’s akin to the recognition of, I would say, constructive individuality in relationship to the state. So I see these things as very, very, very deeply biologically predicated. Where’s the concept of an archetype come into this picture? Well, OK, imagine this, Sam, you tell me what you think about this. So you know how if you if you have a can I tell you just a two minute story? Sure. So OK, so one time I was at the hockey rink with my son and he was playing, he was young, he was about 12 and they were playing this championship game in this little league that they had. And my son was a pretty good hockey player, but there was a kid on the team who was better than him, who was kind of a star. But he was a he was a diva, you know, and even though he would score goals and all of that, he wouldn’t pass and he wouldn’t he wasn’t facilitating the development of any of the other team members. And so anyways, we watched this game and it was very close. It was a very exciting game. And in the final few minutes of the last period, the other team scored and my son’s team and this the stars team lost. And so then the kids went off the ice and that and the diva kid smashed his hockey stick on the cement and started to complain bitterly about how unfair the game is. And then his his idiot father came running up to him and told him how unfair the roughing had been and how and how it was stolen from them and how catastrophic all of that was. And I thought it was one of the most heinous displays of poor parenting that I’d ever seen. Now so there’s there’s a there’s a moral of that story. So his kid was very good at playing hockey, but he wasn’t very good at being a good player. And so, you know, you always tell your kids doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And of course, you don’t know what that means. And neither does the kid. And it’s often a mystery to the kid what that means, because obviously you’re trying to win. But but imagine it this way. Imagine that human beings that the goal of human life isn’t to win the game. The goal of human life in some sense is to win the set of all possible games. And in order to win the set of all possible games, you don’t need to win any particular game. You have to play in a manner that ensures that you will be invited to play more and more games. And so when you tell your children to be good sports to play properly, what you mean is play to win, but play to win in such a way that people on your team are happy to play with you and people on the other teams are happy to play with you. And so that you keep getting invited to games. Now if you think of each game as a small hierarchy of value or dominance, then obviously the appropriate thing is to move up the hierarchy. But that’s what animals do is they move up in their specific hierarchy. But because human beings are capable of abstraction, we’ve been able to conceptualize the hierarchy as such, rather than any specific one, and then also to characterize a mode of being that is most likely to move you up the hierarchy, no matter what that hierarchy is. And as far as I can tell, that’s the archetype of the hero. The hero is the person who’s most likely to move up any given dominance hierarchy at any time in any place. And the hero is also, and then so that the nature of that archetypal hero first was acted out, it was laid out in procedure, and then it was acted out, and then it was described. But it’s also, it’s multi-dimensional. It’s not only he who plays to be invited to play again, but also he who goes out into the great unknown to face chaos and the dangers there, but to gather what’s valuable as a consequence and to bring it back to the community. And that’s the basis of the dragon myth archetype, which is, of course, plays out in art and literature throughout recorded history. The oldest story we have, which is the Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia, is a story about Marduk, who’s the culture hero and also the highest god in the Mesopotamian pantheon. He confronts the dragon of chaos, cuts her into pieces, and makes the world. In fact, one of his names was Nam, I can’t remember the name, unfortunately, but it meant he who creates ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat, who’s the dragon of chaos. So he cuts off, he cuts up the unknown into pieces and makes ingenious things out of them. And it’s a perfect description of the human archetype, the fact that we are hyper exploratory and that we use our capacity to explore the dangerous unknown to gather the treasure that lies there and then to distribute it to the community. And in terms of the evolution of that archetype, Sam, think about it this way, okay? Again, you can tell me what you think about this. So we know that, roughly speaking, that human females mate across and up dominance hierarchies, whereas chimpanzee females are non-selective mateers. The dominant males will chase away the subordinate chimps from the females in estrus, and so they’re more likely to have offspring, but the females will mate with anyone, whereas human females are very selective and they have hidden ovulation and they mate across and up dominance hierarchies. So imagine the woman wants the man who’s most capable of rising up the set of all dominance hierarchies. So what happens is she outsources that problem to the computational capacity of the male hierarchy and she lets the men fight it out among themselves, compete and cooperate to determine who the best man is. He’s provided with the majority of the mating opportunities. And so that’s how the extended religious phenotype manifests itself in evolutionary space, which was something that you and Richard Dawkins were wondering about the last time that you talked. Like, it’s not psychopathy, which was in some sense, you know, you were thinking about the charismatic liar, but really what’s being selected for is the consciousness, because that’s the right way of thinking about it, that’s best able to rise across the set of all dominance hierarchies. And females are selecting very hard for that, which is at least in part why we’ve had this tremendously expanded cortical capacity. Well, let me see if I can wade into this picture and find places of agreement and disagreement. For clarity’s sake, I think it’s useful to distinguish between two different intellectual projects here with respect to values and morality and the question of just how to live in this world, which is our least nominal starting point. First, there’s the description of how we got here, right? And this captures all of evolutionary psychology and much of what you just began to say about selection pressures with respect to dominance hierarchies and the kind of heroic male mate that female apes will find attractive and all that. Then you can add religion to that as perhaps an extended phenotype or the possibility of group selection pressure, more religious tribes have a way of organizing themselves in a more durable way than less religious tribes and therefore there’s something in our evolutionary history that has selected for religiosity, say, an overarching story that unites non-kin in a way that is more energizing than some other story. I don’t really have much of a dog in that fight. I think some of that is plausible, some of it isn’t. I think group selection, though you haven’t mentioned it, is working to some degree in the background of this way of talking about religion in evolutionary terms and at the moment I happen to be convinced that group selection is implausible and based on some bad analogies. But again, this doesn’t strike me as important for this conversation or for anything that I’ve written about the relationship between morality and science or facts and values because I view this problem of describing how we got here. How is it that apes like ourselves have the moral attitudes and concerns that we have? That’s a distinct project which is quite separate from the question of deciding how we should live now given what we are and given the opportunities available to us and given the way in which we’re continually flying the perch that has been prepared for us by evolution with our technology and with our institutions and with our new moral norms that have absolutely nothing to do with ancient selection pressures. And this is even true in a religious context. So you have in many religions, perhaps even most, you have certain ideals that could never have been selected for because they are the antithesis of anything that would offer an adaptive advantage. Celibacy, for instance. Anyone who was committed to celibacy in our ancient past by definition didn’t breed. You could say that they might have helped their kin, but still celibacy is not an ideal that you can make much Darwinian sense of and yet you can have the most committed adherence of any faith tending toward a life of celibacy. At the very least promiscuity is taboo in most religious traditions. Now I’m not taking a position that that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m just saying this is where evolution is no longer relevant to a discussion of how people should live. And as I think I said in a blog response to some of the things you said after our first podcast, if you wanted to just take a gene’s eye view of how human beings should live, especially how men should live, well then you would conclude that given current opportunities, every man should be passionately committed to doing more or less nothing but donate his sperm to a sperm bank because then he could father possibly tens of thousands of offspring for whom he would have no financial or emotional responsibility. From a Darwinian perspective, that should be every guy’s deepest dream. You should just get up in the morning with just a commitment to that project unlike any other that could be discovered in life. So we have motives and norms and concerns that don’t narrowly track a gene level analysis of what we should be doing. So I just put that out there. I think the more interesting conversation is not to talk about how apes like ourselves could have gotten religion, but to talk about what we should do given the way the world is now and what we seem to know about it through science. Well that’s fine. I just want to make a couple of comments about that. I mean the hypotheses that I’m proposing is certainly not dependent on group selection. So we can leave that one aside as far as I know. I think the jury’s out on the ultimate validity of the idea of group selection, but I’m not interested in going down that rabbit hole because it doesn’t matter to me one way or another really how that’s resolved. With regards to the potential validity of evolutionarily derived motivations to the present day, I think that’s more complicated. So the first thing I would say is that I believe there has been a central march forward with a set of very productive ideas as human beings have evolved their morality, but those have spun off counterproductive evolutionary dead ends like everything does. And it’s possible, for example, that celibacy is one of those. With regards to the donation to sperm bank idea, I mean that’s essentially the mosquito way of propagation, right? And that’s it’s R versus K. Is that the correct terminology? I don’t remember it correctly, but there’s two fundamentally different strategies, extreme strategies for propagating yourself in the world. And one is to disseminate yourself as widely as possible and let the offspring live or die as they may, which would be the sperm bank approach. And then there’s the other one, which is high investment in children, which is maybe taken to its extreme in human beings. And so we’re tilted a lot more towards that. And so you can’t really imagine a human being being motivated to take the mosquito approach because that’s really not built into us. But that isn’t to say that the sexual morality that’s part and parcel of our being, which seems to tend relatively strongly towards monogamy, for example, as marriage is a human universal, although there are variations of it, we’re still very much tilted towards the high investment in single offspring patterns. So let me just clarify one point. I certainly am not saying that you can’t see the thumbprint of evolution in more or less everything we do. You obviously can. And as you point out, our sexual morality and our commitment to monogamy, all of that is amenable to being interpreted in evolutionary terms. No doubt those stories are valid and interesting to understand. My point is that we are in the process of repudiating and struggling to outgrow most of what evolution has prepared us to want and care about and fear. Tribalism, xenophobia, and the list is long, but we want to get out of our tribal violence program and all the rest. Let me address that because you see, most of the evolutionary psychologists that I’ve encountered have what I consider the misbegotten notion that our primary period of evolutionary determination was on the African veldt. My viewpoint, I would say, spans broader time spans than that. So I’m starting from the presupposition that the most permanent things are the most real, which I think is a reasonable starting point. But I have a reason for saying that because what I’ve been able to understand by delving deeply into the grammatical structure underneath mythology is that the religious landscape actually describes that which is most permanent in what shaped human evolutionary history. And I mean, way back, I mean, 350 million years back before trees, before flowers, back when we shared common ancestor with crustaceans. And so one of the most permanent features of the biological landscape is the existence of the dominance hierarchy. And that’s roughly portrayed in religious mythology as culture or explored territory or the known. And it’s usually given the characterological representation of the great father. And there’s a positive one and a negative one as the dominance hierarchy can support you in your development or crush you completely. So the dominance hierarchy is one major selection mechanism. And it’s known territory. There’s another major selection mechanism, which is roughly speaking, mother nature. And that’s that which exists outside of explored territory. And it’s generally being kept conceptualized as feminine, which and I think the reason for that is because the unknown, it’s the unknown, cognitively speaking or territorial speaking that gives rise to new forms. But it’s also more importantly that female human beings, so the feminine, plays a very vicious role in the selection process. You may know and probably do that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So as far as human beings are concerned, the feminine is a bottleneck through which genes must pass, so to speak. And it’s a very narrow and picky and choosy bottleneck. So it has a positive element and a negative element. So roughly, it’s the same thing, Sam, that’s represented in the Daoist yin yang symbol, because that yin yang symbol basically is predicated on the idea that being is partly the known or the interpretive structure that’s brought to bear on the situation. And so that’s the white paisley. It’s a serpent, actually, and the unknown, which is the black paisley or serpent, and the two are interchangeable and out of them arises meaning. So the idea behind the Daoist symbol is that you should have one foot in what you know and one foot in what you don’t know. And that’s the place where information flow is maximized. And that’s the same thing as occupying the position of the hero who confronts the unknown and generates new information. And those evolutionary realities remain absolutely unchanged. The idea that every place you go, there’s something you know and an interpretive framework that you bring to bear. So there’s a cultural element and everywhere you go or are, there’s something that transcends that knowledge that you have to deal with. And everywhere you go, you’re there. And so the three basic archetypal characters of mythology are the individual, positive and negative, culture, positive and negative, and nature, positive and negative. And we haven’t outgrown that in the least. It’s exactly the same problem. It’s always been. And as far as I can tell, it’s exactly the same set of problems that always will be. And that’s partly why these archetypal stories cannot be transcended and they cannot be ignored. They pop up of their own accord. I mean, look, I’ll give you an example. One question, Jordan. How is any of that religious, though? I understand how thinking of the individual versus the cosmos gives us a kind of narrative structure, right? You have your protagonist and you have all of the things that can happen to him or not and all the things that he can want or not. And it’s very easy to conceive of any human life or the life of a whole civilization in terms of stories like that. How does this bring religion into the picture? OK, well, I’m going to approach that from two perspectives. The first perspective, I presume, is one that you might find interesting given your interest in spirituality. So it’s certainly capable for people to experience deeply a sense of meaning. Chick-Sent Mahaly talked about that as flow, which I think is a rather trivial way of dealing with it, but at least it’s one that people can directly understand. But I would say you can understand when you’re doing something meaningful because you’re deeply engaged in it and you also have a sense in some sense of standing outside of time because you don’t know how time’s flow. And it also feels worthwhile and that the sacrifices that you have made to enable yourself to do that were justified. And so I would say because the ultimate domains of reality are in fact chaos and order or known and unknown, that when you straddle those two properly and maximize information flow, you feel a deep sense of intrinsic meaning. And that’s the output of the entire structure of your consciousness telling you that you’re in the right place at the right time with regards to furthering your capacity to thrive and move forward. A question here, Jordan. Wouldn’t you grant that there are pathological experiences of meaning, meaning that is actually based on a misconception or divorced from the truth, which can be no less intoxicating to the person who’s finding something meaningful? Sam, I think that’s a great question. I mean, one of the things that really, really disturbed me when I was first working out these ideas was exactly that question because I’ve read an awful lot about extraordinarily pathological people, serial killers and people who were malevolent right to their core. And that’s exactly the question I asked because with serial killers, for example, especially the sexual predator types, they seem to have to live on the edge of their pathology in order to continue to be rewarded by it. They have to keep extending their pathology into the unknown to keep getting that rush. And then, of course, there’s the situation with schizophrenics, where the underlying mechanisms that produce the sense of meaning actually go astray. And that’s especially the case, say, with paranoid schizophrenia. But you see, that’s partly why I think I developed a viewpoint that’s similar to yours with regards to the necessity of stating the truth or at least attempting very hard not to say what you believe to be false. Because as far as I can tell, at least under most circumstances, that that meaning orienting system, which is actually the extended orienting reflex, technically speaking, neuropsychologically speaking, I think that you pathologize the underlying mechanisms if you speak deceitfully, because you build you build pathological micro machines, so to speak, into the architecture of your physiology. And then your underlying the underlying systems, much more fundamental, say, limbic systems for the sake of for lack of a better term, they start producing pathological output and take you down extraordinarily dangerous roads. So if you’re going to let your intrinsic sense of meaning serve as a guide through life, then you have to ally yourself with the commitment to speak the truth or at least not to engage in deceit, because otherwise you will do exactly what you said and pathologize yourself and then well, and then all hell will break loose in your life and in the life of others. And you could be rigorously honest, but still mistaken, right? You could have a belief system or be raised in a culture that has a belief system that is completely illogical or out of touch with reality, and you could not know it. The dishonesty doesn’t have to be local to your own brain. You could just be confused, right? Well, I think this is partly why I was more insistent than I should have been in our last discussion about a particular idea about truth. I mean, because I would say there’s the truth that’s associated with being in possession of a set of accurate facts, but there’s a more enacted truth or embodied truth, which is the consistent attempt to go beyond what you know. And so that would be the necessity of living in humility or in ignorance. And so that what you’re doing when you’re discussing with someone or when you’re acting in the world is not so much attempting to prove that what you already know is completely right and correct, but attempting to understand very carefully where you’re in error and learning everything you can to correct that. And you see, that idea is also deeply rooted in religious mythology. So for example, the figure of Horus, who’s the Egyptian eye and who’s also a falcon. Now, Horus is an eye and a falcon because falcons can see better than any other animal, even though we can see very well. And he’s an eye because the eye with the open iris signifies paying attention. And Horus, who’s a messianic figure in some sense for the ancient Egyptians, had his eyes open to the corruption of the state, which was symbolized by a deity named Seth, who later became Satan in the developmental pathway of this set of ideas. And Horus, who lived in truth, so to speak, was able to keep his eyes open and understand the corrupt nature of his society and his uncle, his uncle was Seth, and to put that right again. And so there’s the idea that lived truth can rescue you from pathological untruth. And that might be moral or factual. If you’re a scientist and operating in a truthful manner, you update archaic empirical representations. If you’re a what would you call more culture hero type of person, then what you’re doing is updating archaic and blind representations of the proper moral pathway forward, which can never be encapsulated completely in a set of rules. See, that’s partly why, for example, in the line of Christian thought, Moses couldn’t reach the promised land because his morality was bounded by rules. And it’s not possible to reach the proper mode of being by only acting out rules because rules, the same rules aren’t applicable in every situation. I mean, I could tell you the Christian story in a way that you might find interesting in about 10 minutes if you if you would like me to do that. And let’s hold off on Christianity. I want to get there because I know that’s the system of thinking you find most interesting in this area. And so I would like to talk about that. OK. My issue is that it seems to me that this kind of language game of talking about ancient stories and the way in which they seem to cash out some of the pre scientific intuitions and moral norms of any group of people. So there’s a validity to the whole picture when you talk that way that I just see that that’s kind of unconstrained by anything. I think you can do that with anything with any system of beliefs. You can find people which, from my point of view, are living in some form of radical error, which is to say that virtually everything they think is true almost certainly isn’t. The way they’re treating one another is terrible on the basis of those misconceptions and they’re never going to get anywhere worth going. So a modern example of that is something like ISIS or the Taliban. But there’s some ancient examples or older examples that are in some cases even easier to understand because we have no affinity for them. So do you know the Dobu people? The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about them. I wrote about them for a few pages in my book, The Moral Landscape. Yeah, I read about them in your book actually. Yeah, so for listeners who didn’t read the book or can’t remember, I mean the Dobu get my vote for perhaps the most tragically confused people who have ever lived. And this is just kind of a hothouse version of radical confusion, which you wouldn’t believe would be possible, but for the fact that some anthropologists wrote about it. So this was a culture that was completely obsessed with malicious sorcery and their primary interest, every person’s primary interest was to cast spells on other members of the tribe in an attempt to sicken or kill them in the hopes of magically stealing their possessions and especially their crops. It was like a continuous magical war of all against all in this way and they believed that magic had to be consciously applied to everything. They literally thought that gravity had to be supplemented by magic so that if you didn’t cast the right spells, your vegetables would just rise out of the ground and disappear. And they thought every interaction of this sort and every outcome for people was zero sum so that if one man succeeded in growing more vegetables than his neighbor, his success, his surplus of vegetables must have been stolen from one of his neighbors through sorcery. Even the farmer who got lucky in this way with a surplus would have believed that he succeeded for this reason, that he actually magically stole his neighbor’s crops. So to have a good harvest was a crime by everyone’s estimation, even the person who was a lucky harvester. And it seems to me that you could play this same game with the dobu. You could talk about archetypes, you could talk about whatever stories, ancient or otherwise, that they were using to justify this view of life. You could find some evolutionary way of kind of threading the needle of how what they were doing was a response to the ancient imperative of dominance hierarchies. You could give some sympathetic construal of the whole enterprise in terms of myth and archetype and meaning. But clearly this was like a kind of strange basin of attraction that you’d be very lucky never to have found as a tribe or as a culture. And we’re very lucky not to be stuck in some similar place there. There’s another detail here which is especially horrible because the dobu felt that magic became more powerful the closer you were to somebody so that the people who were closest to them in life, their spouses or their children, were the people who were most likely to destroy them with their magical powers. Well that’s actually true, Sam. If you’ve ever had a family, you know that. But yeah, so again, you could connect it to some kind of story that makes sense. You could go to Greek mythology and Shakespeare and spin a yarn about it. But clearly this underlying belief in magic was, one, it’s almost certainly not true, but two, it was creating a truly toxic moral environment for these people. And so again, I just put that out there as an example of something that one would never want to spend a lot of time trying to justify this worldview by reference to stories ancient or otherwise. Yeah, well, I mean, there’s actually a technical solution to the problem that you’re posing. I mean, part of the problem is how do you know if what you’re looking at is a genuine thing or an artifact of your imagination? And you know that Paul Meehl and his colleague Kronbach basically addressed that back in the 1950s with a very solid piece of methodological work that every psychologist either does or should know about. They were the inventors of the multi-trait multi-method construct validation process, which is a pretty awful jumble of words. But basically it means something like in order to specify whether or not something exists, you have to use multiple methods to detect it and that their reports should co-vary positively. And so of course, we do exactly that with our five senses. You know, just because you can see something doesn’t mean it’s there. But if you can see it and hear it, well, you’re a little bit more certain. When I wrote my book Maps of Meaning, I was very acutely aware of that. And it’s certainly criticism that has been levelled against people like Carl Jung, mostly, tragically enough, by the postmodernists, of course, who don’t believe in any sort of overarching narrative and who have their own form of Dogen-like pathology distributed well widely among them. So what I did was refuse to take a presupposition as acceptable unless I could find its manifestation at at least four levels of evidence simultaneously. So for example, in my book, I start out with a neuropsychological account, an account of the fundamental neuropsychological processes that enable us to make sense out of the world, primarily relying on the work done, early work done by the Russian neuropsychologists Luria and Sokolov and Vinogradova, who did a lot of early work on the orienting reflex in the hippocampus. That was then sort of combined with modern cybernetic theory by Jeffrey Gray, who was Hans Eysenck student. And Jeffrey Gray’s work has had tremendous impact over the last, especially over the last 10 years in psychology in general. He wrote his book in 1982, but it was a very, very difficult book. I think it had, it must have had between 1500 and 3000 references. And Jeffrey Gray was exactly the sort of person who would have read every single one of them. And he outlined a cybernetic information processing model of human neuropsychological function that actually lays extraordinarily nicely on top of the archetypal world that I’ve been working on outlining. And I also wanted to ensure that it was in keeping with the kind of observational animal studies that people like Jane Goodall and Franz de Waal do. Ethology. I wanted to make sure that it was in keeping with the ethological data, as well as the broader literature on evolutionary psychology and biology. And so when I say that there’s these patterns that exist that you can extract out of mythology, I’m saying that knowing full well that you can find concordance for the process is described by those archetypal stories in at least four different scientific disciplines simultaneously. And according to Cronbach and Meehl’s methodology, that’s the most effective possible way of validating a construct when it might be susceptible to the kind of contamination by imagination that you’re referring to. I don’t know what to make of that claim generically. I think we should talk about your view of Christianity at some point soon to see if we can talk about specifics. But I just want to take a generic starting point, which for me is more accessible and I think more illuminating. It certainly describes the divide between science and religion that resonates with me. And I think it connects nicely to the way you were describing kind of our primal circumstance of being an individual or a tribe standing in the face of mute and often hostile nature and trying to figure out what’s going on and how to live within it. I think that really is the primal circumstance. This is why I think of religion, as you know, as a kind of failed science, as a kind of first attempt to tell a story about what’s going on that gives us some power over it. But it’s a bad attempt because we didn’t develop any kind of methodology at that point to differentiate fact from fiction. Take the case that every parent will be familiar with of standing helplessly over your sick child, wondering what’s wrong. Let’s say your child throws up and has a fever and you don’t know what’s wrong with him or her. And this is obviously one of the more ancient moments for any person. And there’s obvious evolutionary reasons why we would be concerned about this. And so this is quite Darwinian to care what’s happening to your infant. But today, this primitive uncertainty and helplessness and fear is bracketed by a basic understanding of the processes in the world that can affect a human body. And there’s obviously enough to worry about there to drive almost any parent crazy. But one thing that is no longer on the menu is the evil eye. When your child gets sick, no part of your mind, if you’re sane, is now devoted to the question of whether or not you should go burn your neighbor as a witch because she might have cast a malicious glance at your child. Right. But as you know, that was not always so. And in fact, in Africa, people are still murdering their neighbors for the crime of witchcraft. So the problem, from my point of view, is twofold. One is that we know that there’s a path forward to rule out things like witchcraft and the evil eye and that this path is science and rationality generally. But the other problem is that you could still play this game by resort to ancient stories and finding some connection between those stories and evolution. You could play a game of dignifying a belief in magic in this case, you know, the evil eye specifically, along Jungian lines or archetypal lines or something. You could be sympathetic with this picture. But my point is, what would be the point of that? Given the obvious harms that we no longer need commit based on disavowing this ancient ignorance, why would one spend any time at all trying to make sense of admittedly ancient concern about sympathetic magic? Sympathetic magic is dangerous bullshit. That’s basically all I think we need to know about it now. And yet you could spend a lifetime. You could be reading not only Jung, but, you know, sketchier people like Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Levi and all the, you know, the history of hermeticism. And you could open, you know, Manly Palmer Halls, the secret teachings of all ages, and just get deep into that stuff. The tradition of Western magic, right, seems to me to be almost by definition a colossal waste of time and actually unnecessary to preserve anything that we care about at this moment in history. OK, well, I don’t think that we have to have an argument about the utility of moving forward on the scientific front. I mean, I consider myself a scientist and I don’t feel that it’s necessary to justify to the audience that’s likely to be listening to this, the utility of the scientific approach. I would say that there’s great purpose in looking at these ancient stories in the same way, Sam, as there’s great purpose and utility in reading fiction. So and I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner. I mean, one of the things that I thought about after our last discussion, because I went and did some investigation into definitions of truth and some serious investigation so that I was more prepared the next time that we talked. But one of the questions that I wanted to ask you, for example, given your emphasis on truth as embedded in facts and also the ability of moral truth to reveal itself from a set of facts is here’s a sentence for you and perhaps you can tell me what you make of it. There is great truth revealed in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Shakespeare. Do you agree with that or disagree? Because there’s no fact in any of that and there’s certainly no scientific data. Now, do you think that that that those great works of literature, which are, I would say, more or less universally regarded as valuable, do they how would you this is where we why we got stuck on the issue of truth. You see, I would say that those stories, there’s more truth in Dostoevsky’s fiction than there is in a single person’s life. I don’t know if I would go quite that far, but yes, I will totally agree with you that there’s a lot of truth in fiction. I don’t think that’s at all why we got bogged down in our previous discussion about truth. How would you characterize that truth, though, because it’s certainly not factual by any stretch of the imagination. It’s it’s a different sort of truth. Let me stretch our imaginations there. I think there’s a wide variety of facts that are at the very least illustrated in fiction. The reason why fiction is compelling to us is that it does map on credibly to our experience of the world or what we can imagine to be valid human experiences. Yeah, precisely. If it were radically strange, which is to say if it all seemed preposterous, that’s the definition of an unsuccessful work of fiction. Insofar as certain kinds of fiction push those boundaries and certain kinds of, you know, magical realism or science fiction, which begins to seem basically like tennis without the net, where there’s just no there are no rules that make it interesting. The sweet spot, at least in in my mind for fiction, is something that has enough verisimilitude to be credible. And yet it’s a heightened reality, which makes it much more interesting than just finding out what happened to an ordinary person on an ordinary day. Right. OK. So that let’s let’s take that idea of heightened reality, because I can make imagine that this is the case. Imagine that I took Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Shakespeare for Neldu for the time being. And I distilled out what made them great fiction and I extracted a work of meta fiction from them. That would be archetypically religious. The thing about religion for me, again, I know there are people who would dispute this. I just don’t find this these claims credible. Religion becomes religion for me when you begin to assert that certain things are true, specifically otherworldly things. The survival of the conscious mind after death or the real existence of invisible agents, which you can propitiate or fail to propitiate and who have their eye on you. Right. They care how you live. They care whether you masturbate. They care whether you pray to them and in what terms you do. And if you get any of that stuff wrong, you will suffer for it. You are in relationship to these things. There are some people who who have relaxed their standards of commitment to revealed religion so much that they don’t really answer to that description. But most religious people most of the time, certainly most Christians and Muslims, believe otherworldly and supernatural and superstitious things, which are, I would argue, in direct contradiction to reasonable things they might believe about how the cosmos works. OK, OK. So I’m going to take a specific example from what you said and address it. You were talking about the propitiation of supernatural beings. OK, so I’m I’m going to, if you don’t mind, tell you the story of Cain and Abel in a way that you probably haven’t heard it. It’s only a paragraph long, this story. And I want to set it up first. So Cain and Abel are types from a classical religious interpretation standpoint. And they’re that you might think about them as foreshadowing the emergence of the idea of Christ and Satan. So they’re the they’re the idea of the hostile brothers. And that that idea pops up in fiction all the time. It’s it’s a it’s a constant. It’s an archetype. It’s man against his soul, say. Or man against his darker nature. That that’s the basic plot idea. So now Cain and Abel in Genesis are actually the first two actual human beings, because God or Adam and Eve are made by God. So somehow they’re not exactly human. Play along with me for a minute. I know this isn’t literally true, Sam. So I’m not trying to claim that it is. But Cain and Abel are the first two human beings that are born into the world instead of paradise. And Cain is a an agriculturalist and Abel is a shepherd. And of course, that shepherd theme echoes much later in through Christianity and also in the story of King David, partly because if you were going to be a shepherd back then, man, you were one tough dude because you had slingshots and sticks and there were lions after your sheep. So, you know, you weren’t little boy blue in pastoral Victorian England. You were one tough character. So to be a shepherd was no joke. Anyways, Cain and Abel are making their way through life and Cain is having a very rough time. Things aren’t going his way at all. Whereas Abel, everything goes his way. All the women love him. His flocks increase. He’s he’s successful. And the story also intimates that not only is he successful, but everyone likes him and understands why he’s successful. Whereas Cain is kind of bitter and nothing he ever does works out. And so they both make sacrifices to God. And I’ll tell you, Sam, when I started to understand what the discovery of sacrifice meant, it just about blew me out of my room because I realized that in the discovery of sacrifice, in the acting out of sacrifice, we had information pertaining to the earliest human discovery that you could let something of value go in the present and reap a reward in the future, which is a staggering realization. It’s actually the discovery of the future. Now, people had to act these things out and then represent them in stories before they could understand them psychologically. So Cain and Abel make sacrifices. And the idea is that to keep Yahuwah happy, the patriarchal spirit happy, you have to sacrifice something of true value. It has to be a real genuine sacrifice or you won’t reap the future rewards. And everyone knows what that means, Sam, because I ask my students all the time what their parents sacrificed to send them to university. And they all understand that perfectly well. And what’s happened is their parents have made a bargain with the present, which is that they will forego certain kinds of gratification so that they or even their children can reap a reward. They’re making a bargain with the structure of reality. Now, that was personified or anthropomorphized, depending on which terminology you want to use early, when people were still starting to work these things out. But that didn’t destroy the essential validity of the idea. Now, the story goes Abel’s sacrifices were valid. The story implies that, although it’s a bit ambivalent. You never know if Cain is doing a bad job of sacrificing or if Yawa is just being a son of a bitch and torturing him, which, of course, is a classic problem existentially, because you don’t know in your life when you fail if it’s because you’ve been doing things wrong and not making the correct sacrifices, so to speak, or that fate is just treating you harshly and unjustly. But the story intimates that Cain is making errors in his sacrifices, whatever. Things don’t go well for Cain and Abel continues to flourish. So Cain is very unhappy with this, and one day he decides to have it out with the creator of being, which, you know, is a pretty ballsy thing to do, let’s say. And so he goes and has a chat with God, and I’ve got this description of their conversation from looking at multiple translations of the original text. And he basically confronts Yawa and he says, you know, what kind of stupid universe have you put together here? This being that you’ve created is fundamentally flawed. I’m out there breaking myself in half, trying to make everything work, and nothing ever works out for me. And then there’s that damn Abel who he doesn’t he hardly has to lift a finger. And, you know, women flock to him and his camels increase. It’s like it’s unjust. It’s unjust and inappropriate. And you should be called to task for it. And so that’s the eternal story of people complaining about the fundamental tragedy and evil of being. So it’s a pretty good argument. So God says to Cain, he says, look, you know, that’s a pretty good argument, but here’s how I look at it. You’re like a man who’s inside a house, and at the door of the house, there’s this predatory cat that’s sexually aroused. And it’s sin. It’s missing the mark because that’s what sin means. It means to miss the bullseye. And you have invited it into your house, this corruption and sin, you’ve invited it into your house voluntarily, so that it can have its way with you sexually. So that, and you’ve intertwined yourself with it creatively and brought something horrible forth. And your suffering therefore can be laid at your feet. And you have no reason to call me on the structure of my creation. And so, of course, that’s the last thing that Cain wants to hear because he doesn’t want to understand that he’s at fault for making the wrong sacrifices. So he trots on out of there, and the story says that his countenance falls and that he’s wrought, which is to say almost nothing at all. And he decides that he’s going to serve God a good one and wander off and destroy his ideal, God’s ideal, but also Cain’s own ideal. So he kills his brother and leaves him dead. And that’s the story of mankind. And then it’s worse, Sam, because what happens after that is that Cain gives rise to descendants. And in his first or so generation of descendants, if you bother or annoy them, they kill seven of you, not one. And if you bother his descendants’ descendants, they kill 49 of you, not seven. And then his ultimate descendant, or one of his ultimate descendants is Tubal Cain. And Tubal Cain, historically speaking, or traditionally speaking, is the first person who makes weapons of war. And so the idea there is that the deceit and jealousy and resentment of the individual propagates through society until war emerges, and then the next story is the flood. I’ve got two reactions to this, Jordan. One is that obviously some stories are interesting and are written for a reason, and those reasons are interesting. And I’ve already granted you that in fiction, there can be a lot of truth in fiction, a lot of human truth, which is distilled there. And one of its virtues is that when you read somebody like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Shakespeare, you can run an emulation of other people’s lived experience. You can essentially live other lives that you would never live personally and learn the lessons of those lives. Though you’re never going to murder some old woman in her flat, you can watch Raskolnikov do it and experience a plausible psychological arc that follows from that. So I’m not discounting the value of stories at all, but it seems to me that what you’re doing is overlooking in your discussion of Cain and Abel and the archetype of propitiating a god, you’re overlooking the obvious ground truth and its consequences here and then telling a story which is fairly unconstrained by any rules. The obvious ground truth for me is people thought they were in relationship to a deity who could become angry and who had to be propitiated. And this led to some very direct and appalling consequences for millennia, the most extreme being human sacrifice from which we graduated to animal sacrifice, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And human sacrifice was real and it’s virtually a cultural universal. And yes, so there’s some archetypal story you can tell about it, but it was perhaps the most barbarous symptom of human ignorance about the weather, about disease, about good and bad luck, about agriculture, about everything that we have ever given rise to. And we are quite happy to have outgrown it. And whenever we find a culture that is practicing something like human sacrifice based on its, a notion of propitiating invisible deities, we see these people as dangerously confused. And any child born into the company of such adults is an unlucky one who has to be rescued now, right? I mean, the year is 2017. As you were talking, I was reminded of something I wrote in the end of faith, my first book in an end note. It was kind of pitched to the Joseph Campbell use of mythology of which you are showing some affinity, even though his name hasn’t come up. And I just wanna read this to you because this is, I believe this counterpoint to this way of talking about mythology and stories and archetypes is still valid. At least it’s still what I think. I went into a bookstore, I walked into the cookbook section of a Barnes and Noble and with my eyes closed, just ran my hand down the shelf and grabbed a book and opened it at random and looked at the first recipe I saw. And the book turned out to be a book called A Taste of Hawaii, New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. So here is what I wrote in this end note in the end of faith. And therein I discovered an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to be a recipe for wok seared fish and shrimp cakes with Ogo tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence. Then I list the ingredients, right? So there’s one snapper fillet cubed, three teaspoons of chopped scallions, salt and freshly ground pepper. There’s a long list of ingredients. And then I go through with a mystical interpretation of this recipe. And I’ll just give you a few sentences to give you a sense of it. Sounds like you’re getting dangerously close to paranoid schizophrenic thinking there, Sam. That’s the thing. I mean, this is obviously crazy because I know how I did this, but this is as valid sounding, or so I would argue, as most of what is produced in this genre. So when I say the snapper fillet, of course, is the individual himself, you and I, awash in the sea of existence. And here we find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit. Now you have three teaspoons of chopped scallions. This further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need to add to each level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear. The body, mind, and spirit need to be tended with the same care. Salt and freshly ground black pepper. Well, here we have the perennial invocation of opposites, the white and black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe of spiritual life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experience. This seems to be a tantric text. What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains, which is to say that the good and bad qualities are born of the tiniest actions. And thus, we are not in good or evil in general, but only by virtue of innumerable moments which color the stream of our being by force of repetition. Then there’s a dash of cayenne pepper. Clearly, a bean of such robust color and flavor signifies the spiritual influence of an enlightened adept. I go on and on, and this is all bullshit because it’s meant to be bullshit. I mean, again, this is a random text that I’m giving a high-falutin spiritual interpretation of. But my point is you can do this with anything. And religions have been doing this for millennia with specific books, which even by the merits of fiction, for the most part, and there’s some exceptions here, I’ll grant you that there’s some bits of the Bible that stand comparison with the rest of world literature, but much of it doesn’t, right? Most of these books are profoundly mediocre. The Quran is as mediocre a book as I’ve ever seen on any subject. I’ll grant that maybe the Arabic is beautiful. I don’t read Arabic, but the content of the book isn’t. And this is true of most religious writing. And the fact that most people most of the time have found profound meaning in much of this work is not proof otherwise. I mean, again, if you found me a culture that was doing what I just did to a recipe in a cookbook, the fact that they had gone generation after generation enamored of that interpretation wouldn’t prove anything. That’s the problem I’m having here. Yeah, well, that’s good. I mean, what you wrote is very funny too. And it’s very much reminiscent of new age thinking, I would say. What’s the problem with new age thinking then in your view? Well, I don’t think it’s constrained exactly in the manner that you said. I mean, I mentioned that what I’ve been trying to do while working my way through the Merck, let’s say. Look, if you’re analyzing scientific literature, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And like 95% of it is chaff, unless it’s social psychology, in which case 99% of it is chaff. But it’s chaff. There’s a lot of it. You have to be discriminating in your interpretation in the scientific literature just as in other, and in other literary domains. And it’s certainly the case that we aren’t as good at distinguishing what constitutes quality in the fictional domain from what constitutes outright falsehood and delusion, let’s say. And I used the example of paranoid schizophrenia very specifically there, because paranoids who tend to be among the more intelligent people who are cursed with schizophrenia, take a set of axioms and then weave a compelling story that’s logically coherent if you grant the validity of the axioms. And so the kind of Merck that you’re describing, and I think that characterizes in particular new age thinking is an ever present danger, not so much of religious thinking though, Sam, it’s an ever present danger of human imaginativeness. We can produce representations of the world that grip onto the world in many ways, but then we have to subject them to intense criticism. And that’s why, for example, we both share a belief that the last thing we wanna do in our society is put any restrictions whatsoever on the human right to criticize religious presuppositions. I think that’s an absolute catastrophe. And I’m certainly not claiming for a second that every possible religious interpretation is correct. And that’s clearly, no more than every possible work of fiction is of quality. But the quality issue really is a stickler because it’s very, as we’ve already discussed, it’s sufficiently evident that there’s such a thing as great literature to be somewhat self-evident that there’s truth embedded in that, even though we don’t precisely know how to define it. You know, now the postmodernists would take an opposed view to that. They would say, well, there’s no truth in literature whatsoever. It’s all a matter of interpretation, which is akin in some sense to the objection that you’re raising. And that’s all that I have to say. That’s a profound objection. But I believe that it throws the baby out with the bathwater. So what I’ve been trying to do is discriminate my way through the wealth of past wisdom that has been bequeathed to us, and to find patterns, and then to verify them using other techniques. Now, some of the techniques are, you know, you can also debate what constitutes an acceptable methodological technique. But one of, there are existential techniques as well. And I think you rely on them to some degree when you’re talking about the necessity of speaking the truth. Because I would say, I’ve put what I’ve learned from the analysis I’ve conducted into action in my own life, which has changed dramatically as a consequence, and only for the better, in the life of my family, about which I could say the same thing, about the teaching that I’ve done to my students. And I’ve been regarded for 30 years as teaching courses at good universities that have been regarded by a vast majority of the students as absolutely life-transforming. And so, and there is a massive hunger. It’s almost insatiable for more sophisticated understanding of these archetypal stories. Now, you know, you talked about human sacrifice, and I would say, well, obviously, that was a catastrophic and barbaric epoch in human developmental history. And who would wanna go back to that? But I would say, what we’ve done to that is not so much invalidated as supplanted with a psychological understanding in that we can sacrifice what we hold dear that’s holding us back and move forward into the future. Or you could say, on an even more superordinate sense, it’s reasonable for a person to sacrifice themselves to what they hold as the highest value. And that’s an idea that’s built extraordinarily deeply into the substructure of Christianity. And it’s very much what you’re, in my opinion, when you tell people that they should abandon, let’s say, their impulsive desires and their instrumental longings and do nothing but tell the truth. In some sense, from my perspective, what you’re telling them is to give up their selfish individual being and sacrifice themselves to the truth. To me, that, like I truly believe that that’s the central message of Christianity. It’s the central message of the prophetic tradition in Judaism as well, because the people who spoke truth to power in the Old Testament were, ha, generally very unpopular for doing so. So I know it’s a problem separating the wheat from the chaff. And I think you did a great job of satirizing that in what you wrote. But that doesn’t help us solve the problem of the fact that there is value in great fiction. I don’t view that as a problem. I think it’s obvious that there’s value in it, but it’s not the value of telling you how the cosmos works or what is likely to happen in the future, right? It’s a different kind of value. It’s not a surrogate for a scientific theory about anything. Right, absolutely. That’s what religion does with it. Well, I would say that, fine, I’ve got no disagreement with you there. The thing about the fundamentalists, say, the Christian fundamentalists who insist upon a literal understanding of the biblical stories is that they don’t know what literal means. And actually, they’re better scientists in some sense than the scientists themselves because the scientists would never say that the stories in Genesis are scientific, but the fundamentalists, implicitly assuming that only scientific fact can be true, attempt constantly to force these stories into a scientific framework where they do not belong. Right, but again, because the stories are believed to be, we’re talking specifically about the Judeo-Christian tradition, because they’re believed to be revealed truth, right? I mean, these are not stories written by human beings. These are the Word of God in some form. These are not held to be stories. These are held to be records of things that have actually happened. So they’re history books on one level. And when they talk about what will happen, when they’re obviously given to prophecy, they are an indication of what will happen if you believe God is talking to you. And that’s where the whole thing becomes so pathological from an intellectual point of view. I agree with you. This is partly why I’ve spent so much time studying Nietzsche. I mean, in the late 1900s, Nietzsche basically diagnosed Christianity. He said that it had produced a tremendous longing for the truth, which was then used against the dogmatic elements of Christianity, which it destroyed. But some of it’s, I would say some of it is intense philosophical confusion. It’s like, there’s a kind of, let’s call it wisdom in fiction, if we don’t wanna call it truth, because obviously calling it truth brings up the fact issue. Let’s call it wisdom. The wisdom is clearly there, but to consider it as a representation of the factual world is not only a mistake, but also a dangerous mistake. And it’s a self-defeating mistake. It’s partly why the fundamentalists who insist upon the equivalence of the stories in Genesis and scientific theory do their own creed, a tremendous disservice, and they’re bound to lose because the Bible as science is weak, and science as science is strong. And so there’s no hope there for people who are trying to push fundamentalist Christian stories as literally true. So we can agree on that. What I’m trying to do, well, I would say what I’m trying to do in mythological language is I’m trying to raise my father out of the belly of the beast, out of the belly of the whale in the depths of the ocean, because there’s living truth in our traditions, obscured as that is by human ignorance and inability to conceive even. That doesn’t mean that it can be left behind. It can’t be, it has to be brought forward and updated and given new sight, which by the way, is exactly what happens in the Egyptian stories, because Horus, the eye of attention, goes down into the underworld and rescues the god of tradition, Osiris, and gives him sight. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. And I think I’ve been successful at it. And so yes, the interpretation problem is a major one, but that’s something that bedevils everything, absolutely everything. The other issue here though is that there’s a, this is another thing that puts religion in general in an uneasy relationship with science. There’s a radical provincialism entailed in endorsing any specific religion. So for instance, if Christianity is right in any sense, well then all other religions are wrong. When you look at what Christianity entails, so at a minimum, it suggests that Jesus was the Messiah. So the Jews are wrong. Jesus was divine and resurrected, so the Muslims are wrong. There’s only one God, so the Hindus are wrong, right? So even if you want to relax the literalism there, you’re still sending some fairly sharp elbows toward the other religions. Yeah, well look, this is again, I think, to give the devil his due, this is exactly the point that postmodernists like Derrida have put forward and very powerfully. They say, well look, if you accept a value system as paramount, then you invalidate all other value systems and you exclude everyone who isn’t succeeding in that value system. And their answer is, well, we’ll just dissolve all the value systems. Well, that’s a completely insane answer because you can’t even focus on an object in the absence of a value system, technically speaking, because you’re always focusing on things of value. And so the fact that the conflict that you described is an emergent consequence of value systems is a terrible problem, and we don’t know how to solve it, although I think the solution, paradoxically enough, is actually embedded to some degree in Christianity. And the reason for that is because Christianity makes the group subordinate to the individual. And it also hypothesizes that the highest moral virtue that a person should uphold is that of the truth, and that the truth speaks chaos into order in the most beneficial possible way, and that that’s the fundamental ethical duty. But why make this a matter of allegiance to Christianity? Why not just take what is useful in any tradition? You just mentioned Nietzsche, right? So you found some of his work useful. There’s no tradition of allegiance to Nietzsche. You don’t have to worry about whether or not you are sufficiently Nietzschean in order to use his wisdom. You just take from him, insofar as it’s useful, why not do the same thing with Christianity? Why waste any time wondering whether or not you are a Christian or telling people that you are or not? Why not get out of the religion business and use everything that is useful in human culture, however it comes to you, in a way that’s non-denominational? Well, if that could be achieved, that would be absolutely wonderful. I would say the first problem with that is that, or the historical problem with that, is that the kind of truth that have emerged out of this lengthy mythological process, this lengthy imaginative mythological process, were first encapsulated inside the stories and the images. They weren’t articulated philosophical or psychological truths of the kind that we’re speaking about. Look, you can think about this like the relationship between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. So Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were very similar in many ways philosophically, but Dostoevsky wasn’t a philosopher. He was a storyteller. Implicit in his stories was Nietzschean philosophy, even though paradoxically enough Dostoevsky was a Christian. The storytellers get there before the philosophers. And you’re saying now that the philosophers have got there, maybe we don’t have to pledge allegiance to a canonical version of the story. And that could be the case. In fact, you see partly Nietzsche criticized Christianity for all the reasons that you just criticized Christianity or any other creed, in a devastating manner, although he was also extraordinarily grateful to Christianity because he believed it had disciplined the European mind and that that period of discipline was necessary, a period where everything was interpreted under the rubric of a single interpretation, because that taught concentration. But Nietzsche said, well, now we’re beyond that and we’re going to have to become gods of our own accord in order to withstand the consequences. And then of course, that turned out to be very problematic for reasons that Nietzsche also prophesied, because he said that the West would degenerate both into nihilism and into totalitarianism, and that millions of people would die as a consequence of the death of God. And that’s Dostoevsky prophesied exactly the same thing in the devils, and it’s exactly what happened. And I don’t believe that we can get past the Scylla and Sharibdis of nihilism and totalitarianism without going back to the past to find what it has to offer us, to bring it forward in an articulated manner. And of course, that’s precisely why I think the discussion that I’m having with you is important, because I think that’s what we’re doing. Right, but there are two ways of going back to the past. You exemplify both of them. You are going back talking about people like Nietzsche, and you can throw the rest of philosophy and world literature into that bin. But then it sounds like you are also tempted to go back in what appears to be a different category of effort, which is the religious one, which is that you’re holding to one side certain arguably fiction writers and philosophers as being something other than fiction writers and philosophers, and treating certain texts as something other than mere products of the human mind. And you have a lot of company, right? This is what every religious person does, but why not treat Jesus the same way you would treat Socrates? Well, that’s a good start. I think that Socrates and Jesus had an awful lot in common, but the thing about Socrates is that he’s primarily a historical figure, whereas Christ may have been a historical figure. I think that the simplest assumption is that someone of that description existed, but he’s also a mythological character. And the mythology is unbelievably deep. And what it is in some sense is the human imagination’s attempt to construct a representation of the perfect man. And so Christ is the perfect man. Now, you may say, well, we don’t know what that means. You can say that Jesus was the perfect man. Hold it, hold it, Sam. I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I said that Christ is the perfect man. That it’s different, because I’m speaking at the mythological level, is that whatever human beings can imagine as perfect in terms of the manner in which an individual could conduct himself, that’s what Christ represents. I’m not claiming for a moment that that manifested itself in history. That’s a different claim. And we can talk about that claim too, but- I would say it didn’t even manifest itself in the Bible. If you were going to write a story about the perfect man, a fiction of the perfect man, you wouldn’t write it the way the New Testament is written. And you would get Jesus to do things that he didn’t do and not do things that he did do. And he would say things that he didn’t say. It can get a lot more perfect than what you see in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Well, okay, so let me tell you why briefly, why that story is archetypically perfect. Okay, so here’s the reason. It’s because as has been agreed upon by the sages of the ages, let’s say, the fundamental reality of life is suffering and finitude. And you can layer on top of that from an existential perspective, malevolence and injustice. And that’s the law of human beings. And so here’s an archetypal story. The most perfect, innocent, sinless person possible is betrayed by his friends, his countrymen, and the foreigners simultaneously for no crime whatsoever in the most torturous possible way and also abandoned by the creator of being himself. And he accepts that all voluntarily. You see, the reason it’s an archetypal story is because you can’t get beyond that. You see, it hits a limit. It’s the limit of tragedy. And so that’s where the perfection lies. Now, the issue is, well, what does that mean? And here’s what it means. We can go incrementally here because I don’t even buy that it’s the limit of tragedy. I mean, first of all, the thing is anchored to a belief in human sacrifice. This is what is so weird about Christianity from my point of view is that this is not a religion that disavows human sacrifice. This is a religion that claims that human sacrifice is real and important, but there was only one that was in fact necessary and effective, and that is the sacrifice of Jesus. Well, that’s the Protestant in the Catholic interpretation. It’s not so clear with the Orthodox Christians. They don’t really, they buy a version of Christianity that stresses more each individual’s moral obligation to do the same thing. I don’t know enough about Orthodox belief to dispute that, but most Western Christians have unacknowledged at the core of their belief system, this assertion of the validity of human sacrifice, right? Which is insanity. Well, it isn’t insanity, Sam, if you think about sacrifice in the way that we talked about it earlier. That’s not the way it’s thought about even in the Bible. He had to die for our sins, right? He is the scapegoat. He is the only effective scapegoat, and he’s a hero. He’s perfect in your terms, because he took this on voluntarily. I mean, to go back to what you were just saying, this is not the ultimate tragedy because he did take it on voluntarily. It’s more tragic if someone really gets screwed by the cosmos. Oh, yes, you’re right about that. But the part, the fact that he took it on voluntarily is actually the part of the story that involves the transcendence of the tragedy, because the story there, and this is a very old story, it’s far older than Christianity. The story is that the best way to transcend the bitterness of life is to accept it completely, including betrayal at the hands of your friends, including betrayal at the hands of your countrymen and the foreigners, to allow that to be acceptable, to take it on voluntarily, and not to be bitter about it like Cain, because you get murderous when you’re bitter. So I can go with you there, but now if that is what you find compelling in this story, I could just offer for your examination another example, another story, another tradition, which in its details is basically irreconcilable with Christianity, but it’s also well-subscribed. It’s the Buddha and Buddhism, right? The Buddha is another example of the perfect man. He does give you a similar rationale to the one you just gave for radical acceptance of the vicissitudes of life, and yet he’s far more articulate. I mean, here now we’re talking about the historical Buddha who predated Jesus by five centuries, but who seems to have said much more that is psychologically perspicacious, and he talks exactly on that point about the nature of acceptance, what psychologically is accomplished when you do accept your experience moment to moment, and the barriers to doing that, and the way in which you should structure your life so as to be able to do that more and more moment by moment. And he presented a methodology of meditation that is even today almost perfectly designed, if you’re gonna talk about the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada, it’s almost perfectly designed for export into a secular context. So you can take whole sections of the Pali Canon, and if you just filter out some of the needless repetition and some of the phraseology that treats the Buddha like the perfect world conquering hero, who Buddhists believe him to be, and you just look at what is being said is almost a perfectly secular recipe for training your mind in essentially a course of growth toward the kind of acceptance you’re talking about. Again, I’m not urging you to be a Buddhist, I’m just saying this is an example that is non-Christian that does much of what you are claiming Christianity perhaps uniquely does. It invites a non-mythological relationship to it. Well, only if you strip the mythology away from it, and I think actually that you make a mistake with, that a person makes a mistake with Buddhism if they do that. You see, because there’s also a longing for religious experience that’s part of the human soul. And for example, that’s why people smoke marijuana and why they take psychedelic drugs. And why they meditate. But again, I would argue, and this is what I argue in my book, Waking Up, you can have the most esoteric experiences that are classically interpreted as religious or mystical or spiritual without believing anything on insufficient evidence. And certainly without structuring your interpretation of these experiences along classically religious dogmatic lines or even Joseph Campbellian mythological lines. You can essentially be a scientist of introspection and you can use drugs to do that. You can use new technology to do that. You can use ancient techniques of meditation to do that. You could even do something which is, seems to partake of delusional thinking to do that and just notice the outcome. I mean, there are practices like in Tibetan Buddhism, there’s something called deity practice where you imagine yourself to be a deity or a bodhisattva. And the practice of imagining yourself to be that is not the same thing as becoming delusional and thinking you are that. That’s exactly the same thing as the mystical imitation of Christ. It’s exactly the same idea. So you could do that with Christ. You could do it with Batman. You could say to someone who’s shy and who doesn’t like to go to parties because they just don’t like each subsequent encounter with a stranger where they have to overcome their shyness and their inability to make small talk and all the rest. So shyness is a psychological problem that virtually everyone has to some degree or another. And perhaps one way to overcome it is to walk into a party just trying on the idea that you are Batman, right? That you’re Bruce Wayne, right? You have this, all of these secret abilities or you’re Jason Bourne or some powerful character who- You got it. That’s exactly it. Is capable of great things, but we know is a total fiction. So now does that have any psychological consequence? And if so, why? I think there’s no question it can have a psychological consequence and can be useful to do that. But the crucial thing there is that you can play with those kinds of schema without diluting yourself. Like if at any point in that adventure, someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, but do you really think you’re Batman? You would say no. Now the problem is when you meet the guy who really thinks he’s Batman, that’s where you cross over into dangerously divisive and unsupported ideas about the nature of reality. And religion is really the only game in town when you want to dignify those ideas generation after generation and protect them from criticism. That’s why the scientific attitude of speaking honestly about facts keeps smashing into religion uniquely. It doesn’t smash into fiction. Doesn’t smash into Dostoevsky. It smashes into Jesus, right? Because of what most people are doing with Jesus. Yes. Well, okay. So right, look, no arguments there, but let me offer you an elaboration of your idea. So let’s say a kid wants to be Batman. Well, that’s right, because that’s why he’s reading the comics. And that’s why he’s going to the billion dollar Marvel movies or DC movies that portray these superheroes out on the screen. It’s because the kid is acting them out in imagination, is trying on an ideal. So let’s say, well, maybe you start with a pro wrestler because you’re not that conceptually sophisticated. And then maybe you move to Batman and then maybe you move from Batman to Thor in the Marvel cartoons. And there you’re in the domain of quasi deities. And then maybe you get a little bit more sophisticated than that and you try on Jesus or Buddha. And then you ask yourself, well, what would happen to the world if you tried those on completely? And that’s the real question. That’s where the historical element and the mythological element meet. I mean, there’s obviously a hierarchy of rank among individuals. And some people have a much more positive impact on the world through their actions than others. And there’s some hypothetical ultimate limit to that. If you were the best person you could possibly be in every possible way, just exactly how much good could you bring into the world? And at what point would you be a bodhisattva? That’s something Buddhists ask themselves all the time. Why would you be an incarnation of Christ? Something that isn’t just mythological or imaginative or delusional. It’s a partial because the ideal recedes as you approach it. But there’s a reality underneath this, which is that better people are better and worse people are worse. And there’s archetypal limits to both of those. So these are very complicated things. They’re fiction in a sense, but I would think about them more as meta-fiction. They’re what happens when you distill fiction into what’s ever centrally true about fiction. And it’s really, really true. Well, I would grant you, and again, this is the topic of my book, Waking Up, that there are possibilities on the positive end of human psychology that very few people actualize for any significant amount of time. And people glimpse them in their best moments in life. They have peak experiences, whether on drugs or after some crisis, or they’ve been fasting, or they have moments where they feel as good as they have ever felt. They feel as in touch as they ever will with just the sheer profundity of slamming into the present moment and finding it totally captivating and worthy of their attention. They’re not looking elsewhere for anything. They have become identical to the feeling of being and found it to be in some basic sense, perfect. Now that’s available to us as human beings. And there’s not much of a scientific story to tell about it at the moment. It’s not arrived at by understanding more about the universe scientifically. So it is in some sense orthogonal to all of science. But my point is that it doesn’t require delusion either. It doesn’t require belief in anything on insufficient evidence. It doesn’t require that we believe certain books were revealed by the creator of the universe and others weren’t. You can get rid of 90% of what people are doing in the name of religion and spirituality and mysticism and still find this project captivating. The 10% that you retain perhaps is when you hear these stories about people like Buddha and Jesus and all of the people who have made heroic efforts to be like them historically, the Christian contemplatives and Buddhist monks and all the rest, you can find in the biographies and pseudobiographies of these people, some evidence that transforming the human mind is possible. And you can find that evidence in your own life if you have the right experiences. And you can see that human consciousness is perturbable and plastic and you need not be who you were yesterday. And so when you’re talking about becoming your best self or becoming more and more like the best selves that have ever existed, or you talk about transcending the self itself as an illusion, right? All of this stuff is worth thinking about and paying attention to and there is a there there. I’m not doubting that for a second. What I’m insisting upon however, is that we need never step off the razor’s edge of real honesty and conceptual integrity, even for a moment in order to walk in that direction. And that’s, as you said, most new agers see no problem in indulging any kind of happy talk about the significance of crystals or whatever it is they’re connected to. And that’s where it becomes startlingly unscientific. And that’s where someone like Deepak Chopra and I can’t agree about how to talk about things because the moment we start, he hits me with, you know, you close your eyes and you feel at one with the universe that proves that you preceded the big bang. Your consciousness was there before the big bang. Now, of course it proves nothing of the kind. That’s where he becomes a pseudo-scientist. And so what I’m arguing for is that we just remain attentive to honest talk about what we know about reality, even while we have deep experiences and seek them out by whatever means. And again, I will grant you that there are means that would amount to a kind of internal costume party where you can think in terms of myth. If you said to me, Sam, I want you to think of the rest of your day in terms of the hero archetype. What are you doing today to slay the dragon and bring back that hoarded wealth to your community? That’s a pattern of thought that I have no question could have some utility, right? Well, that’s what we were doing today, Sam. Right, but again, the crucial bit is that in doing that, I’m not making claims to knowledge about the ethereal existence of archetypes. There’s no Akashic record or collective unconscious. I’m not making claims of that kind at all in order to find this way of thinking useful. And I’m not aligning myself with any provincial tradition of myth-making, i.e. a religion, and claiming that my religion is better than others, which is, as we see every time we open the newspaper, a divisive game that we have to figure out some way of unraveling. Right, we do. And I mean, your emphasis on clear-headed thinking, I mean, this is part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you. I mean, certainly one of the things that you demonstrated the first time we talked was your capacity for clear-headed thinking. I mean, you’re crazily incisive and laser-focused, and those are extraordinarily useful attributes. And that’s partly why I thought it would be so useful for us to have a conversation. I’m an advocate of critical thinking. We have to get this right. But having said that, the abandonment of all value structures, which is, say, the postmodernist perspective, isn’t a way forward because it leads to a situation where people are going to be unconsciously possessed by far more foolish ideas than they left behind them. You’re certainly not getting that in me. I’m not advocating that we abandon value structures. To the contrary, the value that we should have in hand, perhaps before any other, is the one you referenced earlier, which is honesty on every level. Because it’s the only thing, when you’re talking about honest speech, it’s the only thing that allows us to course-correct collectively. It’s the only thing. Yes, exactly. If you’re gonna lie to me, then you are denying me your view of reality. And insofar as you have a view that can be useful to me, we’re now playing a game that is not at all optimized for course-correction. And so as a society, we need to be, and this is where your defense of free speech comes in and has been so useful, we have to be committed to defending free speech, however impolitic or unpopular, or even wrong, because defending that is the only barrier to, in the limit, violence. Because the only way we can influence one another, short of physical violence, is through speech, through communicating ideas. The moment you say certain ideas can’t be communicated, you create a circumstance where people have no alternative but to go hands-on you. But again, there’s nothing in me that is echoing a postmodern relinquishment of a sense that there are right and wrong answers. To the contrary. No, I understand that, and I’m certainly not assuming that you are in that camp or that you think that way. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t. Sam, I’m getting tired. I wanted to just say one more thing, if that’s okay with you. Well, it has to do with this course correction idea. So I’m gonna perhaps leave you with another archetypal idea that you can chew on if you want. So there’s an idea that’s paramount in Christianity, which is a creed I understand better than most, mostly as a consequence of my educational history. But the idea, there’s a very weird idea in that, in that is that at the beginning of time, God spoke order out of chaos. That chaos was like a potential. And that it was the act of speaking truthfully that brought forth the proper kind of order. And that was the paradisal order that Adam and Eve inhabited. So there’s this deep idea lurking in there that was drawn from many sources that the spoken truth is what transforms chaotic potential into habitable order. And then weirdly enough, what happened with that idea over the period of about 3000 years as Christianity emerged from Judaism was that by the time Christianity emerged, there was an insistence that Christ was the word that God used at the beginning of time to extract habitable order from chaos. And so the idea there, it’s one of the most brilliant ideas of mankind is that by speaking the truth, you face the chaos of potential and bring forth the most benevolent possible type of order combined with that course correction that you’re describing. And I think that’s the central idea of the West. Now you can find that idea echoed in other areas like in Buddhism, for example, and in other religions for that matter. But I believe that it reached its highest in the gistic development, at least as far as I can tell in the West. And that’s also why we have societies that are predicated on the sacredness, so to speak, of the spoken truth. Yeah, the question of why we value the spoken truth to the degree that we do is an interesting one. I think it’s largely, it has as much to do with a reaction against Western religion by science and philosophy as it does with anything that came from Western religion. But I think it is something that is unraveling in the strangest of places now. So it’s insofar as you and I can make common cause in defending the necessity of protecting free speech across the board, however unpopular. I think practically speaking, that’s an extraordinarily useful thing to do. Yes, well, that’s the best way at the moment that we can slay our respective dragons. Well, listen, Jordan, it’s a pleasure to talk to you a second time. I hope people found something of value in it. You would never imagine we disagreed as much as we did the first time around if you only heard the second conversation. Yeah, well, sometimes some stupid persistence is useful. And I think the rabbit hole we went down was an interesting one, even though it was painful. And perhaps, look, it was productive because it got us to the second conversation. And hooray for that. And if you feel inclined at some point to speak in the future with me, we’ll see how people respond to this. But I found the conversation very useful and hooray for that. Yeah, well, listen, so I will invite people to respond yet again, as I did the first time. And I think you and I both pay attention to Twitter, at least I pay attention to Twitter really exclusively in terms of social media. So- Yeah, me too, pretty much. Twitter’s a good place to make noise at us. We have these kinds of conversations for you guys. This, as I said the first time around, this, you, Jordan, were my most requested guest by a factor of, I don’t know what, but it was remarkable how many people wanted us to talk. So we have now done it a second time. And listen, it’s a pleasure. And I wish you the best of luck with your entanglements with crazy bureaucracies and everything else you’re doing because you are on the front lines of a certain kind of culture war. And it can’t be easy. I know it must be stressful and I just wish you the best with all of it. Thanks, Sam, much appreciated and good talking with you. If you enjoyed this podcast, there are several ways you can support it. You can leave reviews on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media with your friends. You can discuss it on your own blog or podcast or you can support it directly at samharris.org forward slash support.