Enlightenment and the Righteous Mind | Steven Pinker & Jonathan Haidt | The JBP Podcast S4: E52

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 amis tversky and daniel 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 uh extreme poverty we can be uh uh unaware we could be out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news instead we base our view on data then not only do we see that many although not all things have uh gotten better not linearly not uh not without uh setbacks and reversals but but uh in general a lot better and it also uh paradoxically because as i've uh also cheaply put it uh progressives hate progress but the best possible case for progress that is for striving 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 [Music] hello everyone i'm very pleased today to have with me speaking dr stephen pinker and dr jonathan height dr pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition psycho-linguistics and social relations he grew up in montreal and earned his ba for mcgill and his phd from harvard currently john stone professor of psychology at harvard he's 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 two time pulitzer prize finalist a humanist of the year a recipient of nine honorary doctorates and one of foreign policy's 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 28 201 21 this year september 28th it's called rationality what it is why it seems scarce and why it matters dr jonathan height 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 height 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 luekenoff 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 2500 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 we haven't 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 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 uh 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 explain why it doesn't just explain why our politics is so messed up it also explains a lot of conflicts about economics and business and so uh i 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 just co-founded heterodox academy and then i got hijacked into uh a lot of uh well the cod leading 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 i've got to write it if i don't write it now i don't know when i ever will uh but it's basically about how to think about economics in a way that gets you out of the moralism um maybe a 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 uh 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 cowan has a quote somewhere in a ted talk he says we think in stories but as soon as you put a good evil story 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 over generalization 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 uh 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 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 and potentially turning into a characterological attack yeah that yeah that's that's a good way that's a good sounds like a good rule uh 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 uh even though it often doesn't persuade the other person but because we evolve for moral grandstanding uh 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 baker 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 by which i meant far too much moralization alluding to the fact that history's greatest bloodbaths were not caused by greedy vdk is feathering their own nest accumulating palaces and harems uh they were moralistic crusades yeah 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 uh they were not uh they were not motivated by agreed they were motivated by what in their own eyes was was uh morality which we call moralization it doesn't mean we should also all be amoral psychopaths there is such a thing as morality but moralization the psychology of the moral sense which john has done uh so much to illuminate can be a source of immorality judged objectively okay i'm gonna i'm gonna google cheeky paragraph steve pinker too much morality there we go so stephen in your book um 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 longberg for example matt ridley uh uh mary and 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 uh try to squirm out of the uh optimist pigeonhole because i'm not arguing for looking on the bright side 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 hey miss versky and daniel 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 uh since a lot of good things are either things that don't happen like a country uh at peace or a uh 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 uh extreme poverty we can be uh unaware we could be out to lunch about what's happening in the world if we base our view on the news instead we base our view on data then not only do we see that many although not all things have uh gotten better not linearly not uh not without uh setbacks and reversals but but uh in general a lot better and it also paradoxically because as i've uh also cheekily put it uh progressives hate progress but the best possible case for progress that is for striving for more progress in the future for being a true progressive uh 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 uh 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 we 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 you know 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 um uh genocidal regimes in 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 now in in in in christianity broadly speaking you could make the case from a psychological perspective that utopia is permanently forestalled into the future in in that 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 now 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 what any any thoughts about that no it's a strange question well we have ideas about heaven um that seem to be not universal but there are features of heaven that seem to occur 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 having which often seems so perfectly beautiful the idea of it's perfectly beautiful but you know it's got its weird political problems and these people like that just doesn't make any cognitive sense better to have it all be good and perfect and pure and hell be all you know perfectly terrible so i don't know it was motivating the early christians i have no insights into that but something that a way that i do psychology and actually uh jordan i know that you do too because when we first met you when i first met when i had a my first job interview at harvard in 1994 and you were the only person on the on the faculty then that i that i connected with but we both bonded over an interest in young and while i don't embrace the you know the um you know the sort of the um some of the more fanciful elements of of young the um but the idea of uh of archetypes the idea that there are thing images that occur to people around the world uh because they come out of our evolutionary past something about our minds readily imagines them because of some something was adapted long ago uh and so that's what got me into the study of disgust and purity pollution was when i started reading ethnographies and seeing that all these cultures that never had any communication many of them are idled in nations in the pacific or the or you know 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's 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 it i 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 know i wouldn't think they knew i 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 isn't doesn't find its proper place that in the in abstraction then you elevate other elements of of society to the same level and then that becomes dangerous well it depends on what you elevate uh if it's uh 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 and it's certainly better than some arbitrary stipulation from from uh some scripture or creed that you can't justify to people who don't believe it antecedentally the problem with utopia is i mean among the problems um and 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 a end times there's heaven on earth there are notions of utopia that are not so not necessarily not necessarily postponed uh indefinitely but the problem with utopia of course is that it ignores the the inherent trade-offs in the human condition such as that if you give you can't have uh 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 will lead to some bad outcomes you we're not all identical and therefore anything that uh carries out the vision of some of us is going to to be inhibicable 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 trade-off between equality of outcome and equality of uh opportunity or or rights and since we're not all clones that means that if you just allow people to achieve the most they can some people will achieve more than others and there is that trade-off if you don't want to have extremes of uh inequality uh added to the uh the inevitability that whatever your vision of utopia is going to be not everyone's going to agree with you and uh 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 things standing between the current world and world will be infinitely good forever then you're justified in doing anything possible there to to eliminate the dlt 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 uh but they're good arguments so yeah i'd like to go ahead if you don't mind jordan i'd like to um to take what steve just said which is so sensible it makes perfect sense yes we need a liberal democracy for all these reasons um 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 um i've spoken i get invited to speak at christian colleges and christian associations and podcasts sometimes because even though i'm a you know center center-left atheist jew um they 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 uh think religion at least in the united states religion on net is 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's 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 evolve for sacredness and gods and and and how gods have evolved culturally um 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 there they tend to be kind of nice and so uh so i would i would bring that perspective okay so yeah so i want to comment on that a bit i mean one of the things i've been struck by talking to lomberg and ridley and and marianne toopey 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 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 yeah so i have another if i can allude to another cheeky passage toward the end of enlightenment now i say well is do we need to have uh you know men in colored shirts saluting posters of john stuart mill and uh and and secular humanist preachers rolling back their eyes and pounding a copy of spinoza's ethics on the pulpit uh 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 human belief and values given i'm a pretty staunch advocate of the concept of human nature but the what fills that that god-shaped hole is uh 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 you know a guy who was nailed to a cross two thousand years ago died for your sins and and the before most of which was when adam and eve uh you know eating the the fruit of the 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 uh we also know that uh despite the prevalence of 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 portion of the uh population of western europe in the united states um millennials and and gen z's have some vague notion of you know spiritual but not religious but they're following their uh in droves away from specifically from formal relations but that makes them more vulnerable to these new political religions well indeed no i i i i 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 you know i'm a dirk hyman and so i think a good religion anything that's going to fit in the hole and by good i don't mean good for so 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 or 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 solution yes right exactly exactly you see that 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 i mean 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 re-emerging let's look let me give you an example okay 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 imag 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 okay snake has predator other person has 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 if don't report like well this side says this and this size 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 is particularly attractive to me in in christianity at least in some of the christians that i know um is that they really make a virtue of humility uh in a way that uh well jews don't at least american jews don't don't seem to um but um the idea that we are all flawed don't be so sure of yourself judge not list ye be judged um so i sometimes join a group of evangelical uh um preachers actually brought together by jonathan rauch uh another jewish atheist but you know with a bunch of interesting people like pete weiner david brooks uh uh and some actual yeah some actual ministers as well um but it uh i 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 yeah 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 are there in in broad form and importantly yeah that makes sense yes yeah you know the idea that that uh there's uh a struggle between our our better angels and our inner demons between good and evil within us uh 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 weren't raised in the credit in the christian tradition or who just just don't don't believe it or can't slide onto it can reject it but it's not that abstrusive notion it appears also in uh freud's contrast between the the uh it and the superego it appears in uh evolutionary psychology in terms of the particular drives and motives that served us well in uh in an arctic society uh you see in cartoons with the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other i i 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 they have happened to be a have to have been brought up in and in terms of the jewish notion of humility i i'm sorry but i have i have to tell a jewish joke which is that on the uh holiest day of the year yom kippur the rabbi and the cantor are standing in front of the the ark of the uh open ark with the torah scrolls the cantor falls to his knees and says lord i am nothing the rabbi uh seeing him uh false his knees says lord i have nothing in the back of the synagogue there's the the lowly janitor overcome with emotion he falls to his knees and says lord i am nothing the rabbi says the cantor look because he's nothing so that's humility within the jewish tradition right um when i was reading enlightenment now and i i was struck by this and i guess this is something that's always struck me is that there's a 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'm 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 it's a 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 no it is it is a challenge of how to engage people's uh how to get their their their their blood pumping their their adrenaline going uh you know it's a dangerous thing if it can be commandeered by by demagogues and by uh rabble rousers uh 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 uh the founding of the united nations was a source of great um uh uh hope immediate the united nations has its own pathologies but in its time even in things like uh there are uh there's a kind of pseudo-religion to some uh ted talks where you've got a techno optimist who proposes some uh way of dealing with with climate change with malaria with uh parasitic disease uh and in the room you can feel that kind of elevation that law uh i think we have to work toward not just engaging any old uh fervor but to figure out how we marry that fervor to the causes that generally deserve it i'm going to play this the skeptic here because my new theme that i'm thinking through is is unmoralize everything that moral moralism moral judgment um you know as i said it's just it 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 uh the civil rights movement women's rights movement gay liberation all the incredible rights movements over the last 50 or 60 years but that's in part because we look back at the ones that uh that that were successful and that were really deeply right about writing injustices and now when i look at social activism um on campus and among young people i think it um 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 um un unmoored moralism um 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 an attempt to come up with something that would work so you know that's blindness blindness isn't it i mean blindness blindness they're blind to what they're blind about yes exactly well you know you 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 john piaget's argument you know his final stage of cognitive development hardly anybody knows this but it was the messianic stage well i've never heard about that absolutely there's many things about piaget that people haven't heard about you know that his goal was to unite religion and science oh yes i mean 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 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 ourselves 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 very he was very careful to highlight their dramatic use of ritual and their 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 well i'm going to mediate between uh jordan what you've been saying with what uh children offered and i i do tend to agree with john i was trying to make some concessions toward the possibility that you could best energize people by somehow co-opting this uh this fervor but we but i think it's probably an open question how much can you engage people without the the the trappings of religion or pseudo-religion can you engender a problem-solving mindset as opposed to a struggle mindset that's right and you know before we write 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 they've got to bow down you know we have uh you know we did eliminate smallpox we've uh drastically reduced the uh uh amount of warfare partly because of you know john and yoko and peter paul and mary but also because of much more practical uh treaties and organizations uh we've drastically reduced extreme poverty not because of uh the teachings of the hebrew prophets or jesus but because of china and indonesia and india adopting capitalism to to tie into the theme of uh 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 and 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 uh these dangerous passions and treat more things as problems to be solved well my so my concern i agree with your your description of what came before uh but 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 modif how we mobilize to solve problems so just just to take one example um 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 uh but now that everyone is connected to everyone and and if things go at many times the speed uh i think you can have a groundswell for a reform of a system that gets pushed through within days or or weeks just by people with very little input from adults and that's why i think we see over and over again demands you know just speaking from the area i know best on campus you know demands that dozens and hundreds of schools year after year for things that make race relations and inclusion and diversity worse so um 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 uh because life after 2012 is just fundamentally different from life before 2009. well do you think go ahead stephen yeah although i mean i i i see that happening and there has been a change in intolerance and uh struggle as opposed to problem solving the last few years on the other hand the demands are being accepted by uh baby boomers by the deans and the provosts and if you rewire 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 hernstein and tom bouchard and many others were cancelled there were posters i have one from 1984 uh a talk for e.o wilson bring noise makers and now the student activists of uh when we were students are now the deans and the provosts who are happily ratifying these extreme demands you know at the same time and then we all know this from our students this is not a uniformly woke generation there are an awful awful lot of students who are uh intimidated into silence and they think i must be the only uh satan 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 uh just mature judgment but it isn't completely a cohort effect 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 uh 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 the people giving in to the demands are people from the previous generation who were the uh 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 um they're they they are they feel stuck they feel pressured they don't know what to do and now it's the same thing people leading non-profits especially progressive nonprofits or companies so it's not that young people are woke it's that the dynamics have changed so that they'll 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 to please um 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 uh 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 uh in 2009 you get uh 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 algorithmise all the feeds and so as it's more engaging this is the two or three years where uh at least adolescents i have data or data from national survey 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 on various platforms so do you think that's so are you characterizing that as a positive feedback loop essentially uh the light buttons with the algorithms yes exactly it's a feedback loop and it's also the most powerful uh not pavlovian it's uh just behaviorist behaviors conditioning mechanism ever opera thank you thanks i haven't taught psych 101 in 10 years um but you know if you think about it you know if you many people have seen that video of bf 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 um 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 did people think about it and so we have um uh so this is why so these are ideas that i developed with tobias rose stockwell we had an article in the atlantic on uh why everything's going hey 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 agrophobic 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's we don't know what these technologies are doing to us we don't have a clue we have noise and it's pretty much all bad um so yes we got 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 um and in some ways that's good because we it's things that we enjoy but the 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 yes 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 um 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 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 are not children and so we at least you know from watching bugs bunny you're at least exposed to opera and you're exposed to certain cultural themes and and you know even have a sense of the 1940s let's say um 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 you know in the after times let's say and you know after the social media world there's not much room for kids to learn anything about the 20th century or communism or nazism uh or great literature most so much input is jammed up with trivia ephemera and to extend that there's political content it's 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 uh that 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 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 uh 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 just once they get a little richer they'll want that but now it's clear that the founders were right that us that a 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 uh binding us together we had briefly a a a centripetal media system where we all got the same news so there we had the high point of journal 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 uh so jonathan roush 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 in his book on rationality so let me kick it over to steve steve you know what do you see do you see that things are changing 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 uh war decline after the blip from the syrian civil war which temporarily reversed the trend we've seen movements like the uh the legalization of gay marriage in the united states the uh restrictions and the application of the death penalty so there are a lot of these long-term movements that are are continuing and you also got to remember that in the 60s and 70s for one thing domestically there were weekly bombings and riots with police shooting a dozen rioters a night the the weathermen the black liberation armies liberation army i'm getting all of that oh yes things are things materially things are continuing to get better i give you all of that uh and uh but but and and if you listen back i mean i've been watching the uh apple tv series 1971 year the music changed everything oh cool highly recommend it it's a reminder of a lot of the political inanity of our generation and the our older brothers and sisters who were uh 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 it was a pretty uh ugly time and even in terms of it's certainly true that there is no um 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 or 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 juntas 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 uh ideal i agree that 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 the 1970s and there are some built-in advantages like people want to live there that's where people who vote with their feet and up we know from i mean john i know you you covered this in your book on happiness but uh people in liberal democracies are happier and and together with material affluence which of course liberal democracies are very good at uh delivering the second as i recall a contributor to happiness is a sense of freedom so people there is at least pushing in the direction of liberal democracy against uh agreed the tribalists and authoritarian and and backslid and um magical thinking uh there is people's desire for prosperity and freedom at least for the for themselves uh and pushing back against the kind of the the positive feedback loops the vortexes of misinformation and fake news and so on there is the fact that you know reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it that and and jonathan roush is clear in his book which just recently came out which i i admire as much as you do that um that there are some that because reality uh is still there there's always a a resource to uh 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 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 like 73 yeah 73. um it seems that there were terrible things going on in the world at that time that people were concerned about and they seemed 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 another start over population 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 and it was raging away in in vietnam among other places and so people were very uh 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 that seems to be the mediating factor between the position you staked out in this discussion stephen 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 no so i so i again i totally accept steve's 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 um i'm 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 uh 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 um i heard a discussion i think andrew sullivan said something like there was a you know a memo went around that we're going we need to make race part of every story um so if uh you know if the new york times has this this dual telos you know this you know that you know all the troll the truth that's 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 uh 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 uh 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 in the court system the legal system and we've done it in high quality journalism and uh and now the truth we need that truth and but we also need the truth that unites us right i mean what's the truth that unites us well i 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 we're 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 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 okay 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 we're we're you know we can't unite around something so you know if you think about when 9 11 happened within a week you know we pretty much there was common agreement about what had happened uh planes were sent by al-qaeda whenever we figured that out and there were conspiracy theories that it was in his inside job by israelis but those were fringe freak theories nobody really believed them um and you know we came in america came together and supported a response now of course we you know george w bush abused that and took us into a rock on false premises we came apart 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 you know we had the pandemic a year and a half ago and it could have been a way to bring us together to solve this massive problem that we all faced um but we quit in america at least we quickly split into crazy factions yeah well i should say i mean you know crazy conspiracies theories on the right the left wasn't conspiracy theories but the left was the woke problem where certain things you know um certain things couldn't be said and uh you know and especially the the you know 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 at a trump rally oh but black lives matter protest 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 i completely agree with john that's one of my favorite examples the other one of course being that the uh that if you discuss the possibility that sars co2 originated from a lab leak in wuhan that shows that you're a racist you're a racist right and so that was uh that that was uh censored and inhibited until it just burst for first 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 um i think that it was that much better in the past i mean one of my favorite quotes is that uh the 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 rinsberg came out a couple of weeks ago called the gray lady linked going over the history of the new york times coverage of world events which uh forget all the news that's fit to print they downplayed the holodomar 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 loaded dm 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 uh 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 uh to take on the optimist role too thoroughly because i agree with john a lot has gone wrong in the last uh uh a few years uh again the constant vulnerability of the institutions of liberal democracy and um uh and truth-seeking um but um where was i going with this the um the best explanation is a bad memory yes right um and the problem with an aphorism is that it makes you forget what the original point was but that was a good approach but it's a good aphorism well we were talking about the new york times and about the fact that it you know it's never been what it was and you you walked through that and and the phrase okay now here it is okay and what one 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 we may or may not succeed at every new medium opens up a kind of a wild west of apocrypha of a carnival of nonsense this happened with the uh the printing press the printing press and with the mass production of newspapers and pamphlets and radio there 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 uh 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 uh 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 that jonathan rauch and i independently made in our books that online media can actually implement a a regime of uh fact checking and truth seeking we see it 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 you know we all have to concede this is really really good better than the alternatives 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 uh pure correction under the um but not devolving into flame wars although it does happen in the wikipedia top pages but somehow they have they managed to land on a set of rules that that brought out a 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 non-profit uh and it actually brings people together for 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 is that's right it's it's one of the essential features for a species that is so committed to confirmation bias into finding whatever supports my side or what i've said publicly so yes wikipedia hit on uh it it used it found a way to harness viewpoint diversity to create a better product and so yes i think we should put jon stewart mill up on a pedestal and we should bow down to him and we should have a new religion we'll call it millionism or millenarianism 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 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 and does anybody study that oh yes there's a lot of research that is bad is stronger than good as a general principle there's a wonderful book by roy baumeister and john tierney and so bad spreads more than good um 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 uh while it serves that function it serves it about as badly as could be uh so um 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 5 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 i appreciate that and uh 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 to see you guys too bye so let 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 the conceptualization of religious instinct religious impulse something like that it's like how do you how do you view that and why is it that you've been asked to talk to uh gatherings of religious people for example yeah so uh so the story that i tell in the righteous mind um 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 uh 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 b it's the hive where the 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 uh drawing on on research on uh you know early human origins and especially the period around you know from like a million years ago to 200 000 years ago um it appears that we did live in groups that competed with other groups um for territory uh um over all sorts of things and that often wiped out or killed other groups and so i think there was some degree of 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 uh 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 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 just one way of marking yourself as not a terrorist is not a terrorist as to what flyer 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 okay so that might be part of a nativistic attempt to say look guys i'm definitely on your side i'm not trying to put it down yeah well okay but uh 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 um my point is that we evolved in this this dynamics of group versus group uh and so uh and here i follow david sloane wilson uh you know in saying um you know conflict within a you know conflict at any level um 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 um and allah um we evolved for you know little gods and sprites and and the the the god of this river and this tree uh and and we evolved to worship our ancestors and we evolved just this really intense spirituality uh 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 i i was so pleased that i could integrate two of my my heroes in the social sciences which are durkheim and darwin they actually fit together perfectly on the subject of multi-level selection and even on ideas of sacredness and 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 while you 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 okay well let me just develop that a little bit because you talked about what was sacred and it it seems to me that there's an association between what's sacred and what inspires awe does that seem reasonable yes absolutely yes okay do you think it's reasonable to presume that the instinct for awe is the same as the instinct for imitation for mimicry i i don't think they're the same no i don't think the same at all okay 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 okay well please well let me give you an example people can be possessed by a spirit at a football game and their teams are cooperating and competing in the way that you describe 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 okay so the teams organize themselves into hierarchies of talent etc 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 it 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 okay okay 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 okay so i disagree with that analysis because i'm i'm a dirk heimian 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 um 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 described it's um the pleasure any 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 crimean terms he uses those terms we can briefly enter the realm of the sacred and if you're gonna 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 even just an excellent window would you rather be part of the whole crowd that does the wave i mean think about the waves no i spontaneously figured out how they could become a super organism no no i'm not disagreeing at all and i 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 okay 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 here i draw from joe henrik and others uh their approach to cultural evolution joe's book uh you know why humans cooperate and the weirdest people in the world and um so uh hum 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 awe but then i think we can bring our accounts together by saying now then 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 and well yeah it actually it's always puzzling in judaism you know you dove and 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 um you you know you do what everyone else does and so uh that's to atone oh oh that one at one month atonement oh at one minute yes absolutely yes so let's go back to imitation so okay okay so look when children when the sun acts out the 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 sun by no means precisely duplicates those motions right what the sun does is observe the father across a wide variety of contexts extract out the gist and imitate the gist yeah okay so you made the claim that what we're imitating is the capacity to learn but i would modify that and say no we we're imitating the capacity to explore and there's a difference there while 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 of the sky uh 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 part no no it's a 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 while there's there's a narrative that drives that and that's the thing that's imitated and and um 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 wait uh so we certainly are an exploratory species and just as you know when i was a kid you know you you put a you get a mouse or a gerbil as a pet you put it into cage it's going to explore so you know mammals are very exploit 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 worshipped the eye horus eye and that's the attentive i 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 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 the whole sequence of gods competition between gods that was likely the abstracted result of competition between tribes and their own you know 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 arranged 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 that 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 like okay i can give you an idea i'll give you an example okay 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 okay so you see byzantine cathedrals the the dome is the sky okay the cathedral's across right the center of the cross is the central point of being okay you look up at the sky and there's a picture of christ as pantocrator as creator of the world okay what's the idea and he's in gold there's a halo the halo is like the sun and gold ism 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 something personified it has to be because we can't imitate it otherwise that's the problem with abstract ideals as as uh motivating they're not personified you know even when stephen talked about the civil rights movement he had to mention john f k and and martin luther king right he had to bring the personality into it yeah yeah 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 yeah okay so so okay i think we we we take we're taking a very different approach to religion uh i am a social functionalist i 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 um there's a saying attributed to robert zions a great social psychologist that um 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 uh but even then we 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 uh 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 read that i don't buy that argument i don't think it's weak yeah i don't know what to think about that particular argument well here okay 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 it would mean that i uh 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 see no tis you talked about ancestor worship okay 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 i would just say you're in it's not that you're imitating per se it's that you are moving as one or music as well as moving at one your image well you are from the piagetian perspective because you're matching your body to the rhythms right so you're you're so 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 this ability to match to match each other's movements uh and that is part of imitation and that does get us in sync uh 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 you know i'd like to see that validate i'm not very positive that's a finding that holds up but that makes a lot of sense to me so uh i think we're both focusing on different aspects of of the religious experience and i'm coming in as a social psychologist looking at 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 oh we evolved to be oh we evolved to be religious okay so that part of our nature okay so that's the first issue is okay so you think that's a reasonable proposition all right so then the question is what exactly does that signify so let me try running something else by you okay 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 it unites a culture something like that you reflect your father he reflected his father etc 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 i we have to have a shared personality to comprehend one another eo 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 um you know you'll be friendly forever especially if you do sort of speak each other's language you can communicate a little so again that's okay i'm not i'm not trying to localize it to a specific subculture okay okay well i just met that i just mean 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 don't put as much stock in but 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 um 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 okay so that's fine that's fine so let's take the example of a team that's that's perfectly acceptable to me because teams can be of any size essentially yeah i would say that there's a 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 okay 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 okay that seem 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's a claim quite common at the moment that the central animating principle of western culture is power oh yeah yeah okay it's a it's a popular claim yep okay right what's the appropriate counter claim that there is no central animating spirit or that that's not it that i face this a lot and um um 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 sometimes pain sometimes joy and like sometimes jealousy right exactly okay 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 uh yeah you might know how they act too yeah yeah so um you know if you if you if you think that anything whether it be the western tradition or or college is all about power um i mean that's just sad well it's also completely i 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 weren't driven by power that's right they were driven by competence and generosity that's right and there you go and so this is actually one of the hallmarks of a religion is um 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 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 you know 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 counter claim but i think it's as we're talking about with steve the good counter claim 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 you know we did all these things uh and it's not as inspiring oh 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 because everything is white supremacy well everything is up for grabs at least right 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 now 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 and can critiques um 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 reasoned 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 recent conversations anymore so what do you think so you attribute what's happened since 2012 fundamentally to to technological transformation is that 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 v 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 uh and obviously for a long time it excluded african americans and and then um yeah and a fair bit of that was materialist progress right that the instantiation of the yeah exactly right that's right once you once you don't need somebody doing full-time laundry and and carrying water whatever you yeah material progress allows people to live as individuals um but um let's see yes i i think the the phase change was um when we were connected to each other in ways that bring out that that play on aspects of our psychology that are generally anti-social 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 yes you know what i mean 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 you know 19th century 20th century with prosperity we could live alone we have individualism 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 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 world that's kind of why i asked about shared vision it's like i guess one question is what is it that unites a group you know what it 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 the sports team or something like that like do do we unite around a purpose rather than beliefs so so here i draw on mike tomasello who's just a brilliant psychologist who studied child development and chimpanzee and chimpanzee development and he said he shows our the he the great human innovation i cover this in chapter nine of the righteous mind is shared intentionality so if you have two chimpanzees and um 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 two 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 like two or three kids do that yeah we signal that with our eyes exactly to a large degree right and they're even involved for that you can we have very uh legible visible whites so we can tell where people are pointing their eyes exactly that's 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 ella 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 it's why do we broadcast why do we give away this valuable information it's because it makes us a better partner for cooperation you know yes it enables other people to see what we're up to too that's right and we're useful to them and they're useful to us um so i think that oh and there's also this thing from tubia and cosmetics about um i forget 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 a 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 um the rest of 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 times he had to run away from the police a couple 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 at least it didn't through the vietnam war but they really got serious about this about race issues in the 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 i don't it's not like i disagree with the idea of the necessity of doing things together i'm i'm always fascinated by this idea of gist because we're so good at abstracting out the essence from things you know and so you 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 something like that well i would say it's not what's important who's important it shows you who's important who's on your team right but then who's important would be willing to do that yeah they put themselves at risk for you yeah something like that so that's self-sacrificing behavior yeah yeah it does it does uh and you know even in an office you know my kids love the the office and it's about the dysfunctions of office life and i i did work in office for two years in between undergrad and grad school i was a computer programmer for the government uh and we had a really bad boss and though you know and i'm still bonded to my my co-workers we suffered together we you know intrigued and plotted together you know 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 um when i was a first year grad student beginning to study moral psychology it was all about lawrence colebrook and jean piaget and it was very rational and 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 treatments of cultures from around the world and and it was there that i saw these patterns these repeated patterns around menstruation food taboos um you know orders or yeah that's right there are um 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 uh his ability to reach according to 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 uh disgust at purity pollution and then discussed with paul rosen 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 be look at this much more irrational stuff to think about evolution in a certain way and that led me to multi-level selection so yeah if not for disgust i 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 disgusting yeah and there's a big debate in um you know in moral psychology um 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 and others say no no it's all about fairness everything is fairness uh and i am a an anti-parsimonist that is um i do not believe in the pursuit of parsimony i believe well 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 right exactly exactly exactly so it it does it does seem to be a a mug's game in some sense and it enables you to have one answer for everything which is really helpful yeah so um i was reading friends to wall recently and he's studied disgust quite in i didn't realize that disgust did manifest itself in other animals so clearly it's controversial there are there are some hints of it in some primates that i've heard of but it's i don't think any other animal shows contagion the way we do it tell me if he has an example well he thinks dogs show disgust to citrus fruits which are poisonous well they'll do it to the smell too yeah but it's just his taste no this is so paul one of the things i got from paul rosen who's 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 you know sensory experiences that guide them to their food so if you're a koala bear if it smells like eucalyptus you're done uh but if you're a dog um you revolve to eat meat and and you know when you're a kid like you think well grapes are so delicious i love grapes you know phyto why won't you why don't you like this grape you won't eat a grape um and so that's just his taste and so what rosin what i learned from working with paul rosin is this taste 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 well he tracked one chimp who found a dead rat and used it to torture other chimps with okay and 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 practical joke that is so funny because my 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 uh other accounts where is this last mama's last hug it's called is that his is that a book of his i don't know yes yes mama's last talk it's a relatively recent one yeah yeah yeah well i was wondering it's very influential in my thinking yeah i love to also yeah me too well and 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 that is more but 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 that 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 right yeah well i guess with disgust you'd think that it was sufficiently uh 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 important yeah or more specifically human trait perhaps maybe you see it in sled dogs i don't know yeah no i do think uh so you know maybe you can tell me about freud's anal triad where there's any truth to that but at least if you if 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 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 uh there's you know there's a small correlation with politics they tend to be a little more conservative um and conservatives certainly are more conscientious um especially orderly they're especially more orderly and that seems to be more tightly associated with disgust sensitivity that's right as as opposed to say straight neuroticism yeah that's right what do you think randy thornhill's work on on on parasite prevalence and conservatism which seems yeah to be logically associated at least to some degree with your work on disgust yeah it is i mean i know the the hypothesis i think it makes a lot of sense i i don't i'm not so across that so basically the idea that uh cultures that evolve with high parasite loads other people are much more dangerous you're much more uh uh you know careful about outsiders coming in they bring disease and so conservatives tend to be more um you know actually a nice metaphor in the brexit context are we drawbridge up people or are we drawbridged down and the brexiters were more drawbridged up you know here you know here's our our island and the more universalist you know uh remainers we're more garbage down and over and over again you see uh the you know the progressive mindset is much more john lennon imagine no borders just everybody living in peace uh and the conservatives might be the fundamental political difference i 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 co-vary 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 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 exclusive the promise of the right a long search for left-wing authoritarianism i think there is such a thing you you know you think so too actually right you've produced some research on that but i i heard an interview with john hibbing who's a political scientifical scientist who's done a lot of research on the sort of the physiology or brain basis or uh you know uh the psychology of politics and he says the word we use shouldn't be authoritarian it's not primarily authoritarian it's primarily securitarian 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 at 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 months my neighborhood's gotten really much more dangerous um uh you know more crimes new york was so good for so long yeah my wife and kids could walk around it 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 uh 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 the reason i bring it up is just to say that in we're having a mayor's a mayoral election the primary's 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 uh 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 many people suddenly say wait a sec security is really important and do you think that that this is particularly german 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 right but yeah but it's the disgust issue that's 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 i think it's what's threatening now 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 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 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 in my imagination with regards to political belief partly because of your work um partly because of randy thornhill's uh partly because there is an association between orderliness and conservativism 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 so you'd expect that really 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 could 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 yeah 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 dinner time 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 well it's so much disgusting you may know this and you may not that zyklon was originally used as an insecticide in factories they cleaned up the factories the the nazis cleaned up the factories first then the mental hospitals then they broadened out and it was cyclone b i believe to begin with and then cyclone a and so there's 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 yeah you want to withdraw from them yes yes you want to withdraw and you want especially burning yeah yes especially the most satisfying way to dispose of things so that yeah it kills right so it's not like the nazis weren't enamored of of the symbolism of fire 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 to be drawn to progressive or left-wing politics and that has a very clear negative relationship with disgust that i think is the strongest relationship we'd ever paul rosen ever found now you would think that that would also have some relation to anxiety because as you said the negative emotions all clump 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 a new experience that 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 but remember that he divided that's right he divided art into acceptable and and pathological right so he was an artist with very conservative tastes in what was beautiful yeah so i think he was open and hyper-orderly hyper-orderly because he there's other examples of his orderliness and disgust sensitivity but are there other examples four times a day wait a second so you 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 yeah so look i'm not trying to make a case that hitler was an artistic genius not i'm not saying that at all he was a very complicated person but i think the real tilt for him was was maybe maybe even the contradiction between openness and extreme orderliness like 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 and 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 contamination sensitivity exactly and the way he saw jews in german society is contaminating rats cockroaches yeah that is very common in genocide that'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 a 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 fascinating 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 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 hiding them in uh 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 okay well it's 5 30 over here i have to head home for dinner uh but it's always a pleasure to talk with you jordan i uh i was going to say i never know we're going to talk about but i always assume it'll have something with politics psychology and disgust i appreciate the fact that you found my disgust work and i uh useful and i found your your writings about young and religion uh and certainly your what you've written and said about the current state of our universities uh to be incredibly useful too so uh well 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 to talk to you more about imitation and awe because those are those are crucial okay crucial you know what so let's do this imitation awe and psychedelics that's something that we we talked about earlier uh so some you know next time we get together uh let's talk about uh 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 perfect yes that would be much better than just you and me talking about it yeah yeah yeah that'd be good yeah all right all right okay maybe next fall or next winter yeah okay okay really good talking to you and glad you're talking about all that thank you you too bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 693,477

Keywords: enlightenment, peterson pinker haidt, enlightenment thinkers, jordan peterson enlightenment, steven pinker, jonathan haidt, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, the coddling of the american mind, steevn pinker jonathan haidt, Jonathan haidt jordan peterson

Id: 4tAQM5uU8uk

Length: 125min 50sec (7550 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021