Enlightenment and the Righteous Mind ｜ Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt ｜ EP 198 (4tAQM5uU8uk)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4tAQM5uU8uk

Based on your understanding of the world on data rather than journalism. The problem with journalism being that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine in the sense of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s availability heuristic namely our sense of risk and danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes and images and narratives that are available in memory. Whereas since a lot of good things are either things that don’t happen like a country at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists which almost by definition are not news or are things that build up incrementally a few percentage points a year and then compound like the decline of extreme poverty. We can be unaware we could be out to lunch about what’s happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If we base our view on data then not only do we see that many although not all things have gotten better not linearly not without setbacks and reversals but in general a lot better and it also paradoxically because as I’ve also cheekily put it progressives hate progress but the best possible case for progress that is for striving for more progress in the future from being a true progressive is again not to have some kind of foolish hope but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past and that means why should it stop now? Hello everyone I’m very pleased today to have with me speaking Dr. Stephen Pinker and Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Dr. Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition psycholinguistics and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He’s won numerous prizes for his research his teaching in his books including the language instinct, how the mind works, the blank slate, the better angels of our nature, the sense of style and enlightenment now. He’s an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a humanist of the year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates and one of foreign policies world top 100 public intellectuals and times 100 most influential people in the world today. He writes frequently for the New York Times, The Guardian and other publications. He’s publishing his 12th book September 28th 2021 this year September 28th. It’s called Rationality, What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce and Why It Matters. Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business. His research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultures including the cultures of American progressive conservatives and libertarians. Haidt wrote the Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. He co-authored that with Greg Lukianoff. The last two books each became NY Times bestsellers. At NYU Stern he’s applying his research on moral psychology to business ethics, asking how companies can structure and run themselves in ways that will be resistant to ethical failures. He’s also the co-founder of HeteroxAcademy.org, a collaboration among 2,500 professors working to increase viewpoint diversity and freedom of inquiry in universities. He has a forthcoming book, Three Stories About Capitalism, The Moral Psychology of Economic Life, expected to release in 2022. Thanks gentlemen very much for agreeing to talk to me and to each other today. Looking forward to a wide ranging and intense conversation. So Jonathan, we haven’t talked for about two years, I guess. That’s right. I’ve always been a great fan of your research, especially research on disgust and other moral sentiments. I’m kind of wondering what you’ve been up to recently. So maybe you can start us off. Sure. So after I moved to Stern in 2011, I’d been at the University of Virginia, I got interested in how moral psychology doesn’t just explain why our politics is so messed up. It also explains a lot of conflicts about economics and business. And so I saw left and right unable to understand each other’s views of business and capitalism. And I thought I’d write a book on it. And I got a book contract in 2014. And I went off to Asia to do research for the book. And I came back and I was all ready to write when the universities blew up at Halloween 2015. And I had just co founded Heterodox Academy. And then I got hijacked into a lot of the coddling the American mind stuff. And that basically occupied me for three or four years. The capitalism book was due in 2017. And finally, I have a sabbatical. I’ve got to write it. If I don’t write it now, I don’t know when I ever will. But it’s basically about how to think about economics in a way that gets you out of the moralism. The theme that I’ll explore today is how moralism messes everything up, at least about trying to figure out what’s going on or trying to do research. What do you mean by moralism? Moralism is if you look at things in a framework, not of true versus false, but of right versus wrong, bad versus good. Once you put on that frame, Tyler Cowen has a quote somewhere in a TED talk. He says, we think in stories, but as soon as you put a good evil store, as soon as you interpret things in terms of a good evil story, your IQ drops by 10 to 15 points. And I think that’s right. It seems like kind of like a case of overgeneralization in some sense, right? You want to discuss a narrow issue, assuming consensus on everything you’re not talking about. And then if you transfer that into, let’s say, a mutual elaboration of both your characters on the scale of good and evil, all it does is make things exceedingly complex. That never works in a marital argument, for example. For example, that’s right. We had a rule in our relationship, my wife and I, that we would try to argue about the narrowest possible thing in the given argument, right? To stop it from expanding ever outward and potentially turning into a characterological attack. Yeah. That’s a good way. That sounds like a good rule, because at a certain point, arguments become all out war where the goal is not, you lose all touch with truth and your goal is to win. And strangely, you win in ways that alienate the very person you’re trying to persuade, because so much of our argumentative ability is actually intended for an audience. We’re really, really good at making our case, even though it often doesn’t persuade the other person, but because we evolved for moral grandstanding in very intense social groups. And that’s a little foreshadowing of how I hope we’ll talk about social media. So you see that as, go ahead, Dr. Pinker. Well, I’m going to add something to John’s point. Having looked at data on violence on historic scales in my previous book, Better Angels of Our Nature, I have a somewhat cheeky paragraph that says the world has far too much morality, which I meant far too much moralization, alluding to the fact that history’s greatest bloodbaths were not caused by greedy, greedy dictators feathering their own nests, accumulating palaces and harems. They were moralistic crusades. They were people committing violence because it was not only permitted, but obligatory in service of a higher cause. A lot of bloodthirsty dictators were ascetics and they were not motivated by greed. They were motivated by what in their own eyes was morality, which we call moralization. It doesn’t mean we should all be amoral psychopaths. There is such a thing as morality, but moralization, the psychology of the moral sense, which John has done so much to illuminate, can be a source of immorality judged objectively. OK, I’m going to I’m going to Google cheeky paragraph, Steve Pinker, too much morality. There we go. So, Stephen, in your book, Enlightenment Now and other works, you’ve been tarred and feathered, so to speak, as an optimist. I mean, you make the case that things are improving and there’s there’s a number of public intellectuals who make the same sort of argument. Bjorn Lomborg, for example, Matt Ridley, Marion Toopey, all of detailed ways that the world has improved dramatically over especially over the last 30 years, but certainly over the last 150. And yet we seem to be polarizing terribly at the moment. And so what do you think is driving that, given that, you know, arguably things are better than they have been? Yeah, I tend to try to squirm out of the optimist pigeonhole because I’m not arguing for looking on the bright side and seeing the glasses half full. But rather just basing your understanding of the world on data rather than journalism. The problem with journalism being that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period. It is an availability machine in the sense of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s availability heuristic, namely our sense of risk and danger and prevalence is driven by anecdotes and images and narratives that are available in memory. Whereas the since a lot of good things are either things that don’t happen, like a country at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news, or are things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year and then compound like the decline of extreme poverty. We can be unaware, we could be out to lunch about what’s happening in the world if we base our view on the news. If instead we base our view on data, then not only do we see that many, although not all things have gotten better, not linearly, not without setbacks and reversals, but in general a lot better. And it also paradoxically, because as I also cheekily put it, progressives hate progress. But the best possible case for progress, that is for striding for more progress in the future, for being a true progressive, is again not to have some kind of foolish hope, but to look at the fact that progress has taken place in the past. And that means why should it stop now? We know that it’s possible. So that’s the. Do you think that it’s a reasonable thing to do from a rational perspective to compare the present to the past rather than to, I mean, there is a tendency to compare the present to a utopian future. And I mean, that’s kind of a cognitive heuristic, because we’re always looking for ways to make things better. And I suppose that’s that tendency taken to its extreme. But it does seem to me that some of the decrying of the current situation is a consequence of comparing it to hypothetical utopia instead of actual other countries or other times. Yeah, utopia is a deeply dangerous concept because people imagine a world without any problems. And since people disagree with each other, that means that in order to have complete harmony and agreement, you’ve got to get rid of all those nuisances, those people who are not on board with your plans for utopia, which is, of course, why it’s been the utopians that have been the most. Genocidal regimes of history. Yeah, so I have a kind of a religious question to ask you about that. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. No, in Christianity, broadly speaking, you could make the case from a psychological perspective that utopia is permanently forestalled into the future in the name of the afterlife or of heaven or something like that. So it’s abstracted up into something that’s then put in a distant place. And I’m wondering to some degree if that’s not a consequence of attempts to remove the danger from assumptions of potential utopias here and now. No, because I’d like to look at religious thinking from an evolutionary perspective or a biological perspective. And it’s very curious to me that the idea of of the utopia, let’s say, would be forestalled in that way. Any any thoughts about that? No, it’s a strange question. Well, we have ideas about heaven that seem to be not universal, but there are features of heaven that seem to recur. Maybe we’ll get into this later if we talk about psychedelics, but there are certain visions of heaven and hell. And so the idea of heaven, which often seems so perfectly beautiful, the idea of it’s perfectly beautiful, but you know, it’s got its weird political problems. Like that just doesn’t make any cognitive sense. Better to have it all be good and perfect and pure and hell be all perfectly terrible. So I don’t know what was motivating the early Christians. I have no insights into that. But something that a way that I do psychology and actually, Jordan, I know that you do, too, because when we first met, you and I first met when I had my first job interview at Harvard in 1994. And you were the only person on the faculty then that I connected with. But we both bonded over an interest in Jung. And while I don’t embrace the, you know, the sort of the some of the more fanciful elements of Jung, but the idea of archetypes, the idea that there are images that occur to people around the world because they come out of our evolutionary past. Something about our minds readily imagines them because of some something was adaptive long ago. And so that’s what got me into the study of disgust and purity and pollution was when I started reading ethnographies and seeing that all these cultures that never had any communication, any of them are idle and nations in the Pacific or they all had some similar ideas about purity and pollution. And so I would guess similarly with heaven and hell. Yeah, well, it’s interesting to me that if earthbound utopias present a continual political danger in the way that we’ve been discussing that one way out of that might be to permanently forestall it. You know, because and we also talked archetypally already because you guys mentioned the fact that it’s easy for political discussions to degenerate into something like an archetypal struggle between good and evil. Right. It’s that base level category that seems to emerge and confuse things when they need to be more specified. You’re supposing that there is some sort of an evolutionary system that there has been enough competition between cultures that the ones that were utopian didn’t win out. Or you’re assuming that somebody had access to enough data of world historical societies to realize that utopias tend to end in bloodshed. And guess what? Here we are in 2100. And while a few social scientists know it, most people are still or many people are still utopian. So I think I would not look for some adaptive thing like, oh, the Christians were very wise in putting utopia impossibly far in the future because they knew that if they put it in the present, it’ll be. No, I don’t. I don’t. I wouldn’t think they knew. I don’t I don’t imagine it’s anything that was planned. It just strikes me that the idea is so prevalent that utopian thinking is so prevalent that there might it might be necessary to develop a psychological mechanism to make it to make its existence safe. You know, I was thinking in some sense the same thing about ideas of God, because and I don’t know what you guys think about this, but it seems to me that it’s possible that if there isn’t a place in society for something like an ultimate value, then that degenerates down to the political level and starts to contaminate it. So if there is such a thing as a religious instinct, let’s say if it doesn’t find its proper place in abstraction, then you elevate other elements of society to the same level. And then that becomes dangerous. Well, it depends on what you elevate. If it’s if what you’re elevating is human well-being, people should be healthy and happy and long lived and educated and safe. That doesn’t seem like such a bad moral value to elevate. It’s certainly better than some arbitrary stipulation from from some scripture or creed that you can’t justify to people who don’t believe it and deceitfully. The problem with utopia is, I mean, among the problems. And I’m not sure, by the way, I’m the least qualified person on earth to talk about Christian theology or eschatology, but it seems to me there’s also the notion of the second coming. There’s end times. There’s heaven on earth. There are notions of utopia that are not so not necessarily seem to me not necessarily postponed indefinitely. But the problem with utopia, of course, is that it ignores the inherent tradeoffs in the human condition, such as that if you give you can’t have complete freedom and complete well-being because people will choose to do things that screw up their lives. So unless you have a totalitarian nanny state, you give people freedom. They’re going to do things that lead to some bad outcomes. You were not all identical. And therefore, anything that carries out the vision of some of us is going to to be inimical to others. And so that’s why a liberal democracy is basically a means for resolving disagreements, not a vision of what life ought to be. There’s an inherent tradeoff between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity or rights. And since we’re not all clones, that means that if you allow people to achieve the most they can, some people will achieve more than others. And there is that tradeoff if you don’t want to have extremes of inequality. Add to the the inevitability that whatever your vision of utopia is going to be, not everyone’s going to agree with you. And in order to carry out a scheme that is perfectly laid out on paper, how do you deal with the people who don’t get with the program? If you sincerely believe that the people who disagree with you are the only thing standing between the current world and a world that will be infinitely good forever, then you’re justified in doing anything possible. To eliminate the deal. Yeah, well, exactly. Well, that’s why it seems to be such a hazard, right? Because utopia, if utopia is perfect and it can be attained, then any means are acceptable to bring it about. And that I can’t think of a more profound moral hazard than that. Yeah, we’re all kind of channeling Isaiah Berlin here. But they’re good arguments. So you like to wait. Oh, go ahead. If you don’t mind, Jordan, I’d like to take what Steve just said, which is so sensible. It makes perfect sense. Yes, we need a liberal democracy for all these reasons. But yet somehow it’s not it doesn’t seem to inspire people the way that a God does. And yes, we could elevate human well-being. Let’s all have a religion around human well-being and we’ll do whatever it takes to advance human well-being. Well, I’ve spoken I get invited to speak at Christian colleges and Christian associations and podcasts sometimes, because even though I’m a center, center left atheist Jew, when they read The Righteous Mind, they find it useful and they see that I don’t have the usual academic contempt for religion. I actually think religion, at least in the United States, religion on net is a very good thing. And so when I speak to Christian audiences, I often start off by saying, you know, we actually agree on something extremely important, which is that there is a God shaped hole in everyone’s heart. And Pascal didn’t say exactly that, but he said something more or less to that effect. And I say, yeah, there is a God shaped hole in our heart. We just disagree on how it got there. And you think it’s there because we long for God and God exists and God fills it. I think I’m a naturalist. I think we evolved to be religious. And I tell that story in The Righteous Mind, how we evolved for sacredness and gods and how gods have evolved culturally. And so I think central to our conversation here, or rather, we’re having this academic conversation in the context of a country going insane with bad religions. And by bad religions, what I mean is people have found something that fits the whole. And so it’s deeply satisfying, but it makes them behave in ways that are incredibly destructive to a liberal democracy. Whereas the older religions at least went through a process of evolution, especially those that made it in a free country like America. They tend to be kind of nice. And so I would bring that perspective. So, yeah, so I want to comment on that a bit. I mean, one of the things I’ve been struck by talking to Lomborg and Ridley and Marian Tupi about the idea of human well-being, which is obviously something that anyone sensible would support, is that it is very, very difficult to make it inspiring. And I think there are probably two reasons for that is one is this God shaped hole that John was talking about seems to perhaps indicates that the that ideal that you mentioned, Stephen, needs to be embodied in something like a personality for it to fit properly rather than for it to be an abstract idea that might be more motivating for people who are highly rational and intellectual. And so so it isn’t obvious to me how an ideal of, say, incremental progress towards well-being, which might be regarded as a prime enlightenment sentiment, can be fashioned in some sense so that it fulfills the psychological requirements that Jonathan was describing. So I have another if I can allude to another cheeky passage toward the end of enlightenment now, I say, well, do we need to have men in coloured shirts saluting posters of John Stuart Mill and and secular humanist preachers rolling back their eyes and pounding a copy of Spinoza’s ethics on the pulpit? Here, here. Well, maybe we do. But on the other hand, and I find there’s some irony in here, me defending the plasticity of a human belief in values, given I’m a pretty staunch advocate of the concept of human nature. But the what fills that that God shaped hole is it’s pretty variable. I mean, it was certainly there’s nothing in human nature that says that it had to be filled with the notion that if you accept that a guy who was nailed to a cross 2000 years ago died for your sins and the foremost of which was when Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I mean, that’s not an intuitive idea. That was an idea that we had to have acquired. We also know that despite the prevalence of a religious belief, there’s an awful lot of the world’s population that does not believe in any deity. The population of China, for example, a large proportion of the population of Western Europe in the United States, millennials and Gen Z’s have some vague notion of spiritual but not religious, but they’re falling in droves away from specifically. From formal religions, but that makes them more vulnerable to these new political religions. Well, indeed, I agree. But the thing is that those aren’t specifically they’re not literally religious in the sense that they appeal to the supernatural or theological. They’re crummy moral systems. And so it does leave open the possibility of having a not so crummy moral system. But the essential element, I think, is that it unites a group against other groups. So human well-being wouldn’t do it, but fighting white supremacy or fighting CRT or the communists or the fascists or whatever. So I think it’s it you can’t just put anything in there. I’m a Durkheimian. And so I think a good religion, anything that’s going to fit in the whole. And by good, I don’t mean good for I just mean something that’ll make a good fit is going to have to be one that has a group bonding function for us to come together to fight something else. So let me ask you about that. So you just made the case, I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, that we seem to agree on the case that because of this absence of a higher value, whatever it happens to be, that’s fallen down into the political domain. And then the quasi religious impulses that are infiltrating the the political domain tend to pit one side against another. So you get a good versus evil narrative emerge. But the problem with the good versus evil narrative is that the evil is embodied in some other group and the good is embodied in your group. So one of the things I’ve been thinking through is that, you know, in sophisticated literature, you don’t have good guys and bad guys. You have good guys and bad guys in the same soul. And that’s the Solzhenitsyn quote. Yes. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You see that in sophisticated literature. Everyone knows that. So so here’s a thought. So if you don’t have a abstract religious system that insists that the dividing line between good and evil is to be fought inside your own soul, so to speak, then it degenerates one step into a battle between good and evil in the outside world, with evil being conveniently located somewhere else. So one of the things I think that Christianity did bring the world and it had its roots in Jewish thinking as well was that the greatest of evils was to be found within, not without. And maybe that’s one way of protecting society from this schismatic tendency that we see reemerging. Let’s look, let me give you an example. OK, I’ll just go through this very quickly. So in the in the book of Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve, you have evil located as a snake. Right. So it’s a predator. It’s the predator in the garden and predatory snakes were hell on primates. So there’s plenty of evolutionary reason for that. But then you can imagine. So there’s an insistence in Judeo-Christian thinking that the snake in the garden is Satan, which is a very odd idea. I tried to think that through. I thought, OK, snake as predator. Other person as predator, group as predator. Soul inside your soul as predator. It’s increasing psychologization of the idea of predator, because, you know, when we were animals like other animals, we were preyed upon by straightforward predators and then by other people and then by other individuals. But then we figured out that that battle was within. And if it isn’t occurring within, then is it necessary that it is transferred to something that’s occurring without? I really like your point about how believing in original sin or that the battle is within makes you less susceptible to a simplistic, where good, their evil narrative. I like that a lot. I’m a big fan of Amanda Ripley, who wrote this amazing essay called Complicating the Narrative. And it’s about how journalists, reporters, you know, don’t report like, well, this side says this and this side says that. Don’t just report the two sides. That simplifies the narrative in a sense. Rather show splits within each side and show that the story is really complicated. And that kind of stops people in their in their in their rush to judgment and mob action and makes them think, which, of course, is what great literature does, too. And that also helps explain what I think is is particularly attractive to me in Christianity, at least in some of the Christians that I know, is that they really make a virtue of humility in a way that, well, Jews don’t least American Jews, they’re not as seem to. But the idea that we are all flawed, don’t be so sure of yourself. Judge not lest ye be judged. So I sometimes join a group of evangelical preachers, actually brought together by Jonathan Rausch, another Jewish atheist, but, you know, with a bunch of interesting people like Pete Weiner, David Brooks, and some actual, yeah, some actual ministers as well. But it I just love the the virtues there of humility, grace, forgiveness. And these are virtues that have just been completely drained away from from modern society. I think you see the the struggle for morality within in the Jewish tradition in the prophetic tradition with the insistence that, you know, people have deviated away from the path of God and have to be called back to it. So at least the precursors to that idea there in in the Jewish tradition, I think, is that the idea that we have to be called back to the path of God is that we have to be called back to the path of God. Yeah, that makes sense. Yes. Yeah. The idea that there’s a struggle between our better angels and our inner demons, good and evil within us, is an important idea. It doesn’t have to come from the parable of the snake in the garden of Eden. The problem there is that if it is in the garden of Eden, it’s not a good idea. It’s a good idea. It is an important idea. It doesn’t have to come from the parable of the snake in the garden of Eden. The problem there is that if it is, it’s just a parable and people who are graced in the Christian tradition or who just don’t believe it or can’t slide onto it can reject it. But it’s not that abstruse a notion. It appears also in Freud’s contrast between the inner super ego. It appears in evolutionary psychology in terms of the particular drives and motives that served us well in an anarchic society. You see in cartoons with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other. I think if we think it’s a good idea, we have to articulate why it’s a good idea and express it in a way that anyone can accept it, regardless of the tradition that happened to have been brought up in. And in terms of the Jewish notion of humility, I’m sorry, but I have to tell a Jewish joke, which is that on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the rabbi and the cantor are standing in front of the open ark with the Torah scrolls. The cantor falls to his knees and says, Lord, I am nothing. The rabbi seeing him falls to his knees says, Lord, I am nothing. The back of the synagogue, there’s the lowly janitor overcome with emotion. He falls to his knees and says, Lord, I am nothing. The rabbi says, the cantor, look at me because he’s nothing. So that’s humility within the Jewish tradition. When I was reading Enlightenment Now, I was struck by this. And I guess this is something that’s always struck me, is that there’s a power in mimicry and imitation that’s attenuated in rational reasoning. And so I’ve been thinking again about Christianity from a psychological perspective, and I thought, well, one way you could characterize it is that it’s a very long discussion about what constitutes the human ideal. And I’ve been thinking about what unites people. And you might say, well, that beliefs unite them. But I think it’s the shared pursuit of an ideal that unites people rather than beliefs about the state of the world per se. And so when I was reading Enlightenment Now and when I read works of other rational enlightenment types, I it’s this it’s this inability to inspire that that torments me because I appreciate the utility of the arguments and the power of the technology that’s associated with rational thinking and all of that. But things seem to be disintegrating politically around us despite that rationality. And it isn’t clear to me that sufficient force to hold back the tide. I mean, look what happened to Dawkins recently with the humanists, for example, which was quite shocking to me and I suspect to him as well. Me too. Yeah. It is it is a challenge of how to engage people’s how to get their their blood pumping, their adrenaline going. It’s a dangerous thing if it can be commandeered by by demagogues and by rabble rousers. I think it is worth it. And I think we don’t know enough about this process to look at cases in which there have been constructive moral and social movements that have managed to get to to engage people’s emotions. Perhaps the civil rights movement in its heyday of Martin Luther King, when John F. Kennedy got a lot of people to join the young people to join the Peace Corps, the founding of the United Nations was a source of great hope. I mean, the United Nations has its own pathologies, but in its time, even in things like there are there’s a kind of pseudo religion to some TED talks where you’ve got a techno optimist who proposes some way of dealing with with climate change, with malaria, with parasitic disease. And in the room, you can feel that kind of elevation, that awe. I think we have to work toward not just engaging any old fervor, but to figure out how we marry that fervor to the causes that generally deserve it. OK, I’m going to play the skeptic here because my new theme that I’m thinking through is is unmoralize everything that moral moralism, moral judgment. You know, as I said, it’s just it makes it difficult to find the truth. And and so constructive, moral and social movements. Well, we’re all supposed to think, well, social movements are great. And the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, gay liberation, all the incredible rights movements of the last 50 or 60 years. But that’s in part because we look back at the ones that that that were successful and that were really deeply right about writing injustices. And now, when I look at social activism on campus and among young people, I think it I have a much greater appreciation for how hard it is to change institutions, especially complicated institutions that are generally trying to to be open and humane anyway. And I look at the policies that many young people are pressing universities to adopt or pressing companies to adopt. And what I see happening is un unmoored moralism, trying to change institutions without understanding them. And I’m beginning to think that social activism may on net be a negative thing to to the extent that now it is governed more by the social dynamics of social media and self-presentation than by any real study of a problem and attempt to come up with something that would work. So, you know, that’s blindness, blindness, isn’t it? I mean, blindness, blindness, what do you mean? They’re blind to what they’re blind about? Yes, exactly. It’s a good survey. Well, you know, if you put someone on the spot and you ask them if they could run a nuclear power plant, they’ll say no. But if you ask them what should be done about the entire world’s electrical grid, they’ll tell you the answer. And that’s a good example of not decomposing the problem down into into units that could actually be addressed intelligently. But so you’re noticing this this activism and you’re doubtful about its utility and your solution. And we can talk about this more is to take the moral fervor out of it. So I was thinking recently about Jean Piaget’s argument, you know, his final stage of cognitive development. Hardly anybody knows this, but it was the messianic stage. I’ve never heard about that. Absolutely. There’s many things about Piaget that people haven’t heard about, you know, that his his goal was to unite religion and science. Yes. Piaget is a very strange character. And all you hear about is the rational stage theory. But anyways, the last stage was the messianic and he identified that as a stage in late adolescence. Not everyone reached it, but that it involved a world changing fervor. And he identified that as part of what catalyzed identity. And so we’re seeing that these students, they come to university, they want to catalyze their identity in a profound way and orient themselves. And what seems to happen is the activist types tap into that and offer them a solution. And the solution seems dangerous, but it doesn’t look like the intelligent people are offering anything that’s useful as an alternative because they’re not getting anywhere with it. And so we have to ask yourself exactly why that is. And part of it is the lack of romance, I think. You know, when Orwell wrote about the Nazis in the 1930s, he was he was very careful to highlight their dramatic use of ritual and the romantic attraction. Of course, he was absolutely opposed to everything they were doing, as anyone rightly should be. But Orwell was very wise and about human nature in general. And there’s a drama in what’s being offered to adolescents that the rational approach doesn’t seem to engender. And I don’t know how to solve that problem. I think it’s a terrible problem. But I can mediate between what you were saying and what John offered. And I do tend to agree with John. I was trying to make some concessions toward the possibility that you can best energize people by somehow co-opting this fervor. But I think it’s probably an open question. How much can you engage people without the trappings of religion or pseudo religion? Can you engender a problem solving mindset as opposed to a struggle mindset? That’s right. And before we write people off and say, no, no, they can’t. No one likes solving problems. It’s too boring. It doesn’t get heart pounding. You’ve got to they’ve got to wear colored shirts. They’ve got to salute something. They’ve got to they’ve got to bow down. We have we did eliminate smallpox. We’ve drastically reduced the amount of warfare, partly because of John and Yoko and Peter, Paul and Mary, but also because of much more practical treaties and organizations. We’ve drastically reduced extreme poverty, not because of the teachings of the Hebrew prophet Jesus, but because of China and Indonesia and India adopting capitalism to to tie into the theme of John’s impending book. So there is a tendency, there’s a vulnerability in people to want to belong to transcendent movements involving some kind of conflict. On the other hand, we haven’t done so bad at combating disease and poverty and war with a more technocratic problem solving mindset. So maybe Jonathan’s right that we ought to just minimize these dangerous passions and treat more things as problems to be solved. Well, so my concern, I agree with your description of what came before. My concern is that is that the universe is different after 2012 than it was before 2009, that the fundamental nature of society was rewired by everyone going on to social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, but all the other platforms as well. And so whatever was possible, whatever the arrangements were before, some of that is still valid today, but a lot of it isn’t. And we often don’t know what parts. And so whether you’re talking about how we how we mobilize to solve problems. So just just to take one example, activist movements generally had adults in them. They had adults and then young people would come into them as well. And there was there were multiple generations of knowledge about how things work and how they want to change. But now that everyone is connected to everyone and and things go at many times the speed, I think you can have a groundswell for a reform of a system that gets pushed through within days or weeks just by people with very little input from adults. And that’s why I think we see over and over again demands just speaking from the area I know best on campus, demands that dozens and hundreds of schools year after year for things that make race relations and inclusion and diversity worse. So so I’m just concerned. And it’s just this is just one little example. But in so many ways, I think the 2010s were weird because life after 2012 is just fundamentally different from life before 2009. Well, go ahead, Stephen. Yeah, although I mean, I see that happening and there has been a change toward intolerance and struggle as opposed to problem solving the last few years. On the other hand, the demands are being accepted by baby boomers, by the deans and the provosts. And if you rewind the tape back to when we were college students, there was an awful lot of inanity and extremism and repression of speech. E.O. Wilson and Dick Hirstine and Tom Bouchard and many others were canceled. There were posters. I have one from 1984. A talk for E.O. Wilson, Bring Noisemakers. And now the student activists of when we were students are now the deans and the provosts who are happily ratifying these extreme demands. At the same time, and we all know this from our students, this is not a uniformly woke generation. There are an awful lot of students who are intimidated into silence and they think, gee, I must be the only sane person. Everyone else is crazy. And an awful lot of people are all thinking that. So I do agree that there is a problem of just mature judgment, but it isn’t completely a cohort effect. No, exactly. But that’s my point is that it’s not a cohort effect. It’s a it’s a change in dynamics. So it used to be that there would be some activists, but other people could still have a conversation or they could still have some they could still play play a role. You’re right that the people giving into the demands are people from the previous generation who were the at least that generation earlier, but they’re not happily giving in. I’ve spoken to many leaders in the academic world. They all hate it. They are they feel stuck. They feel pressured. They don’t know what to do. And now it’s the same thing. People leading nonprofits, especially progressive nonprofits or companies. So it’s not that young people are woke. It’s that the dynamics have changed so that the woke among the young now have such power to intimidate others into silence. And this is what we see in universities, that students are not afraid of their professors. They’re afraid of a subset of students and the professors are not afraid of anyone except this subset of students and the presidents. Well, they have other donors and other people who did it to please. But but the dynamics of social media allows the small group to weaponize their moralism and to intimidate others into silence. And this is happening in so many institutions, not everywhere, but it is happening. And so what we need to do is not change a generation. What we need to do is change the dynamics so that bad ideas don’t dominate and intimidate. So why do you single out 2012? So 2009 is when Facebook added the like button and Twitter added the retweet button. And before then, social media was not particularly polarizing. People would put up a Friendster page or a MySpace page or a Facebook page with what they liked. And here’s here’s who I am not polarizing at all. And then in 2009, you get the like button and then the retweet button and then Twitter and Facebook copy each other very quickly. So now both platforms have both like and retweet. Now both platforms have huge amounts of information about engagement and now they can algorithmize all the feeds. And so as it’s more engaging, this is the two or three years where at least adolescents have data or data from national service showing this is the two years when adolescents go from mostly not being on these platforms every day to now teen social life is mostly conducted on various platforms. So do you think that’s so are you characterizing that as a positive feedback loop, essentially? Like it’s buttons with the algorithms. Yes, exactly. It’s a feedback loop and it’s also the most powerful not Pavlov and it’s just behaviorist behaviorist conditioning mechanism ever. Thank you. Thanks. Yes, I haven’t taught Psych 101 in 10 years. But if you think about it, many people have seen that video of B.F. Skinner training a pigeon to turn the circle by just reinforcing slightly more clockwise behaviors, counterclockwise behaviors in the video. And if you think about it, as soon as as soon as someone gets on social media and they post something, now people are giving them little reinforcements. And so and it’s within seconds. I mean, people you post something and then sometimes you check within a minute. What do people think about it? And so we have so this is why so these are ideas that I developed with Tobias Rose Stockwell. We had an article in The Atlantic on why everything’s going, why democracy is going haywire or something like that. Well, the positive feedback loop idea is really interesting, too, because a lot of psychopathologies are positive feedback loops. So if you get depressed and you start isolating yourself because you’re depressed, you get more depressed. If you drink alcohol and go into withdrawal and then drink to cure that, you become alcoholic. If you are agoraphobic and you avoid, you get more afraid. Like a lot of psychopathological processes are positive feedback loops. And so the combination of the algorithm with the like that we don’t know what these technologies are doing to us. We don’t have a clue. We have no sense whatsoever. And it’s pretty much all bad. So, yes, we get that feedback loop that now now you can have have the echo chambers and bubbles. If you’re prone to extremist politics on either side, you now because based on what you like, what YouTube videos you watch, that sucks you down into more extreme ones and into a community. So the algorithms are doing two things. They’re picking our friends because they’re going they say you should meet this person because people you know meet him. So the algorithms are making our friends different from what they used to be. And the algorithms are making what we watch and consume different. And in some ways, that’s good because we it’s things that we enjoy. But one of the problems for a liberal democracy, as the founding fathers knew, is faction, factionalism. People become so focused on defeating the other side, they lose sight, they lose concern for the common good. Well, you might also think that it would be necessary. Like if you go to public school, you go to school with 30 people who are basically randomly selected from the population. And so then you have to modify. Well, in Canada, you have to you have to you have to modify your behavior to take into account a broad range of people. And you didn’t pick them. Whereas online, if you’re starting to only aggregate with people who think the way that your interest indicates you think, then is it possible that you start to lose touch cognitively with the broader culture and you don’t even know what it is anymore? And that’s that’s right. And that’s why I’m particularly concerned about Gen Z, because the mental health data shows that their mental health plummeted beginning around 2012, whereas the millennials, they didn’t get social media until they were in college or after college. And I think that if you if you’re exposed to a broad range of ideas and books and people, you have a chance to get your mind broadened when you’re when you’re young. But if you think about the river of inputs coming into people’s eyes and ears, when we were all growing up, we watched way too much television, but television was made by older people. It was made by people who were not children. And so we at least from watching Bugs Bunny, you’re at least exposed to opera and you’re exposed to certain cultural themes. And you even have a sense of the 1940s, let’s say. But once everyone got onto social media all the time, now the river of inputs, so much of it was created in the last week or two by people your age. And so there’s just not much room for people in this post war, in the aftertimes, let’s say, after the social media world. There’s not much room for kids to learn anything about the 20th century or communism or Nazism or great literature. So much input is jammed up with trivia, ephemera. And to the extent that there’s political content, it’s not broadening your mind, it’s turning you into the kind of factionalist that the founding fathers feared. So that’s my most pessimistic take that, yes, Steve, Steve is right, we had incredible progress up until 2009. But in the world after 2012, I think our institutions, the institutions of liberal democracy are in such danger that it’s quite possible that the future will not be like the past. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I now see that as a possibility that I didn’t see five years ago. And what do you see as the danger at the moment? So the danger, I think, is that a secular liberal democracy is a miraculous thing, but a fragile thing. And we briefly thought in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall that this was the end of history. Liberal democracy had won eventually North Korea, Iran. Well, everybody’s going to be a liberal democracy. Once they get a little richer, they’ll want that. But now it’s clear that the founders were right that a diverse democracy, a democracy per se, is very difficult, very fragile. And as Madison said, as violent in their deaths as they are short lived in their lives. And so the 20th century, we had all kinds of centripetal pressures, including especially World War II, binding us together. We had briefly a centripetal media system where we all got the same news. So we had the high point of professional journalism. It wasn’t that way before the 1920s and it isn’t that way after 2012. So there was this period where the institutions that grounded us to truth or rather gave us a process by which we could make progress towards truth and weed out terrible ideas. That, it turns out, was just a temporary thing. And I see it fading away. And this is so Jonathan Rausch has a book coming out in a week or two called The Constitution of Knowledge. Steve is going to cover a lot of this in his book on rationality. So let me kick it over to Steve. Steve, what do you see? Do you see that things are changing in the last 10 years or so in ways that are a danger to a liberal democracy such as ours? Some of them are, although in the last 10 years, globally, we’ve seen extreme poverty continue to decline. We’ve seen war decline after the blip from the Syrian civil war, which temporarily reversed the trend. We’ve seen movements like the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, the restrictions in the application of the death penalty. So there are a lot of these long term movements that are continuing. And also got to remember that in the 60s and 70s, but one thing domestically, there were weekly bombings and riots with police shooting a dozen rioters a night. The weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Sibyanese Liberation Army. I’m getting all of that. Oh, yeah. Materially, things are continuing to get better. I give you all of that. And if you listen back, I mean, I’ve been watching the Apple TV series in 1971, the music changed everything. Oh, cool. Highly recommended. It’s a reminder of a lot of the political inanity of our generation and our older brothers and sisters who were Maoists, who were Marxists, who were violent insurrectionists. And not just in rhetoric, but there really was a lot of violence. There were bombings. There were judges whose heads were blown off. Oh, my God. It was a pretty ugly time. And even in terms of it’s certainly true that there is no overall progressive force toward liberal democracy. And there have there’s absolutely been a recession in the last decade in countries like Hungary and Turkey and the United States and Russia. On the other hand, if you look at the graph of number of democracies scaled by how democratic, how autocratic they are, we’ve backslid maybe to 2010. We have to remember that in the 1970s, there were only 33 democracies on Earth. Half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. Spain and Portugal were literally fascist dictatorships. All of Latin America, you know, junta, banana republics, military governments. Taiwan was a military dictatorship. South Korea was a military dictatorship. There has been some backsliding, but not back to the 1970s. So it’s sort of premature to abandon the liberal democratic ideal. I agree that it has to be that there is some it’s not it’s not so fragile that we have gone all the way back to the 1970s. And there are some built in advantages like people want to live there. That’s where people who vote with their feet end up. We know from I mean, John, I know you covered this in your book on happiness, but people in liberal democracies are happier and together with material affluence, which, of course, liberal democracies are very good at delivering. The second, as I recall, contributor to happiness is a sense of freedom. So people there is at least pushing in the direction of liberal democracy against greed. There is a tribalist and authoritarian and backslide and magical thinking. There is people’s desire for prosperity and freedom, at least for themselves. And pushing back against the positive feedback loops, the vortexes of misinformation and fake news and so on. There is the fact that reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. That and Jonathan Rausch is clear in his book, which just recently came out, which I admire as much as you do, that there are some that because reality is still there. There is always a resource to that the constitution of knowledge, what he called liberal science always has behind it, that in the end, you can’t wish away reality for for long. I wonder if one of the differences between now and the 1970s, I mean, because I often think about now compared to 1972, which was not exactly a banner year. That was the year of the oil crisis. I mean, it seems 73, 73. It seems that there were terrible things going on in the world at that time that people were concerned about, and they seem equally concerned now and equally divisive. But the terrible things aren’t going on. I mean, the Vietnam War was raging. The Cold War was raging. We were concerned about running out of oil, and that seemed that turned out to be, you know, a non-starter. Overpopulation. Yes. I mean, extinction. Yes. Yes. So and a lot of those things didn’t manifest themselves, but certainly the Cold War was absolutely real and it was raging away in Vietnam, among other places. And so people were very bent out of shape about that, and rightly so. And now there seems to be an equal amount of being bent out of shape, but the contributing factors seem even far less obvious than they were in the 1970s. And so that seems to be the mediating factor between the position you staked out in this discussion, Steven, and the one that you’re describing, Jonathan, is that, you know, it’s not worse than it was in the 70s, except there’s no reason for it now. Yeah. So again, I totally accept Steve’s points about progress and about how there are many people, particularly as he says, progressives who don’t want to acknowledge that there’s been progress. I don’t deny any of that. I just I feel like we’re just in the first stages of this new way of living in which we won’t be able to find truth. The processes that let us find truth have decayed in ways that might make the future different from the past. And so if you look at what is happening in journalism and many people now, you know, not just people on the right, but centrists and others are saying the New York Times is just not as reliable as it used to be since it’s committed itself. I heard a discussion, I think Andrew Sullivan said something like there was a memo went around that we’re going, you know, we need to make race part of every story. So if, you know, if the New York Times has this this dual telos, you know, all the truth fits fit to print, or is it all the truth that fits our narrative we print? I mean, those are not the same, you know, that’s incoherence. And that’s basically what’s happened in some of the social sciences as well. And so you have to either have the whole institution committed to this really, really difficult thing, which is advancing towards truth, disposing of falsehoods, using only imperfect, flawed, motivated individuals as the units and creating a process that nonetheless gets you closer to truth. And we’ve done it in universities. We’ve done it in juries in the court system, the legal system, and we’ve done it in high quality journalism. And now we need that truth. And but we also need the truth that unites us. Right. I mean, the well that unites us. Well, I’m trying to to make sense of of all the arguments that you’re putting forward. I mean, one of the things that’s happening, you pointed out is that we were factionalizing and each faction has its own representation of reality. Right. And back in the heyday of journalism. And it wasn’t just journalism, because there was all sorts of central institutions that people trusted fundamentally. And so those institutions were oriented towards the truth in principle, but they also united people. And so now you could say that one of the consequences of this remarkable technology that’s put us all online is that and this is part of what’s undermining journalism and that is everything has fragmented into a thousand narratives or ten thousand narratives. And they all find their own community. And so it seems that the problem of truth has two elements then. What’s the truth and how is it that we share that across ourselves so that we can be united as a country or a state or whatever level of community you choose? OK, I would just be wary of saying the truth that unites us as if we all need to believe one truth. I would rather say if there is a possibility of finding truth, then at least we can have our disagreements within some realm of sanity where we might actually resolve problems or fix problems or make these massive advances on social problems. Once the ability to find any kind of truth goes away, then it’s not that we can’t unite around something. So if you think about when 9-11 happened within a week, we pretty much there was a common agreement about what had happened. Planes were sent by Al Qaeda whenever we figured that out. And there were conspiracy theories that it was an inside job by Israelis. But those were fringe freak theories. Nobody really believed them. And we came in America came together and supported a response. Now, of course, we know George W. Bush abused that and took us into Iraq on false premises. But if 9-11 were to happen tomorrow, do you think that we would we would have a shared understanding of what happened? I don’t. And in fact, it kind of did. We had the pandemic a year and a half ago and we could have been a way to bring us together to solve this massive problem that we all faced. But we in America, at least, we quickly split into crazy factions. Well, I should say, I mean, you know, crazy conspiracy theories on the right. The left wasn’t conspiracy theories, but the left was the woke problem where certain things, you know, certain things couldn’t be said. And, you know, and especially one of the worst things that the that the institutions of that are tasked with creating knowledge. And the worst things they did was they said, no, no, no, you can’t get together at church. No, no, no, you can’t get together to Trump rally. Oh, but Black Lives Matter protests. Yes, go ahead. And so that, you know, so the right was already so skeptical. And once the epidemiological community did that as a community, they put out a statement, boom, no more trust in the establishment. And that has killed a lot of people, because if not for that, there would be a lot less skepticism about vaccines. I completely agree with John. And that’s one of my favorite examples. The other one, of course, being that the that if you discuss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, that shows that you’re a racist. You’re a racist. Right. Right. And so that was that that was censored and inhibited until it just burst out about a month ago. But while completely agreeing with with John that that the our institutions for finding the truth are constantly need defense, they go against a lot of features of human nature. And then I just want to caution against thinking that it was that much better in the past. One of my favorite quotes is that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. And this includes, by the way, the New York Times. And there is a sort of subversive book by Ashley Rinsburg came out a couple of weeks ago called The Great Lady Winked, going over the history of the New York Times coverage of world events, which forget all the news that’s fit to print. They downplayed the holodomor, the terror famine in Ukraine under Stalin. Their Berlin chief during the 1930s was a Nazi who constantly apologized for the Nazi regime. The coverage of Fidel Castro in the 50s amplified the strength of the guerrilla movement. The weakness of the Modin regime in South Vietnam, leading to the CIA inspired coup, may have been inflated by New York Times coverage. There’s actually a history of activism and. Thank you for that. I didn’t know that. And here’s another way of looking at it again. I don’t want to be to take on the optimist role too thoroughly because I could have done a lot has gone wrong in the last few years. Again, the constant vulnerability of the institutions of liberal democracy and truth seeking. But. Where was I going with this? The the best explanation is a bad memory. Yes, right. And the problem with an aphorism is that it makes you forget what the. It’s a good aphorism. But it’s a good aphorism. Well, we were talking about the New York Times and about the fact that it’s never been what it was. And you walk through that and and the. Yes, OK. Here’s what I don’t want to say is a note of hope. That is that it will inevitably get better, but rather it’s pointing a way to what we ought to do if we want it to be to get better, which we may or may not succeed at. Right. OK. Every new medium opens up a kind of a wild west of apocryphal carnival of nonsense. This happened with the printing press, the printing press and with the. Mass production of newspapers and pamphlets and radio. It was massive plagiarism. Newspapers in the 19th century reported the discoveries of sea monsters and miracles and revivals of the dead and all kinds of nonsense. And it took a while for it to settle into norms that would allow people got fed up with the nonsense. They did gravitate to the more reliable sources, but it took a while for those norms and fact checking mechanisms to be implemented. And online, we have seen the social media companies belatedly try to keep people out of those positive feedback loops, those those rabbit holes. And we’ve seen and this is a point that Jonathan Rausch and I independently made it in our books, that online media can actually implement a regime of fact checking and truth seeking. We see in the contrast between the social media like Twitter and Facebook without the likes and the retweets, which seem to bring out the worst and something like Wikipedia, which despite its early rough years, we all have to concede this is really, really good. They do it because their rules of engagement were different in a way that since it’s an unconfounded, it’s a confounded experiment. We don’t know what was the secret sauce, but some of them were the principles of commitment to objectivity, viewpoint neutrality, the mechanisms of peer correction under the not devolving into flame wars, although it does happen in Wikipedia top pages. But somehow they have they managed to land on a set of rules that that brought out the more rational side of us. And the question is, how do we isolate what they did right and apply it elsewhere? Right. Well, it’s nonprofit and it actually brings people together from different viewpoints. There’s an article that came out two or three years ago showing that articles about politics and social science that had a political diversity in the authors were rated as higher quality than those that had less. So viewpoint diversity is rewarded. That’s right. It’s one of the essential features for a species that is so committed to confirmation bias and to finding whatever supports my side or what I’ve said publicly. So, yes, Wikipedia hit on it used it found a way to harness viewpoint diversity to create a better product. And so, yes, I think we should put John Stuart Mill up on a pedestal and we should bow down to him and we should have a new religion. We’ll call it million ism or a million area ism or no, I don’t know what, but something. So I guess I wonder if those modifying technologies will be able to emerge in in the new environment because things change so fast. You know, I don’t know if we can evolve corrective mechanisms faster than we evolve new disruptive mechanisms. Yeah, so we don’t we have no idea what to do with Twitter, for example, and and and no idea what effect it has. We don’t have any idea. I don’t think what it does to people’s communication when you truncate it to 280 characters like does that increase the probability of manifesting anger, for example? Does it does anybody study that? Oh, yes, there’s a lot of research. Okay, bad is bad is stronger than good as a general principle is a wonderful book by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. And so bad spreads more than good. And especially if if you strip away context and intent and everything else, you’re just asking for trouble. And so Twitter is probably the worst form of communication ever devised if the goal is to actually have conversations. Now, it’s great for certain things. It’s great for finding things to read. But to call Twitter a communication platform or a public square, anything like that, while it serves that function, it serves it about as badly as could be. So so I’m sure you’re what I sometimes say when I’m asked about the future here is I say, I believe Steve Pinker is right that in 50 or 100 years, things will be better. Five or 10, probably worse, or at least may well be worse. But yeah, in the long run, we’re likely to figure this out. Okay, so we’re going to say goodbye to Dr. Pinker at the moment. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with us today. Appreciate that. And best of luck with your new book. Hopefully we’ll talk to you again in the fall when it comes out. Very good to see you. Nice to see you, John. Nice to see you, Jordan. Bye. So let’s start by talking a little bit about more about the righteous mind. Okay. And I’d like to know more about your conceptualization of well, conceptualization of religious instinct, religious impulse, something like that. How do you how do you view that? And why is it that you’ve been asked to talk to gatherings of religious people, for example? Yeah. So, so the story that I tell in the righteous mind is that we is that humans are products of multi level selection, which means that for the most part, if you know, if you read Richard Dawkins, for the most part, it’s selfish genes create, create their survival machines, animals or plants. And those survival machines compete with other survival machines. And that’s what we all know, sort of textbook Darwinian evolution. But while I love Dawkins writing, I love the selfish gene, he for some reason says that plants and animals are the vehicles that the selfish genes travel on. But groups are not. He just says groups can’t be. He just rules that out, if I remember correctly. And for most species, that works great. But for bees, for example, it obviously doesn’t work for bees. It’s obvious that the unit isn’t the individual bee. It’s the hive where the queen is the ovary. And the argument that I make in the righteous mind is that humans show signs of some group level selection. That is, we are mostly we’re primates. We’re like chimpanzees and bonobos in a lot of ways. But we have this ability to lose ourselves in something larger, to become completely unselfish, to sacrifice for the group that is unlike any other animal that is not genetically 50% or more shared genes with all the other animals in its group. And so drawing on research on early human origins and especially the period around from like a million years ago to 200,000 years ago, it appears that we did live in groups that competed with other groups for territory over all sorts of things and that often wiped out or killed other groups. And so I think there was some degree of group level selection. We are we are everyone here on Earth now is our genes are not a cross section of the genes that were on this earth 100,000 or 200,000 years ago. Most groups left no trace and other groups went on to spectacular success. So the way you see this is not by having an argument about altruism, which is where the argument is usually done. Steve Pinker and I actually Steve disagrees with me on this. Steve doesn’t think that group selection played any role. But I think if you look at groupishness or tribalism, why are we so tribal? Why do we love to paint our faces and band together and drink together and do all this stuff for sports? Why do we have these tribal responses? And I talk about my response on 9-11 on September 11th. I had this deep urge to display an American flag. Like, where did that come from? It was almost like a Jungian sort of like thing welling up from my collective unconscious. It was weird. But I had a real urge to display an American flag. But as a professor, I couldn’t really do that because people would think I was a Republican. So I, you know, it’s a solution I came up with. Well, it’s one way of marking yourself as not a terrorist. Is not a terrorist as to what? Fly a flag. I mean, if you imagine that your group is attacked, the first thing that’s relevant is who’s with you and who isn’t. And I mean, that was made public politically by Bush, right? If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And that might be part of an atavistic attempt to say, look, guys, I’m definitely on your side. I’m not trying to put it down. Yeah. Well, OK. But yeah, but you’re suggesting an individually adaptive reason for flying a flag. But you wouldn’t need that if we didn’t have the groupish tribal thing of let’s kill people who aren’t going along with us. So anyway, to bring this back to religion, my point is that we evolved in this dynamics of group versus group. And so and here I follow David Sloan Wilson, you know, in saying, you know, conflict within a conflict at any level brings about cooperation at the next level down. And so we come together to compete to we cooperate intensely in order to compete with other groups. That would be a hallmark of a long period of intergroup competition, which shaped which genes have come down to us today. So anyway, we didn’t evolve for big gods. We didn’t evolve for, you know, for, you know, Yahweh and and and Allah. We evolved for, you know, little gods and sprites and and the the the god of this river and this tree. And and we evolved to worship our ancestors and we evolve just this really intense spirituality that manifests in a magical world. We have all of these beliefs that don’t track reality, but they do serve a Durkheimian function. That is, they do serve, I believe, not to help us understand the world, but to bond together with others so that we can survive in this world and conflict and competition with other groups. That’s the Durkheimian story. And in The Righteous Mind, I was so pleased that I could integrate two of my my my heroes in the social sciences, which are Durkheim and Darwin. They actually fit together perfectly on the subject of multilevel selection and even on ideas of sacredness and groups coming together. So that’s my that’s the approach I developed to religion. The Righteous Mind, I originally thought I’d write about politics, but the subtitle is why good people are divided by politics and religion, because they’re largely the same thing psychologically. So that idea of the sacred. So. I mean, in order to we might ask, what are the preconditions for being able to live peacefully with other people? And it seems to me that, well, if we’re all law abiding, for example, then we all embody the body of the law. And so what that means is that we’re imitating something. We’re all imitating the same thing. And that’s what makes us the same. That’s why I. Commented earlier in our conversation that maybe what unites people isn’t so much belief as the pursuit of something like a shared ideal. Yeah, yeah. Well, OK, well, let me just develop that a little bit. Because you talked about what was sacred. And it seems to me that there is an association between what’s sacred and what inspires awe. Does that seem reasonable? Yes, absolutely. Yes. OK, do you think it’s reasonable to presume that the instinct for awe is the same as the instinct for imitation, for mimicry? I don’t think they’re the same. No, I don’t think the same at all. OK, let’s go into that a little bit. So so I’ll tell you why I think they’re the same and you tell me why you think they’re not, if that’s OK. Well, please. That we can find that people. Well, let me give you an example. People can be possessed by a spirit at a football game. Yeah. And the teams are cooperating and competing in the way that you described. So there’s a tribal element, but overall they’re immersed in cooperation because they’re all playing soccer. And then they’re competing to put a to hit a target fundamentally, which is the goal of most sports events is to hit a target. OK, so. The teams organize themselves into hierarchies of talent, et cetera. Essentially, there’s a star, perhaps the star makes a phenomenal athletic gesture and hits the target. And the entire stadium stands up and spontaneously, right? And because they’re observing something that inspires awe and that awe inspiring act is to hit the target. And they’re all in that stadium celebrating the act of hitting the target. Now, I started to figure this out when I looked into the root of the word sin, because it’s hamartia means to miss the target. Oh, wow. Yes. Yeah. Wow is right. Wow is right. And so the opposite of that is to hit the target. OK. OK, so you see in a stadium with that spontaneous manifestation of awe, the possession of the entire stadium often. And it’s almost entirely unconscious because they get up on their feet before they think. And it’s an act of worship, essentially, for that prowess shown for that demonstration of how to hit the mark. And that’s part of the imitative spirit, I think it’s part of imitating what’s competent and heroic. OK, so I disagree with that analysis because I’m a Durkheimian. I just what would Emil Durkheim say about that? Is it that people are so amazed at the skill with which that guy kicked a ball into a net? I don’t think so. Sports events of the kind you describe, you know, that never happens with soccer in the United States. For us, it’s more football and sometimes basketball. But of the kind you describe, it’s the pleasure. And anybody listening to this can probably think of times when they either sung in a choir or played in a band or played on a sports team. And you have that feeling of really becoming one. That is that is a I would say a quasi mystical or mystical experience. It’s a sort of a loss of self emerging into something larger. Yes, that’s my argument about this higher and lower level, the level of the sacred level of the profane. And Durkheim describes those those are Durkheimian terms. He uses those terms. We can briefly enter the realm of the sacred. And if you’re going to go see a football game, would you rather have an excellent view of the game alone in a room with an excellent screen or maybe just an excellent window? Would you rather be part of the whole crowd that does the wave? I mean, think about the wave. No, I agree with you. Spontaneously figured out how they could become a super organism. No, no, I’m not disagreeing at all. And I do think it’s look, there’s a collective element of that worship that’s exactly in keeping with what you’re describing. And it does unite people in the imitation of a spirit in exactly the same way that they’re united in a concert or when they’re playing in a band. I think those are all manifestations of the same thing. And so I’m not saying that it’s only individual by any stretch of the imagination, because there’d be nothing that would unite. See, in the stadium, they’re united around that. Right. Right. So let’s focus on imitation here. I guess the reason I disagreed with you is that imitation is such an important human ability for learning the fact that we you know, and here I draw from Joe Henrik and others, their approach to cultural evolution, Joe’s book, Why Humans Co-operate and the Weirdest People in the World. And so for humans, the nature of the game is not who has the biggest, strongest or the biggest teeth. It’s who learns the most, who learns the best. And we have all this optimization for learning fast. And imitation is a big part of that. So we do imitation, but we do selective imitation and we figure who should I imitate. So so that would be a sort of a very sort of a lower level, ubiquitous, crucial human ability that we have has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with all. But then I think we can bring our accounts together by saying now that we also have this thing about we’re able to come together in larger groups to pursue common interests, especially in competition. And as we do that, we use our imitation abilities, we draw on our imitation abilities. And so religious worship, you know, well, yeah, actually, it’s always puzzling. I mean, in Judaism, you know, you daven, you you bow, but it’s not in sync. So that one is, I think, a little different, but a lot. But, you know, often you sing, you sway in harmony, you know, you do what everyone else does. And so that’s to a tone. Oh, the davening is to a tone. At one, at one ment, atonement. Oh, at one ment. Yes, absolutely. Yes. So let’s go back to imitation. So, OK, OK. So look, when children, when a son acts out a father when he’s playing house, he doesn’t imitate his father, by which I mean, you could observe the father walking across the room and making certain motions. And the son by no means precisely duplicates those motions. What the son does is observe the father across a wide variety of contexts, extract out the gist and imitate the gist. Yeah. OK, so you made the claim that what we’re imitating is the capacity to learn. But I would modify that and say, no, we’re imitating the capacity to explore. And there’s a difference there. Well, the difference is that learning is in some sense, it has the connotation of a kind of passivity. Whereas did you ever see that medieval drawing of the sky all covered with stars and the man on the edge of the earth with his head poking through the firmament? Does that bring a bell? No, an actual medieval drawing or a modern cartoon? No, no, it’s a medieval drawing. It doesn’t matter, but it’s to boldly go where no one has gone before. You know, in the modern parlance, well, there’s there’s a narrative that drives that. And that’s the thing that’s imitated. And and I think all of those collective manifestations of immersement in the sacred that you’re describing are opportunities for people to collectively engage in attention to and elevation of something like that. So we certainly are an exploratory species. And just as you know, when I was a kid, you know, you put you get a mouse or a gerbil as a pet, you put it into a cage. It’s going to explore. So, you know, mammals are very explored. Many of them are very explorative. Human children are, too. Is that what you I’m sorry, you’re saying this is what religion is somehow related to our exploratory instincts. What do you mean? Yes, that it’s that it’s a manifestation of our attempt to abstract out what the essential element of that is. So, for example, in Christianity, I think the the faculty that’s elevated to the highest degree is logos. And of course, that’s translated into logic by the Greeks. But that that isn’t exactly all it means. It means more like exploratory communicative endeavor, but also with a tremendous emphasis on the truth. And I traced that development back, for example, into Egypt and into Mesopotamia. The Egyptians worshiped the eye Horus’s eye, and that’s the attentive eye. It’s not rationality precisely. It’s the ability to see what’s in front of you. It’s the opposite of willful blindness. And the Egyptians characterized it as such because the god of Egyptian attention, Horus, was the antidote to Osiris. And Osiris was the blindness of the state. He was the state and the blindness of the state. The Egyptians had that all figured out. And in Mesopotamia, the highest god, Marduk, he had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words. And he was the victor of a battle between a whole sequence of gods, competition between gods that was likely the abstracted result of competition between tribes and their own local religions. Because monotheism seemed to emerge like that. Imagine all these tribes with their local gods. They come together. When they come together, the gods fight, so to speak. And then over some immense period of time, they arrange themselves into something approximating a hierarchy. And whatever is the ultimate principle that the cultures, assuming they didn’t destroy each other, derived, starts to take place. So you see, each of these local gods is an element of an ideal. And as they struggle across time, the ideals arrange themselves according to whatever principle generates ideals. And something emerges at the top. The question is, what is it that always emerges at the top? There’s a pattern and it’s the thing that we imitate. That’s the crucial thing. Wait, I’m sorry, what emerges out of the top? Give me an example. Well, I can give you an idea. I’ll give you an example. You tell me what you think about this, because it’s expressed in all sorts of ways, because it can’t be articulated, not fully. OK, so you see Byzantine cathedrals. The dome is the sky. OK, the cathedrals across the center of the cross is the central point of being. You look up at the sky and there’s a picture of Christ as Panticrator, as creator of the world. What’s the idea? And he’s in gold. There’s a halo. The halo is like the sun and gold is a noble metal, right? It’s pure and incorruptible. So that ties into that disgust issue that you’ve made so much of. The Logos idea is the idea that truthful speech brings about the best kind of reality. It’s something like that. And so that’s elevated. So you think, well, look, you know, we imitate. You know, we imitate the gist. Well, what is the gist extracted out over thousands of years? See, when I look at religion from a purely psychological perspective, let’s say, and think about our continued discussion about what constitutes the human ideal, it’s something personified. It has to be because we can’t imitate it otherwise. That’s the problem with abstract ideals as as motivating. They’re not personified. You know, even when Stephen talked about the civil rights movement, he had to mention John F.K. and Martin Luther King, right? He had to bring the personality into it. So you think as we’ve organized our religions across time, as we’ve aggregated into groups and attempted to construct a monotheism, we’re trying to figure out what principle should be elevated to the highest state. OK, so I think we’re taking a very different approach to religion. I am a social functionalist. I I start by saying, what’s the social function of this? I don’t think humans are very motivated to find the truth. Now, this is not this is my particular view. There’s a saying attributed to Robert Zions, a great social psychologist, that a cognitive psychology is social psychology with all the interesting variables set to zero. So a lot of people try to use psychology to explain, you know, how people are trying to optimize their information processing. You know, sure, we do that if we’re trying to bet on the stock market or if we’re trying to get from here to there. But even then, we do all sorts of irrational things. Once you bring in the social factors, those tend, in my mind, to overwhelm any sort of truth seeking. And once you bring in religious thinking where so much is done, that is so evidently counter to truth. And many people point out, well, the point of believing something hard to believe is a demonstration of of your commitment. Yeah, I’ve heard that. I don’t buy that argument. I don’t know what’s weak. Yeah, I don’t know what to think about that particular argument. Well, OK, let me let me ask you this. So if I said I believed in you, what would that mean? Well, pragmatically, it means you support me. You’re there for me. You think I’m on the right track. I have faith in you. Yeah. Right. So what that would mean, I think, would mean that I of your own accord, I would expect you to do the right thing and I would rely on that and defend you. And so the reason I’m bringing this up is because that’s one of the ways that people use the idea of belief. Right. It isn’t we have this idea that to express a religious belief is to express accordance with a set of facts like scientific facts. But that is how it seems. No, to see where you talked about ancestor worship. OK, we believe in something like the central animating spirit of mankind. We that’s the gist that we’re all imitating. And that’s what unites us. We’re united around that ideal. And you see that expressed in places that you described already when you’re playing with a band. That’s a remark. I’d love to be able to do that. I can’t do that, but I see people doing it. You can get a sense of that in the audience. Yeah. You’re united around something transcendent. It seems and you’re all imitating, right? Because you’re all you’ve all got the beat. You’re all imitating the music. Well, I would just say you’re saying it’s not that you’re imitating per se, it’s that you are moving as one. I don’t have to imitate the music, though, as well as moving at one. Well, you are from the Piagetian perspective because you’re matching your body to the rhythms, right? So you’re you’re the mimicry is embodied. And that’s what unites you. So you could say you’re knighted by the spirit of music. That’s fine. But I think it does tap into that imitative capacity because everyone does move as one. Yeah, I would agree. Whether you know, I don’t know enough about mirror neurons to say whether those I don’t know what the current state of research is on mirror neurons, but we certainly have the ability to match to match each other’s movements. And that is part of imitation. And that does get us in sync. And, you know, some people say this is why you should go for a walk if you’re working out a conflict or a problem or you’re negotiating because physically moving in sync with the person tends to promote more agreement. I’d like to see that valid. I’m not sure that’s a finding that holds up, but that makes a lot of sense to me. So I think we’re both focused on different aspects of of the religious experience. And I’m coming in as a social psychologist, looking at its social effects. And you’re coming up as a clinical psychologist. But you’re also not writing it off as like a superstitious equivalent to rationality. Like you’re trying to tie it to something that’s deeper. Oh, we evolved to be. Oh, we evolved to be religious. This is part of our nature. OK, so that’s the first issue is OK. So you think that’s a reasonable proposition. All right. So then the question is. What exactly does that signify? So let me try run this up now. I’ll spy you. OK, you’re interested in processes of natural selection. Now. So I made the proposition a little earlier that. We are doing something like collective imitation of the ancestral spirit. That’s like that’s what ancestor worship is. If you nights, a culture, something like that, you reflect your father, he reflected his father, et cetera, all the way back. And so and the only way that we can be in agreement about something is if we share a lot of our presuppositions. I mean, we can differ to some degree, but we have to have. We have to have a shared personality to comprehend one another. E.O. Wilson said, you know, if we could talk to ants, we wouldn’t have anything interesting to say to them. Yeah, that’s right. Right, right. So, you know, our similarities and our differences make communication possible. But the similarity is something like. Well, it’s our participation in our shared culture, even our shared language. Yeah, I don’t know. I think if you if you are on a team with someone, if you’re on a boat that almost capsizes and you and seven other passengers, you don’t speak any languages in common, but yet you struggle together. You know, you’ll be friendly forever, or especially if you do sort of speak each other’s language, you can communicate a little. So, again, that’s OK. I’m not I’m not trying to localize it to a specific subculture. OK. OK, I just meant that I’m not sure we need common beliefs in order to feel that we’re part of one. I think we need to move together, face a common enemy together. I just put as much stock in belief. What do you what do you think unites us if we face a common enemy together? I think we evolved to have the ability to go into team mode very quickly. And this is why teams and the army and other places can do a really good job of suppressing racial animus because race doesn’t matter when you’re on a team. Right. OK, so that’s fine. That’s fine. So let’s take the example of a team. That’s perfectly acceptable to me, because teams can be of any size, essentially. Yeah. I would say that there’s a central what would I say? The team has a personality in a sense that’s fragmented and represented by each of the players on the team. So there’s a unity that the team consists of that’s represented in each of the players. And that’s what constitutes the the team element of it. OK, so so when we talk about personality, it’s hard to say exactly what we mean. We mean something like an animating spirit, a pattern of action, a pattern of perception, something like that. There’s no reason to assume that can’t be shared between people. And I think that’s the kind of seizure that you’re talking about when you see people collectively participate in something they regard as sacred. They’re all could be OK. That seems that seems reasonable. The question would be then, what what’s the gist of that central uniting principle? The reason I’m asking this in part, you’ll you’ll appreciate this, I think. There is a claim quite common at the moment that the central animating principle of Western culture is power. Oh, yeah. Yeah. OK, it’s a it’s a popular claim. Yeah. OK. What’s the right? What’s the appropriate counterclaim that there is no central animating spirit or that that’s not it? That I face this a lot. And I think the response is to say sometimes power matters. And there are those who believe that everything is sexuality and sometimes sexuality matters. And there are those who believe that everything is money. And sometimes money matters and sometimes self-esteem. People can sometimes pain, sometimes joy and sometimes jealousy. Right. Exactly. OK. So that’s that’s people’s first response to everything is power structures, power structures, power structures. You know, you kind of know what they think because it’s a it’s a. You might know how they act, too. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you if you if you think that anything, whether it be the Western tradition or or college is all about power, I mean, that’s just sad. Well, it’s also completely I’ve thought this through. And then I thought about all the people that I’ve admired in my life who were successful. And so those would be people that I’d like to imitate or at least I respect. And that seems to be a reflection of something like, you know, a low level of awe. They were admiration. They were driven by power. They were driven by competence and generosity. That’s right. That’s right. And there you go. And so this is actually one of the hallmarks of a of a religion is people are committed to something that’s obviously not true on its face. And the people are really committed to this religion, that everything is power, this sort of Michelle Foucault religion. They even interpret family life as being about power. You know, that my relationships with my kids is primarily about my power. I mean, that’s just bizarre. And marriage. Yeah, that’s right. Because I’m a man and my wife’s a woman. Therefore, I must be motivated to have power over my wife. And I must feel something in common with other men because we’re all men. We’re all trying to maintain the power structure. I mean, this is far wackier than saying there was this guy and he was killed and he came back to life three days later. I mean, you know, it’s this is just a matter of faith. And so the fact that it is intruded so deeply into the academy now, again, not in most departments, but in some of the departments that you and I both know. This is the religion. Everything’s about power. Yeah. Well, we don’t seem to have been able to put forward a very good counterclaim. But I think it’s as we talk about with Steve, the good counterclaim is something which you have to sort of reason through. And it’s about process more than any particular person. And we need equal treatment by the in front of the law. And we need all these things. And it’s not as inspiring. Yeah. But there’s another problem with it, too. It’s not like I don’t have sympathy for that viewpoint. And there’s nothing wrong with a reasoned argument. But look, whatever’s at the bottom of the woke movement is critical of the processes of reason themselves. Right. Everything is white supremacy. Well, everything is up for grabs, at least. So it’s a radical critique of enlightenment thinking. It’s also an attempt to identify enlightenment thinking specifically with Western European thinking, which I think is a great mistake. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t think that those it isn’t obvious to me that those merely rational responses are going to do the trick. No, in general, not. But something that I’ve begun to think a lot about is the importance of specifying the institution or the domain before you say anything else. And so we can talk about will a rational argument persuade people? And if we’re talking about like on planet Earth, you know, or just you know, out on the public square, not your odds are not very good. And so the trick to having a good society is one in which there are domains within which people have a set of professional norms or norms about how we do things. And so the norms in a college seminar class should be very different and much more generous and much more about building on each other’s arguments and can critiques than it is on Twitter. And part of what’s changed, part of why I keep saying the world is so different after 2012 than it was before 2009, is that social media knocked down all the walls between different domains. And now the norms of the norm, the norms in the norms within which a reason discussion among people who have basic respect for each other and are tied together, at least as fellow students or fellow jury members or whatever. When that goes away and everything is just the public square. Well, then, yeah, we’re not really able to have reasoned conversations anymore. So what do you think? So you attribute what’s happened since 2012 fundamentally to technological transformation, is that the case? Yes, there were a variety of trends that were building already, but those included technological changes like the emergence of cable TV in the 1980s. But between 2009, 2012, that was when we passed a kind of a tipping point or a phase change, I would say, in which everything got weird right after 2012. Do you think it has anything to do with lack of a shared vision for the future? Well, you know, a liberal democracy doesn’t need a shared vision. And we never really had a shared. Well, I shouldn’t say that there was an idea of what it was to be an American. There was and it wasn’t held by everybody. And obviously, for a long time, it excluded African-Americans and and. Yeah, and a fair bit of that was materialist progress, right? That the instantiation of the. Yeah, exactly. What? Right. That’s right. Once you once you don’t need somebody doing full time laundry and carrying water, whatever you material progress allows people to live as individuals. But let’s see. Yes, I think the phase change was when we were connected to each other in ways that bring out that that play on aspects of our psychology that are generally antisocial and that inhibited both our ability to connect to people authentically and our ability to find truth collectively. I think we’re worse at both of those. And that helps explain why the more connected a generation is, the more depressed it is. Gen Z is the most connected generation. The most depressed generation. They’re also the most lonely. The more connected you are, the lonelier you are because it’s not real connection. Is it also idiosyncratic in what way? My connection network and yours aren’t the same and my connection network and no one else’s are the same. That yes, you know what I mean, it’s so. Not overlapping. Yeah, yeah. So I think so. So I believe that we are ultra social creatures. We evolved in groups in a sense. We broke out of the hive in the 19th century, 20th century with prosperity. We could live alone. We. And so while that’s very good for certain things and it certainly brings it makes it easier to give everybody rights, but many of us yearn for groups. We are. I think we are at our best. We are at our happiest and we have well constituted groups. And if you think about the times I ask my MBA students, think about a time in your work life that was just the best. Like what was the best job, the best time in your work life? So that’s kind of why I asked about shared vision. It’s like I guess one question is, what was the best job? I guess one question is, what is it that unites a group? You know, what you can unite with someone else around a shared activity, which is usually directed to some sort of goal. Right. So so there’s there’s there’s an ideal there that that might be pulling you on. You certainly do that if you’re participating in a sports team or something like that. Like, do do we unite around a purpose rather than beliefs? So so here I drawn Mike Tomasello, who’s just a brilliant psychologist who studied child development and chimpanzee and chimpanzee development. And he said he shows are the great human innovation. I cover this in Chapter nine of the Righteous Mind is shared intentionality. So if you have two chimpanzees and and there’s like a log and there’s like a log and they could carry the log over to the wall and tilt it and climb out, they’re smart as individuals. They could do that. But if it takes to to carry it, they will never ever in a million years do it because they don’t they don’t have the ability to say we are doing this thing together. Right. Well, I think three kids do that. Yeah. We signal that with our eyes. Exactly. To a large degree. And they’re even evolved for that. You can we have very legible, visible white. So we can tell where people are pointing their eyes. Exactly. Part of that ability to inhabit the same spirit simultaneously that enables the kind of cooperation that you’re describing. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And Thomas all points that out, that chimpanzees, you can’t see where they’re looking because everything is brown. And so it’s not why do we look at other people’s eyes is why do we broadcast? Why do we give away this valuable information? It’s because it makes us a better partner for cooperation. Yes. It enables other people to see what we’re up to, too. That’s right. And we’re useful to them. They’re useful to us. So I think that and there’s also this thing from Tubian Cosmete’s about share. I think they had a catchy name for it, but it’s it’s like crises that you face together. You know, if you’re attacked by a neighboring group or if you fend off, you know, a lion, that act of like your life is in danger, but you and three others did it together. You’re now you’re really bonded. That’s how you get really close friendships. And that, I think, is part of the reason why Gen Z is so lonely. The rest of us until the 1980s or 90s, kids went out unsupervised and we all got into scrapes. And my best friends, we all got, you know, a couple of times we had to run away from the police. A couple of times we, you know, somebody got hurt. How are we going to get them back to their mom? You have you go through scrapes together. That’s what bonds you. I don’t think you need a shared belief. I don’t think you need a shared vision. I think you need shared activities where you are interdependent. You rely on each other. And that’s why the army works so well, or at least it didn’t through the Vietnam War, but they really got serious about this, about race issues in the 80s, I think it was at any rate. So I guess you and I just we disagree. I mean, I’m sure you are thinking of cases that I’m not thinking of where it’s the shared vision that matters. But as a social psychologist, I think the shared vision is not necessary. It’s really doing things together. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t. It’s not like I disagree with the idea of the necessity of doing things together. But I’m always fascinated by this idea of just because we’re so good at abstracting out the essence from things, you know, and so you said, for example, that maybe you catalyze a friendship in a crisis. Yes. And a crisis indicates what’s important when push comes to shove, so to speak. That’s right. Right. And so then you manifest what you self-sacrificing behavior in the face of danger or something like that. Well, I would say it’s not what’s important, it’s who’s important. It shows you who’s important, who’s on your team, right. But who’s important would be willing to do that. They put themselves at risk for you. Yeah. Something like that. So that’s self-sacrificing behavior. Yeah. And it seems reasonable. Yeah, it does. It does. And even in an office, my kids love the office and it’s about the dysfunctions of office life. And I did work in an office for two years in between undergrad and grad school. I was a computer programmer for the government. And we had a really bad boss. And I’m still bonded to my my coworkers. We suffered together. We intrigued and plotted together. We did things together and we were very diverse ethnically and somewhat politically. But we all went through this thing together and worked together. So back to the righteous mind, how did your work on, did your work on Disgust lead you in that direction? Yes, it did. It was the breakthrough because when I was a first year grad student beginning to study moral psychology, it was all about Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget. It was very rational. It was about how kids beliefs about justice and fairness change as they develop. And it was a little bit dry and dull. And it wasn’t until I took a cultural psychology class with Alan Fisk, who’s a brilliant cultural anthropologist and psychologist, and he had us read ethnographies, you know, full length books, and he was a great writer. You know, full length treatments of cultures from around the world. And it was there that I saw these patterns, these repeated patterns around menstruation, food, taboos, orders. Yeah, that’s right. There are. And so that’s what really showed me this. As I said, it’s like a Jungian view, like there’s something in our minds that is coming out all over the world, you know, culture can’t be just, you know, we’re not a blank slate. I wish Steve was still here. We’re not blank slates. Cultures can’t just teach you, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, like you can’t teach that to people. That’s the way we are in a family. But you can’t make a whole society believe that because there are constraints. And it was studying disgust, purity, pollution and then disgust with Paul Ross and who happened to be at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a graduate student. It was really studying disgust and sanctity and purity and religious practice around that, you know, why is the body so important in religious practice? Except in modern Protestantism. And so that’s what got me to look at this much more irrational stuff, to think about evolution in a certain way. And that led me to multilevel selection. So, yeah, if not for disgust, I probably would have just been somebody studying relatively dry aspects of moral psychology about reasoning and fairness. Right. That takes you down into the emotional and the instinctual. Exactly. That’s right. That’s right. Disgust is the yeah. And there’s a big debate in, you know, in moral psychology. There’s a very it’s a very active, exciting field. But there are people who say, well, no, it’s all about harm. Everything’s ultimately about harm and everything else is indirectly harm. The others say, no, no, it’s all about fairness. Everything is fairness. And I am a an anti parsimonist. That is, I do not believe in the pursuit of parsimony. I believe that the problem is, is the terms that that everything gets reduced to start to expand. What do you mean? Well, if you say everything is about harm, then you have to redefine harm so that it’s universal. Exactly. Exactly. So it does. It does seem to be a mugs game in some sense. And it enables you to have one answer for everything, which is really helpful. So I was reading Franz DeWaul recently and he’s studied disgust quite. I didn’t realize that disgust did manifest itself in other animals. So it’s controversial. There are there are some hints of it in some primates that I’ve heard of. But I don’t think any other animal shows contagion the way we do, but tell me if he has an example. Well, he thinks dogs show disgust to citrus fruits, which are poisonous to them. They wrinkle. Well, they’ll do it to the smell, too. Yeah, but it’s just his taste. Now, this is so Paul. Well, one of the things I got from Paul Rosen, who is one of the world’s experts on food and eating, the psychology of food and eating is, of course, animals evolved to seek out certain sense, sensory experiences that guide them to their food. So if you’re a koala bear that smells like eucalyptus, you’re done. But if you’re a dog, you’re involved to eat meat. And when you’re a kid, like you think, well, grapes are so delicious. I love grapes. Why don’t you like this grape? You won’t eat a grape. And so that’s just distaste. And so what I learned from working with Paul Rosen is distaste is very common. You’re reacting to the sensory properties of the food. So that’s not so interesting. What’s interesting is that something that elicits a negative reaction touches something else. Will you then avoid that something else? So he’s tracked that in chimps. Oh, contagion. Tell me how does he show contagion? Well, he tracked one chimp who found a dead rat. And used it to torture other chimps with. So she would place the dead rat, which was in rough shape, on another chimp, possibly sleeping, the chimp would wake up, be horrified and then rush off to clean. That’s really funny. Wow. Chimp practical joke. That is so funny because my college roommate and I did something kind of like that in college. He had a snake and he had dead rats in the room to feed the snake. And we actually did something very much like that. This is a riot. Now, does that show contagion that they needed to wash off? You know, maybe. Yeah. Well, he does. He has other other accounts in the book as well. Mama’s Last Hug, it’s called. Is that a book of his? I don’t know. Yes. Mama’s Last Hug is relatively recent one. Yeah. Well, I was quite influential in my thinking. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Well, and I’m so interested in your work on disgust. And so it was interesting to me because I thought it was a relatively human emotion, but he makes a pretty strong case. It is. But as with so much about chimps, you can say, do they have culture? Well, you know, there’s this behavior here that was observed once or ten times. You know, what you’re telling me now is the first case I’ve ever heard that looks like maybe it was so with so much about chimps, do they have it? Well, almost a little bit. And sometimes, you know, so, you know, there’s not bright lines, but there are some sort of somewhat bright. Well, I guess with disgust, you’d think that it was sufficiently. Embodied visceral so that it might have fairly pronounced equivalence in in species that are closely related to us. I do wonder about its relationship with conscientiousness, which seems to be more, yeah, a more specifically human trait. Perhaps maybe you see it in sled dogs. I don’t know. Yeah, no, I do think so. Maybe you can tell me about Freud’s anal triad, whether there’s any truth to that. But at least if you if you think that human personalities like the master dimension is sort of are you more set towards like approach, explore mode, or are you more set to finding threats and defend mode? And that’s a trait that varies. And people who are more set to defend mode are going to be more anxious, but also more disgust sensitive. There’s a small correlation with politics. They tend to be a little more conservative and conservatives certainly are more conscientious, especially orderly. They’re especially more orderly. And that seems to be more tightly associated with disgust sensitivity. Yeah, that’s right. As opposed to straight, say, straight neuroticism. Yeah, that’s right. What do you think Randy Thornhill’s work on on on parasite prevalence and conservatism, which seems to be logically associated, at least to some degree, with your work on disgust? Yeah, it is. I mean, I know the hypothesis. I think it makes a lot of sense. I don’t I’m not so cross. So basically the idea that cultures that evolved with high parasite loads, other people are much more dangerous. You’re much more careful about outsiders coming in. They bring disease. And so conservatives tend to be more, you know, actually a nice metaphor in the Brexit context. Are we drawbridge up people or are we drawbridge down? And the Brexiteers were more drawbridge up. You know, here’s our island and the more universalist, you know, Remainers were more drawbridge down. And over and over again, you see the progressive mindset is much more John Lennon. Imagine no borders, just everybody living in peace. And the conservative mindset. Might be the fundamental political difference. I thought this because, you know, the two traits that predict political beliefs seem to be openness. Yeah. Predicting liberalism and the kind of things that you’re talking about. Yeah. And and orderliness. And so if you put you think, why do those covary to predict political belief? And it seems to me to be something very much like what you just described with relationship to borders is, are you on the side of free flow? Because you see the advantages or are you afraid of that because of perhaps because of pathogen contagion? Yeah, that’s right. And so here’s a very useful word. It once you hear it, it just explains it really it improves things here. There’s been a debate for a while about whether conservatives are authoritarian, whether authoritarianism is exclusively the province of the right. A long search for left wing authoritarianism. I think there is such a thing. You know, you think so, too. Actually, right. You’ve produced some research on that. But I heard an interview with John Hibbing, who’s a political scientist, who’s done a lot of research on the sort of the physiology or brain basis or, you know, the psychology of politics. And he says the word we use shouldn’t be authoritarian. It’s not primarily authoritarian, it’s primarily security. People who are really focused on security, they want us to be safe. They see threats over the borders. If that’s if that’s the way your mind is more, then you will end up more attracted to parties right of center, whereas if you’re less concerned about security, then you go more left of center. And boy, is this playing out in New York City right now, because, you know, we had a horrible crime wave that went on for decades in this city. It ended in the 90s and it seems to be picking back up as of two or three months ago. I mean, it increased during the pandemic. But the last couple of months, my neighborhood’s gotten really much more dangerous, you know, more crimes. It’s sorry to hear that, because New York was so good for so long. Yeah, my wife and kids could walk around at, you know, at 11 o’clock at midnight. They could walk around, you know, millennials were taking the subway out to Brooklyn at four in the morning. And, you know, I hope that’ll come back. But in the last couple of months, it looks like it’s back to the 70s. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is just to say that in we’re having a mayor’s mayoral election, the primaries going on right now and election day is tomorrow. And back when it seemed like everything was great, we’re going to come out of this. You know, one set of candidates was was attractive. But now it’s, you know, oh, really, you said defund the police. No way. Like, no, we need the police. We actually really, really need the police. So there’s, you know, as soon as there’s a real threat, many people, not just conservatives, but many people suddenly say, wait a sec, security is really important. Do you think that this is particularly germane question to you? We tried to look for heightened levels of anxiety and conservatives in my lab for a long time. We never found them, not really. But but but it’s the disgust issue that so germane to me. It’s like when you say security, do you mean control of what’s contemptible and disgusting? Or do you mean what’s threatening? Those are not the same thing. Yeah, I think following him, I think it’s what’s threatening. No, because you’re right. The neuroticism, if anything, is more common on the left. Conservatives are happier by some measures, not by all. There are a variety of psychological traits that do seem to indicate greater psychological adjustment among conservatives. And including happiness. And so I would not write it. It’d be weird to say that conservatives are more anxious, but yet they do seem to be more threat sensitive. Would you agree with that? I don’t know. Like I wrote a whole book sort of theorizing that the purpose of belief was to bring anxiety under control and uncertainty. And there’s something to that. But disgust has has, you know, occupied more and more of my imagination with regards to political belief, partly because of your work, partly because of Randy Thornhill’s, partly because there is an association between orderliness and conservatism and orderliness and disgust sensitivity. And that’s it’s not associated with neuroticism, which is so strange, right? Because the negative emotions clump together. You’re right. You’d expect really it’s it’s a killer piece of evidence. If conservatives are more threat sensitive, they should show higher levels of neuroticism on some measures and they just don’t. And so you can you can see in lab situations, there are some stimuli they seem to overreact to. But it isn’t obvious that it’s associated with the canonical negative emotions. But disgust is a whole. And, you know, after I familiarized myself with your work, I read Hitler’s Table Talk, which is a collection. Yeah. What is that? It’s a collection of his spontaneous utterances over dinnertime. Collected by his secretaries across about four years. Oh, fascinating. Yes, it’s fascinating. And what’s really fascinating is how much of it’s about disgust. Oh, wow. God, it’s just unbelievable because his propaganda process cockroaches, rats, you bet. Well, it’s so much, you know, you may know this and you may not. That Zyklon was originally used as an insecticide in factories. They cleaned up the factories that the Nazis cleaned up the factories first. Then the mental hospitals, then they broadened out. And it was Zyklon B, I believe, to begin with, and then Zyklon A. And so there is a disgust story there that’s unbelievably strong. And the thing about things that are disgusting, if you’re afraid of them, you want to get away from them. Yeah. If they’re disgusting, you want to destroy them. Well, you want to withdraw from them. Yes. You want to withdraw. And you want, especially burning. Yeah. Yes, especially burning. It’s the most satisfying way to dispose of things. Because, yeah, it kills. Right. And it’s not like the Nazis were enamored of the symbolism of fire. Burning. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So I think maybe what we can say here is that let’s bring in openness to experience, because if we say that openness to experience is consistently the largest trade associated with politics, as far as I know. And so people are high on openness to experience, tend to be drawn to progressive left-wing politics. And that has a very clear negative relationship with disgust. That, I think, is the strongest relationship we’d ever Paul Ross and I ever found. Now, you would think that that would also have some relation to anxiety, because, as you said, the negative emotions all clumped together. But in this case, they don’t. So maybe maybe the neuroticism link is a red herring. Maybe what we should be focusing on is the openness to experience. So I’m assuming that Hitler was not very open to new experience. He did not seek out a great variety of foods and curious about it. It’s very complicated because he was extraordinarily interested in aesthetic issues. He had the floor plans of most major buildings memorized and he was planning to transform the centers of most of the cities that he conquered into artistic citadels. But remember this, he divided. That’s right. He divided art into acceptable and pathological. Right. So he was an artist with very conservative tastes in what was beautiful. So I think he was open and hyper orderly. Hyper orderly, because there’s other examples of his orderliness and discussed sensitivity. But are there other examples of his openness? Wait a second. So you’ve convinced me that he’s interested in aesthetics. But do you think he was open in a general way? Well, he wanted to go to art school. He tried to get in three times, tried to make a living as a watercolorist. Yeah. So look, I’m not trying to make a case that Hitler was an artistic genius. I’m not saying that at all. He was a very complicated person. But I think the real tilt for him was maybe even the contradiction between openness and extreme orderliness. He was also a worshiper of willpower, which is associated with orderliness. Right. So he could stand like this, would stand like this for hours at a time. He prided himself on that. And he bathed four times a day. He’s also concerned. He’s also very much concerned with what he ate. Yeah. You know, in an orderly sort of way. That’s right. Right. Contamination sensitivity. Exactly. And the way he saw Jews in German society is contaminating rats, cockroaches. Yeah, that is very common in genocides. It’s the same language in Rwanda. Pure blood all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And so there’s that purity element that you’ve made so much of as well. That’s just it’s just it’s an obsessive theme. And if you if you look at his table talk, you can see that because it’s spontaneous utterances, you know. And so I was looking for fear words, anxiety words. It’s like they’re rare. But disgust words, man, that’s just it’s just there all the time and disgust. It’s you know, you think about our society. We go out of our way to keep fearful things at bay. But we really go out of our way to keep disgusting things away. Yeah, that’s the hallmark of civilization and the civilizing process. Right. And when people travel in, you know, what used to be called third world countries, that was one of the striking things is just the degree to which dead bodies or death and excrement and other things are visible parts of life. And boy, have we done a good job of hiding them in. Yes, that’s that’s just not there at all at all. So, yeah, right. So we don’t even know how sensitive we are to disgust anymore because almost all the elicitors have been have been removed. That’s right. That’s right. So, OK, well, it’s five thirty over here. I have to head home for dinner, but it’s always a pleasure to talk with you, Jordan. I I was going to say, I never know what we’re going to talk about, but I always assume we’ll have something to do with politics, psychology and disgust. I appreciate the fact that you found my disgust work useful and I found your your writings about young and religion and certainly your what you’ve written and said about the current state of our universities to be incredibly useful, too. So thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me again. And good luck with your forthcoming book. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk again, like talk to you more about imitation and awe, because those are those are crucial. OK, crucially, you know, so let’s do this. Imitation, awe and psychedelics. That’s something that we talked about earlier. So some next time we get together, let’s talk about imitation, awe, psychedelic experiences and how they change people and how they, for me at least, opened me up to unmoralizing things, to to stepping outside of moral matrices and just trying to understand complex systems. Yeah, maybe it’d be a good idea to pull in one of the psychedelic researchers for that talk. Yes, that would be much better than just you and me talking about it. Yeah, let’s bring in. That’d be good. Yeah. All right. All right. Maybe next fall or next winter. Yeah. OK, OK. Really good talking to you and I always get to talk to you. And all that. Thank you. You too. Bye bye.