How Anti-Racism Is Hurting Black America | John McWhorter | EP 241

i was raised by a mother who was a teacher of social work in the 1970s who actually taught a course called racism 101. my mother taught me what is today the woke line on how race works and the things that she taught me were correct and i have to this day never voted republican i am a democrat i am a liberal i always say i am a black liberal of about 1960. but i found as i came of age that as i analyzed the socio-political things happening around me that concerned race that i didn't agree with what was supposed to be the default kinds of assumptions and i found that my assumptions which i think would have you know endeared me thoroughly to the naacp in 1960 were considered repulsive inappropriate naive or conservative [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today to have with me professor dr john mcwhorter who teaches linguistics american studies and music history at columbia university is contributing editor at the atlantic magazine and hosts the language podca cast lexicon valley he's the author of over 20 books that's a lot of books some on language and some on race most recently the best selling nine nasty words which was released in early 2021 and because one book a year isn't enough he's coming out with a new one called woke racism how a new religion is betraying black america that should cause a lot of trouble that's out october 26th he has produced five courses on language for the great courses series and appears regularly with glenn lowry in a podcast about race issues the glenn show i first encountered dr mcwhorter at an aspen ideas festival gathering in 2018 was being interviewed with barry weiss and afterwards he asked me a rather difficult question i'm very pleased to have you coming to agree to talk to me today and i'm very much looking forward to our conversation me too jordan so i'm going to start by revealing my ignorance uh what i don't know about linguistics could fill a lot more books than you've written even though you've written many and so i'm curious about why why if you could provide the watchers and listeners with a description of the field and its relevance and and also perhaps why you got interested in it attracted by it's enough to devote your life to it linguistics is a cover term for an awful lot of perspectives but it's not about translation and it's not about learning how to speak languages it's about analyzing language as a scientific object and a lot of it is a lot like biology and so we analyze how language changes what are the physiological processes that allow us to produce language and allow us to understand it how is it that children learn language there's a certain magic that anybody can perceive and the way it happens with so little explicit tutelage linguists study that and there are all sorts of other applications there is linguistics and how to teach a computer to understand and even produce language there is language and the social sphere language as part of a culture's anthropology what probably would surprise many people for very understandable reasons is that what i just mentioned is not my main focus i can talk about those things on tv so to speak because the general public is very interested in those things but i'm actually a language change language contact nerd what interests me is why a language is different now than it was 500 years ago and what happens when languages come together and create new languages and how that process operates but when you do linguistics in the media you're expected to be kind of chief cook and bottle washer and a lot of what is discussed in the media bilinguals is what we call sociolinguistics which is great stuff they're people who really specialize in it i'm just a popularizer of that particular subfield but that's a quick cook's tour of what linguistics is and what in the world i'm doing in it and so what are your thoughts on that remarkable facility of children to learn language i read i think it was russian psychologist vygotsky made a claim he he had this hypothesis he called uh zone of proximal development which is i suppose the psychological place you are when you're learning something new and are engrossed by it something like the idea of flow and vygotsky said that adults um naturally speak to their children at a comprehension level that slightly exceeds their current grasp they seem to do that automatically even though that's an unbelievably complex thing to do and that drags children along you know to further the development of their language this seems deep and instinctual and so and what are your thoughts on on propositions like chomsky's that there's something like a a biological mechanism a specialized biological mechanism that underlies our ability to to learn language and to produce it is is that also under your purview um i wouldn't call it under my purview but i find it very interesting to watch kind of like you rubber neck at a car accident the idea that there is a universal grammar that we're born with and that underlies all languages is utterly fascinating only a true genius such as chomsky could have come up with it but the odd thing is that when you actually try to find what these universal grammar specifications are they could plausibly be encoded in our genes and be subject to natural selection frankly since the 1960s i think most people who practice that way of looking at things would be hard put to tell those who aren't in the club what has been discovered what we know now that we didn't know then what would be useful for people in other fields to know i find it to be a subfield of true geniuses treading water and a lot of them would not want to hear that and they're going to say that i don't know enough about it to say it but you know frankly i think i do because i pay a lot more attention to what they do than many people might think and i'm always wishing that more would come out of it than does and so i don't think it's that there is a grammar tree of some sort even if encoded in some abstract way that people are born with the evidence of that wonderful notion simply hasn't been borne out but it's obvious that there is some sort of genetic specification for the acquisition of and the use of language because if there weren't one we wouldn't be the only species who do it there's clearly something but i hate to say whatever it is is much less interesting than there being this very intricate and suspiciously computer science like universal grammar in our brains now vygotsky is always very interesting and what he's getting at is that humans learn to talk when people around them are chattering and chattering away in such a way that for example an adult learner of the language finds absolutely confounding you just listen to this stream of things going by even if you've been carefully instructed in the language it's that grand nexus of frustration and so certainly acquisition is not teaching children word by word by word but acquisition is also not children filling out some sort of sentence parsing grammar that they were born with it's so it's something that's much less precise than that nevertheless what's amazing is how universally it works you know all cognitively normal human beings learn to speak fluidly fluently idiomatically and without effort obviously that's programmed in some way well you see one of the things that's quite remarkable if you look at people who are quite intellectually impaired so people who suffer from down syndrome for example they also pick up language extraordinarily well and that's very remarkable so it's really something there are autistic kids have trouble with language and autism especially in its more profound forms is an extremely serious neurological condition but it's really is remarkable that something as cognitively demanding as language and specialized to human beings as it is is is so deeply embedded in us that even intellectual impairment doesn't in many cases doesn't interfere with its acquisitions yeah it's amazing it's clearly localized in certain ways and chomskyans have talked about a language organ and i don't think they necessarily mean that it's in any one place but it's clear that there are certain parts of the brain where language is generated that where language ends up even if those parts of the brain didn't evolve for that purpose and yeah they can be doing their job even if the person is quite impaired cognitively which shows that language is a thing in some way the question is exactly what that thing is i think linguists are getting closer to that now than they ever have because we're learning more i wonder i have another scientific question i guess is essentially is one of the psychologists that i had the good fortune to know at harvard whose name i unfortunately forget was a social psychologist very interested in the idea of basic level categorization which was a concept i hadn't come across and one of the things he told me and had worked on was the notion that objects in the world nameable objects in the world pop out at us at a certain level of resolution so for example a child will learn the very short word cat which is a pointer to an individual animal rather than the more generic species level what would you say perception and i wonder if the grammar of language in some sense is that that chomsky was searching for is some sense a secondary consequence of something more like a perceptual grammar because you know one of the things ai researchers have uh been confounded by since the early 60s is the fact that the world is very very difficult to perceive much more difficult to perceive than we thought and yet it arrays itself in front of us in all of these nameable and graspable objects and and the and and and so maybe the grammar is is embedded the linguistic grammar is embedded in the act of perception in some sense and then there's a linguistic scaffold on top of that i don't know if that's a you know an absurd idea but of course there is labeling for one thing just the fact that after a while a child learns that cat is not just the cat in the house but has this concept of cat to which you apply the label cat that's something that human language does to an extent that's unprecedented anywhere in the animal kingdom there's a quantum leap but then what you're saying seems to be true if my money were on it i would say that one universal perceptual specification that there might actually be genetically set in our brains is a difference between roughly nouns verbs and qualities what we call adjectives and so there's some things that are more likely to be labeled by a language as nouns like a cat there's not going to be a language that has a verb that is to be like a cat or you know to per etc it's going to be a cat and there's certain things that are more likely to be encoded as actions and there's certain things that are more likely to be encoded as qualities such as colors those three things are the bedrocks now once you get to prepositions and adverbs and prefixes versus suffixes all of that is up for grabs those things tend to be epiphenomenal upon the very basics but yes a universal grammar probably does entail i think all linguists think there's a difference between nouns and verbs some very few languages seem to contravene that they're the exceptions to prove the rule and then there's also qualities and then beyond that there are many different schools of thought and you think that's fundamentally a separation be between something like things and actions yeah yeah that seems to be one of the very basic things right down to certain brain structures that seem to be sensitive to it there's a difference between an action and a thing and the brain seems to be ready for that that might have something to do with what we might call a you a ug a universal grammar so now yeah i read and it was on wikipedia so that's another indication of my ignorance that you're also known yeah well fair enough you know if you need to get informed about something quick quick that's a great source yes definitely and and and isn't that fantastic for all of us that you're also known as a critic of the superior warf hypothesis which is really not their hypothesis at all but it has come to be known by their names nonetheless and that hypothesis correct me if i'm wrong is in its strong form at least the notion that language structures thought to such a degree that speakers of different languages have qualitatively different thoughts in some sense and that isn't something that sits particularly well for you and i think there are also some political and practical implications of that that belief and also the criticism of it is is any of that off base or no that's quite on base um the idea that the language that you speak gives you a certain pair of glasses that you see the world through is very very attractive i remember learning it when i was an undergraduate about the hopi native americans and it's something that you want to be true but the evidence just doesn't support it if you look at it in terms of lots of languages and what the implications of this would be and so certainly language does influence thought in certain ways it's been shown for example in in russian it's hard for us to even imagine this unless we're russian there's no word for blue they have a word for dark blue they have a word for light blue there is no word for just blue and it turns out that if you subject them to a highly artificial experiment you can show that russians do have a glimmer more sensitivity to the difference between dark and light blue than either you or i do and the only reason for that would have to be the language it's not something about russian culture and the color blue there are many things like that that are fascinating themselves but the way it's shared with the public makes it seem as if you learn italian you're seeing the world in an italian way because of the way the grammar works because of the way the vocabulary um chops up the world and the problem with that is that there are many languages that are very very busy that mark every little jot and tittle of existence and they tend to be spoken by small indigenous groups it's very easy to see those small indigenous groups and to say look at how sophisticated their language is they're picking up on every little sparkle of experience in a way that say english which is a relatively telegraphic language compared to those doesn't but the problem is then you have to look at languages like mandarin chinese which is much more telegraphic than english in many ways if you apply the grand old media warfian perspective to a language like mandarin chinese the chinese end up looking kind of dim because the language marks so little nobody wants it to go that way there was one unfortunate psychologist who actually tried to go that way quite innocently and is still being burned in effigy today and he wrote the article during the reagan administration because the truth is that if your language doesn't have a whole lot in it if your language has a whole lot in it or somewhere in between the evidence is that all human beings think in basically the same way except for these tiny shades of difference that a psychology experiment can breeze out but that's not life itself and so i think that people end up using warfianism as a way to be a westerner who shows that they understand that non-westerners are cognitively sophisticated which is great but the problem is the same thing ends up insulting half of the world's people okay so you touched on the political ramifications of the hypothesis well it seems in some sense a naive biologically naive hypothesis because i mean we we've only been speaking evolutionarily speaking for perhaps a couple of million years which is a long time but it's not that long given our 60 million year mammalian heritage let's say and and all and everything that came before that upon which our perceptual capabilities have been predicated and so the idea that language could affect something as basic let's say as color perception seems to me to be on the face of it quite observed i mean i'm pretty convinced by the arguments for example that our capacity to distinguish between green and red is a consequence of our ancestry as fruit eating primates essentially yeah yes exactly and you can't mess around with something that deep by painting a surface of linguistic ability over the top of it at least that's how it seems to me yeah i think that's correct and we all face in many ways regardless of where we are the same sorts of problems we have to get along with others we have to eat we have to uh uh quell our territory let's say and so there's a lot more that unites us perceptually and cognitively than there is that divides us there is and if you really look at different languages you see that you have to celebrate what unites us rather than what divides us on the pain of being really anti-scientific there are languages of new guinea for example where there doesn't happen to be a difference between eating drinking and smoking in terms of the language they have a word that we would translate roughly as ingest and they use it for all those things based on the warfian analysis they're not as sensitive to the difference between eating and drinking and smoking something as we are and so you end up implying that they're kind of coarse or that they're kind of crude and if you look at the group themselves they are as interested in food and varieties of foods and ways of cooking as we are you find that sort of thing over and over so i wrote the language hoax because it really started to stick in my crawl that a lot of people end up believing this media kind of morphianism as opposed to academic psychological warfare ism which is you know irrefutably true and i was i was bemused i'm glad that book got around more than i expected and it seems to now be just contributing a con side to an argument there used to be only pro ones of for the general public so we'll see how it all pans out so now when you came to study linguistics you are also extremely interested in something else you teach american studies you also teach music what else what element of music um i teach columbia has its core curriculum where every student has to take certain courses in the kind of great books tradition there's a music course for that everybody goes through one semester of the masterpieces of western music so what it really is is good old-school quote-unquote great music clapping for credit it teaches you how to appreciate complex music and the course as you might imagine is undergoing some changes in recent years but it basically takes you from gregorian chants through roughly philip glass and many of us would add jazz at the end so i had been doing that yeah are you interested in the musical element of language because it carries a lot of the emotional weight right so there's this there's the just the linguistic end if a semantic end let's say and you know perfectly well that you can structure the same sentence with two different intonations and mean exactly the opposite you do that when you're being ironic and so was was your love of music does that uh what would you say color your your linguistic theorizing in any sense or is that a separate endeavor no the the music loving me is a different person and to the extent that there is music as you're putting it in language that has not happened to be my area the best person on that is ray jackendoff who is somebody who actually has very good proposals against the chomsky idea too but you know we should talk to him i know about him i should talk to him very important you see the sculpture behind me this thing here yes yeah i made that 30 years ago it's called the meaning of music and it was the consequence of about a year's meditation on what it was that music was doing to us and why we were so attracted it's such a remarkable phenomenon i have a weird thing yeah it is a weird it's a very weird thing and i'll just run my initial hypothesis by you and so i music is often regarded as a non-representational art form i had a great journalist up to my house this week rex murphy and he said to me this was a quote and i don't remember where he derived it from that all art aspires to the condition of music i've heard which is a lovely phrase and so what when i started to think about music i was thinking about it because it was essentially it was a engaging experience that was immune from rational criticism not really so it had this intrinsic meaning that could not be subverted by criticism and so it struck me as something extraordinarily powerful i started to understand at that time that the world in in a really deep sense is made out of nested patterns and those patterns we perceive as objects and actions but but what they are are patterns in space and time and that music is actually the most representative form of of art because it represents the harmonious interplay of patterns and then we pattern ourselves to the music and and find that what would you say existentially engaging in a very profound sense anyways that's my music theory oh with it without a doubt and the easy version of that is a good beat because a good beat implies in a primal sense a certain predictability and therefore a certain truth i think you can see in a lot of people a sense that a good beat in the way you move your body to it equals a kind of truth because of the consistency and look how it unites us yeah and it brings people together classical music is harder because it's longer lined and so a lot of teaching people to appreciate classical music is to teach them how to hear it as something other than just this endless desolatory string of whatever there's pattern in it too and you don't really appreciate it unless you just learn how to breathe and take in the longer pattern yeah so when you when you listen to a great classical piece say a bach concerto or something like that how do you have to listen to it multiple times before you understand it definitely yes my rule is you you don't really know it until you've heard it about seven times if it's challenging music yeah yeah okay okay so i didn't know if that was my i i'm sure there are some musical super geniuses who don't need that length of exposure to get it but i don't get it well maybe two or three with some people but to me i want to drink it in you know you know i'd sit with headphones and a cd and that's becoming very old-fashioned but that's the only way that i can really do it yeah it's amazing too asa how you expose yourself to continually to to that pattern and then you need a certain degree of familiarity with it so it still retains some novelty and then you really fall in love with it and then if you listen to it a tremendous number of times in some sense you tend to exhaust it although the greater the piece of music in in my experience and maybe this is a marker for depth and quality and music the greater the piece of music the longer it takes to exhaust it yeah and if it's a really great piece of music it's never exhausted in my experience but yes that's true if it's an okay piece of music on the level of say a hot dog you'll need 20 21 and then you've kind of gotten past that and you look 20 years later and you realize wow that fell out of the rotation and you sort of realize why as a parent as opposed to the things that never fall out of the rotation because it sounds so corny but you're always finding something different or whatever you initially found the feeling is such a kick it's such a mind blow that you want it over and over it becomes church there's almost a religious story there's yes there is definitely that and we could talk about that more too one of the things i also find absolutely staggering about music is how it can have that long lasting and gripping form in such an endless variety of genres and how that greatness and depth can manifest itself in each of those genres regardless of what the genre is and something that's very difficult to understand something as simple often and say as country and western music something like hank williams which is very straightforward in some ways still to me has that quality of inexhaustibility and it's so yeah what what amazes me and if i if i were more profound about these things or more interested in bringing different parts of myself together i would study it it's harmony because melody is one thing you know melody is a lullaby any human being is given that rhythm especially consistent rhythm i'm sure that we are genetically programmed by accident to appreciate that harmony is a funny thing and i think that people who for one reason or another either training or temperament or both feel harmony and get harmony think that all human beings hear harmony the way they do no it's a very odd kind of ear and i find myself wondering what is it about major and minor and then everything else and the fact that if you're a music listener you you associate those things with certain feelings you often find that other people don't have the same feelings about the ones that you do but yeah it's a weird thing this thing called music you associate a certain combination of notes with nostalgia for me the flatted cysts means it reminds me of the past why very interesting things why would it remind you of anything when it's something that didn't exist when homo sapiens emerged fascinating stuff i had a master's student when i taught at harvard who did her thesis on the meaning of music from a biological perspective and one of the things she came across and i don't remember whose thoughts these were was that deep bass notes remind us of large animals and high notes remind us of small animals this is obviously a part a partial explanation right obviously and that more major tones are more maternal and comforting and minor tones are more discordant and reminiscent of emotional upset something so that feels right exactly it's so there's and and it that ties in in part into the emotional aspect of language itself and and all those things that we pick up and but yes but then the question is you know we quote unquote europeans i know it's weird for me to say that but i think people understand we hear major and minor and low and high that way i wonder if someone an indigenous person who had never heard music like that before let's go to irian jaya it's not called that anymore but the western half somebody from there i wonder if they would hear it that way and i can make a guess the low notes being associated with the elephant and the high notes being associated with the hummingbird that's probably universal because that's true about language oh ah is big e is small that's that's true however the other parts i wonder if all of that is just arbitrary european stuff that we pick up you know from starting from listening to mother goose songs and then it going on i'm sure this has been studied and i have not nosed into what those people were looking at yes probably someone knows this and we're just ignorant about it but so that so so that's that's all fascinating american studies now you also were educated in american studies and you teach american studies so so a very wide range of teaching interests and so tell me about american studies and what you're teaching and how you got captivated by it well you know honestly american studies to me was a backdoor thing that i became passingly interested in in the 80s after i got my ba because i thought of it as a way of studying in a systematic way american popular culture of the late 19th through late 20th centuries which obsesses me to this day i'm a huge fan of the movies the radio shows the comic strips the cartoons the music i you know i could get along living in 1936 hopefully you know white but living in 1936 and knowing everything that was going on better than i think many people could just because i enjoy it's not that i think 1936 was better but i just like that stuff and if you do american studies you get to read books by historians and philosophers and film scholars about those things i got a master's degree in it at nyu at a time when the program in american studies for most of the people in it was kind of a night school and the truth is i sense where you might very understandably going which is that i have the masters in american studies and that informs why i'm a media commentator about race issues these days but actually no the american studies degree i wrote a master's thesis on scott joplin's opera treatment and then left that behind and got into linguistics which had no relationship to any of that at all linguistics i found was where i needed to live as opposed to american studies where i got to read an awful lot of great books and i don't regret it i really enjoyed it but it was really just a passing phase when i was in my my early 20s yeah i did i did wonder about that that relationship and thought that there might be some connection what is it about the mid-30s that fascinates you so much it first looked good and it was it was a terrible classist racist sexist time everybody's smoking cigarettes it's not that i think that it was somehow better but if you think about it the 1930s the fashions the people looked good their hair looked good the cars looked good the music hit a really sweet spot in terms of how a swing band sounded or even before that an early jazz band sounded and then there was an awful lot of great i love literature the thirties jazz it's the third is great great era the 40s i kind of lose it but the 30s was just great feeling i just love to walk around in it for seven days and then come back so all right let me ask you some more questions so as you developed your career as an early professor you stopped being um an assistant professor and you were at sorry it's just escaped my mind you where were you first as a professor cornell or no and then you you went to the manhattan institute a conservative think tank i did yeah okay so okay so obviously that requires some explanation and so one of the things i kind of wonder about maybe is maybe you could shed some light on is what what attracted you to conservatism to the degree that you were attracted and what is conservatism now if i've been trying to puzzle this out psychologically i'm not thinking about it so much politically because you know i think there's room for for liberal thought and for conservative thought and that the dialogue between those two is absolutely necessary but but what was it about conservatism that attracted you because it's not it's not an obvious choice no no it was really a matter of an eccentricity about the way race has been discussed in this country in the mainstream for a very long time i was raised by a mother who was a teacher of social work in the 1970s who actually taught a course called racism 101. my mother taught me what is today the woke line on how race works and the things that she taught me were correct and i have to this day never voted republican i am a democrat i am a liberal i always say i am a black liberal of about 1960. but i found as i came of age that as i analyzed the socio-political things happening around me that concerned race that i didn't agree with what was supposed to be the default kinds of assumptions and i found that my assumptions which i think would have you know endeared me thoroughly to the naacp in 1960 were considered repulsive inappropriate naive or conservative and so the manhattan institute i didn't choose it um a lot of people think that i'm much more self-directed than i am a think tank taps you i barely know what a think tank was but they were doing work on race in new york city and beyond that i agreed with and what they were saying was not black people are all thugs and criminals and they need to shape up they were working with for example cory booker who was the mayor of newark then on prisoner re-entry programs they were really trying to do good work for black people and i didn't see any other think tank that was doing anything like that and they summoned me that manhattan institute is a conservative think tank but they've always been hospitable to an extent to democrats i was not the only one there but understandably while i was there and i was there for a good long time a lot of people thought that meant that i was a conservative republican whereas it's not that my views if anybody were if anybody were to bother to read the work that i've been doing for what i hate to say is 20 years now they'd see i don't disagree with any of the things that you would consider to be the liberal orthodoxy except when it comes to a certain plangent view of race relations where the idea is that the proper black thing to do is to cry weakness rather than look for solutions i don't get that and i know that my civil rights forebears wouldn't have gotten that either but that's considered a conservative take only because what's considered the mainstream take-on race has moved so far to the radical left okay so let's unpack that a bit so what i'd like see i kind of look at all of the things that you are discussing in some sense as an outsider because these are fundamentally american issues although not entirely and i'm a canadian and we have our problems but we don't have exactly the same problems that you have in the united states and so i look it's i'm looking at this from the outside to some degree and trying to understand it what do you what is this set of assumptions in more detail that that that perturb you and why do you let's start with that this what is this set of assumptions about the re uh about race relations in the us that that perturb you well there's one main assumption which is that it's the job of the shall we say woke black person to focus on racist obstacles to black success and to purport that racism be it social or systemic is a conclusive obstacle to general black's success rather than an impediment that you can get around and then there's an extension from that that racism of both of those kinds is so oppressive that it it's the defining experience of being a black person and so it means that if you are a black person and you're writing you know be it fiction or non-fiction or opinion your focus is supposed to be always and forever racist oppression because if you're not doing that you're not authentic and you're dissociating yourself from blackness in some way and i find that as a as a montessori kid who has a lot of interests i've always found that extremely confining as soon as i hit adolescence i realize wow i'm expected to be this racism-focused person maintaining a wariness of white socially that has not been necessary since about you know five years before i was born and i think that it is a cloak that people put on because human beings seek comfortable cloaks to put on it becomes a sense of being part of a tribe but it has a way of departing from what reality actually necessitates and i have just not been able to gracefully allow that sort of thing to define my life or to pretend to believe in those things and so when i was around um how old am i when i start to pop in my early 30s i was at berkeley first was cornell then was berkeley then was the manhattan institute and at uc berkeley there was a dis the racial preferences were discontinued the idea was that there were no longer going to be different standards for allowing black and latino students to be admitted than white and asian students and the way this was talked about was as if all black people are poor as if the idea was that you don't change standards even for people who've grown up hard when actually most black students at berkeley by then were very middle class and the problems were different and i just couldn't remain silent i remember the hardest thing for me was that there would be a white professor who would come and lean in my doorway and start start you know saying all of the usual pious sorts of things about race that i don't think truly cohere such as implying that racism defines my entire existence and i was expected to just sit there and nod they really thought that any black person thought that way and i thought no you're missing me completely many many black people feel misread by whites well i was having a different version of it and i just got weary of it and so i very circuitously and not as deliberately as many people think i started writing about these things i thought at first i was just gonna put out one and a half yelps so that people would know how i felt and then go on being a linguist only but for various reasons that's not what happened and here i am talking to you about well and you have this new book um walk racism well create well walk racism and how a new religion is betraying black america so okay so that's that's quite the title i mean i'm sure it was very carefully chosen and wikipedia informed me that you're formally atheistic and so which may or may not be relevant to our discussion but it's very interesting to me that you picked that as part of the title why why why do you believe that why why this emphasis on a new religion and and and what does that mean exactly well you know we're at a point where the kinds of beliefs that i'm talking about about black people are no longer held as an opinion it's at the point where a certain kind of person lives these beliefs in a way that is so impervious to any kind of reasonable discussion that you start to notice that it really is a matter of religion in the sense particularly of abrahamic religions rather than opinion and they're all sorts of so what's what's the difference between religious belief and mere opinion in your estimation it is that many religions require that at a certain point you suspend disbelief and stop relying on conventional raciosination and logic there's a point at which you're supposed to have faith and believe in miracles of some sort and it's at the point where when it comes to race there are things that one is supposed to insist on and believe regardless of whether they correspond to reality or even any sense of justice one in christianity is supposed to be dedicated to showing that you have faith in in jesus within the religion that i'm talking about the cardinal point is that you show that you know that racism exists just that you know that it exists now what you're going to do about it is irrelevant whether or not what you're showing actually is racism is irrelevant the fact is that you knew you were supposed to be looking for it and only that imperative as ding-dong as it sounds explains a lot of the things that we've seen especially lately there's a real jump in the rails after summer 2020 but even before that and it means that a lot of people look at what goes on with the race scene in the united states and i know there's an to an extent there is that in canada too you whenever you see these sorts of things happening and you see brilliant people making arguments that don't make any sense and utterly despising those who disagree with them as if they were heretics word chosen deliberately it's because what we're seeing even though these are people who are usually very secular in their self-conception it's a religion this is exactly the kind of person who sent galileo into exile a very very long time ago and the people back then often didn't think of themselves as religious it was just considered truth we're faced with that same kind of thought even if the word isn't applied and it makes the reason i'm putting it that way is not just to annoy people by calling them religious although i think it will annoy them and it'll also annoy actual religious experts who will say that i'm stepping outside of my lane which i most definitely am but all of this stuff only makes sense if you realize that these people are religious and that they have to be treated as parishioners and not as people who are up for an argument i've had a number of people make the same case to me recently very profound people in my estimation so i want to run a few ideas by and see what you think so i've thought a long time about the religious endeavor let's say from the psychological perspective trying to unpack it and it's related in some sense to the idea of depth and so if you think about stories literary stories let's say great works of literature for that matter and lesser works we all have this intuition that some stories are shallow and they might be entertaining but they're shallow and some stories are deep and we have the same sense in music for that matter but so we have this natural sense of depth and part of what that is related to is something like place in the axiomatic structure of propositional thinking so something is deep if a lot of other things you think depend on it and it's shallow if you can dispense with that and it doesn't do much to your underlying cognitive architecture so does that seem reasonable so far very much yeah okay okay and then then i would say that there's a set of experiences that are universally human more or less that occur when our deeper beliefs are challenged and and that threatens the way that we construe the world and our ability to act in it threatens us with nihilism it threatens us with chaos it's it's no trivial matter that happens often when here to four um separated cultures come into contact with one another definitely so so worlds can move when that occurs okay so and then i would say that the set of emotions that are associated with the movement of deep beliefs are what we describe when we describe religious experience and this is part of the reason i've had a number of conversations with famous atheists and very smart people i mean harris for harris for example is extraordinarily smart person and i'm familiar with richard dawkins work and daniel dennett's work these people are far from foolish but they missed the point to me to some degree from speaking even scientifically speaking because they treat religion as if it's a set of abstract propositions about the material structure of the world and and that's usually how the argument with religious people is framed and they're often foolish enough to accept that initial framing but there's a lot of phenomena that fall into the religious domain that have nothing to do with propositional uh propositional truth i mean we have already had a conversation about music and music has often been used across many cultures for sacred purposes and part of the reason for that is the emotional state that it's capable of invoking which is something like awe at the deepest level and also its ability to unite people in harmony let's say and in dance and all of that and so there's no escaping the reality of the religious instinct and so and here's the point i'm trying to make with all that to some degree so imagine this think about this for a second so there's this statement in the new testament that we should render unto god what is god's and see unto caesar what is caesar's and you couldn't find you'd be hard-pressed to find a single statement ever uttered by anyone that had a more remarkable effect on the development of political systems because in some non-trivial manner the idea that state and church should be separated is justified by that statement so it's a deadly statement but i also think it might be true psychologically and that if we don't have an explicit territory marked out psychologically and socially for the sacred and so that would be for the deepest things then what happens is that things that should not be so deep start to take on exactly that aspect and i'll finish this with one one observation i've been talking with someone i really admire his name is jonathan paojo and he's one of the deepest thinkers i've ever encountered in the religious domain and he's well-versed in post-modern can you spell his last name p-a-g-e-a-u got it okay yeah french canadian catholic turned atheist turned russian orthodox icon carver that's part of this background anyways he made a very interesting comment in a talk i was watching on the weekend about um false gods let's say and he talked about the danger of the idea of inclusivity when it's elevated to the highest place or or put in the deepest place let's say and so if the purpose of all organizations becomes radical inclusivity so that's the uniting factor then the specific purpose of all those organizations is instantly threatened and so part of the problem here is that what should be lower in the hierarchy of values is put in the higher place inappropriately and that produces all sorts of social catastrophe so yeah yeah the the hard part here is that it makes you feel like rousseau was correct that we'd be better off as small groups of people say about 200 people living on the side of a river and there is some sort of religion probably animist but it isn't part of the warp and wolf of existence because people have a sense of purpose people have a sense of warmth people have a sense of what you might call the sacred in that it's your group and you know everybody and you're a brother and you're an uncle and you're a husband and that's what you are there's nothing existential that's going to happen to anybody and i hear from a couple of people who study hunter-gatherer groups that that's true of hunter-gatherers that there's no such thing as a feeling of anomie when you are say living in the kalahari but then once you go further you start to have this need for something larger which i fully understand and there are many people who have said that this new woke religion and i think it really is one is something that comes as a replacement for what would have been ordinary even if gestural christianity among the same people in 1955 and i myself i have religion for me what people get out of religion i get out of and this is going to be it's going to be taken wrong so i have to put it carefully i get it from musical theater and i don't mean that i'm really into liza minnelli you know it's not grand old ladies and dresses and things like that it's actually the primal thing of life being set to music including its regularities and its harmonies and it probably culminating in people all doing things together partly in rhythm and singing in big harmony to me although i know that isn't real it seems to give life a kind of a transcendental meaning and to me that is so that's like church okay so that okay so that's all extremely interesting but but what one of the things that's most interesting to me about what you just said is that you also felt compelled to interject that it isn't real now obviously musical theater is not okay let's talk about that for a sec because i've gotten trouble with this sort of thing when i've been interrogated let's say about my beliefs many times in the past so when you say something like that it begs the question what do you mean by real right it's not real it's like well wait a second and this is something i talked about with sam harris so here's a here's a weird thing are dostoevsky's novels despite the fact that they're fictional more real than a purely objective account of someone's day or less real because they're definitely not they never happened but the fact that they never happened doesn't make them not real and so then we have an annoying channel you mean because they're channeling something underlying about the human spirit and experience or do you mean something else let's well let's look at it this way so let's say i i took four remarkable people and i i uh distilled down their biography and then i made a metabiography about one great person that incorporated and united all those biographies would i be closer to the reality of greatness obviously we have to decide what reality is well that's that's the thing obviously but the thing is it's so interesting what you said because on one hand on the one hand you're deeply gripped by this art artistic and theatrical representation and you're unapologetic about that and and you also think of it as something at least personally that's deep and profound and meaningful enough to to describe it in at least quasi-religious terms and then the critical mind comes up and says yeah but that's not real and i think well that's like the guy in the movie tapping the kid on the shoulder who's watching pinocchio and saying well you know these are just drawings and none of this is real it's like well that's not so obvious that none of it is real because to some degree it depends on what you mean by real and and why are you so sure that the child being gripped by that isn't more aware of reality than your rationality as in it might be part of reality to experience and consider and even on a certain level believe in these idealizations these refractions of what actually happens in real life that that is something that deserves a place within our cognition as we go through life as people there something is gripping you obviously because you love music and then and you and you related this story and so on the stage is being portrayed various modes of being in some compelling way and music accompanies that to fill in the context in some sense that's lacking in the fictional yes yes yes yes and so i'm not so sure that it seems to me that there's more reality in literature in a very profound sense than there is in the fractionated view of much of the scientific enterprise and and for for a bunch of reasons it isn't obvious to me at all that science can truly guide our actions because we have to make value judgments but when you watch a great theatrical performance a gripping theatrical performance you're being informed as to how to perceive an act which is a vital thing to be informed about and you're doing it collectively you're doing it to music and then you know i've watched many rational cognitive psychologists essentially especially kind of dismiss the whole creative entertainment enterprise which also gripped you with regard to the 30s as sort of epic cognitive epiphenomenon right yes and it's that's not right that's not only wrong that's really deeply backwards it's way way more important than we think it is and it's more real than how else could it unite us if it isn't real well what do you mean by real you know yeah and i would extend it to the rock concert which i think probably more people could relate to and i i stand outside of that because the music forum doesn't grab me as much but it's clear that people are feeling the same thing that i'm talking about and it seems to be almost a human universal to the point that to the extent that they're human groups where music plays very little role and i hear that there's some and they don't have anything that you would call theater it's just some it's not the human norm most human beings have something along these lines i bet they have stories bigger groups and once you have enough people you have something that we would call performance even if in smaller groups everybody participates in the performance but that's even more the same thing that we're talking about the idea that you're a passive audience is something that happens particularly in the west rather late in the game that you sit and clap you usually people are more involved everybody is but that is even more of what you're talking about yeah i would say that those things are real and in a sense and i'm not just trying to yank it back to woke racism to push the book but i'm really thinking about this my book is about people it's actually i'm known for saying things black people don't like black a lot of black people aren't going to like woke racism but what racism is going to be hated by a lot of white people too the woke person i'm really thinking about in that book is a white guy and the white guy in that case is not somebody who i can hate because i do see that there is a benefit that a person gets to this religion even when it doesn't necessarily make if we may pardon the term sense the person can't help it i see where they're coming from and they frustrate me often but it worries me that because religion is let's let's call it for our purposes here a different kind of reality it can conflict with what an oppressed group needs in order to be most comfortable and happy in a complex society well you okay so let's talk about that for for a minute now one of the things you told me earlier on was that i think and i don't want to put words in your mouth absolutely so if i've got this wrong please correct me it seemed to me that you were implying if not outright stating that the collectivist ethos of much of that discourse was interfering with your self-regard as an individual but even more importantly your ability to like manifest yourself appear as and be treated as an individual and so we're looking we're looking here at least to some degree for what might constitute a reasonable uniting principle and one of the reasons that i've been opposing the collectivist thought that's characteristic of the insistence that group identity is the primary phenomenon say socially and cognate morally more importantly is that it's the wrong uniting principle the right uniting principle is the divinity of the individual to speak in religious terms and we can strip that of its religious significance and say well part of it is that the proper level of analysis for political discourse is the sanctit is predicated on the sanctity of the individual and so we need to get serious as a culture about whether or not we actually believe this and and and what the relationship between that belief and reality actually is so that's hard because as you know you're far ahead of this um far ahead of me on this it's hard to be an individual it's not natural it's not i don't think it's what we're hard wired for it's a rather new concept and many people spontaneously will say they want to be an individual i think to an extent though that's fashion and to most people group identity is what gives them a sense of purpose and that's the way human beings have always been and it's hard to really make a person realize being an individual means that it's really just you for example many very smart black people i think are under the impression that being an individual means that you have the bravery to stick your fist up and battle racist attitudes but the problem is that is now a group activity that's something that lots and lots of other people are doing it only may seem a little bit unusual to a very naive white person looking on or subject to it and so the question is how do you really feel about these things if you want to battle racism how would you like to do it as opposed to adopting certain mantras and battle cries but mantras and battle cries are what we human beings do we do it together that's hard that's that's a tough thing because individualism might not be the way that humanity needs to go i personally would prefer it that's my my sense and that's your sense i think but i think a very coherent case could be made that that particular conception of marching to the beat of your own drummer is an eccentricity that certain solitary minded people came to cherish amidst industrialization over a certain two or three hundred years i don't know if i could refute that okay so that's okay so i think that's an extremely astute objection let's say especially the observation that that and you you touched on this earlier that that requirement for group identification is deeply embedded in human human the substructure of human consciousness so let's say well we want to have friends we want to have a family we want to have a town or something like that a community of 200 right embedded in a town i think the question isn't or the issue isn't so much the fact that the idea that the individual is the uniting principle should supplant that it's that that should be organized underneath that in some because it isn't it isn't an issue of the absence of the necessity for group identity because without that we couldn't do anything together and wouldn't that be a catastrophe right yeah right right and so that has to be recognized and i do think to give the woke types and even if it's a religious manifestation they're due if that does produce a sense of cohesive group identity then you can understand the longing for that in a fractionated community that in some senses got too psychologically large so that has to be contended with but i do really see because i viewed the culture wars in the university i really believe they're battling out something extraordinarily deep it's not it this isn't a surface issue part of the debate and this emerged out of france the french intellectual tradition fundamentally as far as i'm concerned is the question of what level of conception should be primary and the assault on the patriarchy and on there's more to it than that is part of an assault on the idea of of individuality and and the truth that individuals hold in their language it's an assault on all of that it's deep deep criticism and i think it's incredibly dangerous but i understand why why it arose and so definitely yeah and and i was curious about you because you said at the beginning that even though your mother had taught you the in some sense these woke precepts there was something in you that rebelled against it yeah it's what was that yeah it's not um i don't rebel against the idea that for example there is institutional racism i don't think it should be called that but there are inequities in society between say black and white that are due to racist attitudes usually in the past and racist biases and racist lookings past all of those things are definitely true there are all sorts of things in black history that have helped to set us back that one should certainly know about one should know about the redlining of neighborhoods where in many cities most black people lived in neighborhoods where banks would not give you a loan all of these things are very real i never felt like i rebelled against that what i rebelled against was the idea that you base your whole sense of identity upon those things such that you live a life that's abbreviated because you're exaggerating how bad it still is and you're distorting what's necessary to create dignified lives for black people and my feelings always been you probably have about 80 years you know you're lucky if you've got 80 years and if you spend your whole life maintaining in my time period the same battle poses in the 80s and 90s that people needed in the 50s and 60s after a while you've spent your life play acting and then you die and the world goes on what i rejected was the exaggeration and so for example i remember what really there was one moment where i realized there was something wrong with me it was the in the wake of the rodney king trial in 1991 and a lot of a lot of black people i liked very much were united in saying what happened to rodney king shows that a black man can't get justice in this country and i remember thinking no no that that statement would have made sense in about 1965 and in many american cities 1975 and there were islands of it even in 1991 but the idea that as a 20-something black person you were living in a country where you just couldn't get justice it struck me as beyond rhetoric especially given the general attitude they had towards what being black meant then as we were standing around at stanford university a campus where all of us had been evaluated according to adjusted standards out of the idea that we were really wanted on that campus etc that we were supposed to still be speaking that language that the black panthers had spoken it struck me as a pose and there was a part of me that was deeply disturbed by the artificiality of it and that you were actually expected to live it why why are the artifacts okay so you again you use very specific words oppose artificial as opposed to what like what on what page like you're comparing it to something and it it sounds it sounds like you're comparing it and and you don't just regard it as an exaggeration your criticism has gone farther than that in the past i mean you you've also uh directly stated that conceptualization of the problem in this form is actually interfering with the solutions that we still need to generate so it's not just it it's not just an exaggeration it's a problem in and of itself and that's a deeper criticism so so so what's the artificiality as far as you're concerned and yeah compared to what yeah what you're trying to live apparently but what do you what is that exactly the question is how much of an obstacle is racism after formal segregation has been battled after racial attitudes changed profoundly in the 1970s and i'm just old enough to have watched that happen just it gets to the point where okay racism does exist both social and institutional but how much of an obstacle is it to doing pragmatic things that will make poor black people less poor and all black people happier so quick example would be that these days you can look at the fact that black kids tend not to do as well on standardized tests yes as other kids it's there now you can look at that and you can say well if black kids don't do as well on the test that's because of racism and so we need to eliminate the test because the test is racist now in what way is the test racist 40 years ago maybe those tests asked you what wine goes with chicken that hasn't been true for generations now so it's not about asking people things that they have no reason to know how is it how is it racist and there are people today who even will imply that black thought is somehow incompatible with tests like that which is very close to saying that black people are incapable of disembodied abstract thought and many whites are probably identical without claiming yeah it's it's very unfortunate especially given that the people who are saying it know very well the history of that being said about black people and so you look at the tests and you say that because black kids don't do well on them they are examples of systemic racism but you have to get rid of racism so you have to get rid of the tests which means that you tell america that black kids can't have their abstract reasoning measured without it being racist and then when you get somebody saying well then black kids just must not be as quick on the uptake you call them a racist and in the meantime it's ignored that you consider helping black kids get better at the tests helping black kids parents realize what free test prep programs there are in those neighborhoods the tests just take a little bit of practice but you're not supposed to talk about it because the tests quote unquote are racist that's a it's an abuse of language and it's abuse of the very conception of what racism is that's not what my mother raised me in that's not your grandmother's racism that's something that comes from a way of thinking that was marginal in 1955 became sexy in about 1966 and here in 2021 is being treated as impregnable wisdom someone black has to speak out against that so that's what i mean by the exaggeration and the artificiality and the outright harm that comes from these sorts of things well and it and with regard to it being a pose so is it is it is it a pose of so i could say well is it a pose of unearned virtue i mean virtue is not easy to earn true virtue you have to establish let's say we'll see we see where we go with this maybe you have to establish a relationship with beauty and beauty is real you have to establish a relationship with truth and truth is real and so to earn virtue is difficult because beauty and truth are imposing and and and formidable if you have any sense at all you see that and so that's a daunting task to establish genuine virtue and a terrifying task and is the pose the the the willingness to adopt see because when i talked to the ideologue types and maybe that happened most famously with an interview i had with i think i was just thinking about it you mean michael eric dyson right yeah oh i was no i wasn't thinking about dyson i was thinking about uh gq interviewer and that interview has been watched like 40 million times now it's just this ideological pose is it is the aping of virtue as far as i can tell and i i mean that and it's sort of a technical sense is that you master this language and it contains the expressions of true virtue but you know the kind of problems that you were talking about and i see this on the environmentalist side of things too well how do you get black kids to do better in elementary school let's say well that's a more manageable problem it's a problem that would take a little bit more humility to conceptualize and it's also a really really hard problem and so to be virtuous in your attempts to solve that would require it probably require the dedication of your entire life really to to take a good crack at that problem right because that's a tough problem man and so maybe you don't want to do that because it's and then you're enticed and you're enticed by your educators into this alternative possibility where all you really have to do is master a set of propositions and you're on the winning side and that also gives you some convenient enemies and maybe it fulfills to some degree the religious instinct and and it depauls me to see the universities complicit in this and that they've come to see that and i think part of that falseness and artificiality that you described i think the fact that that exists is part of the like overbearing insistence that the veil not be lifted and that no one questioned this because what is underneath it is so damn ugly yeah yeah yeah jordan you actually you are um you have nailed something i would be loath to go so near that word virtue because the last thing i want to do is imply that somebody isn't virtuous nevertheless you're getting it in that it's an unearned virtue which people are settling for not because they're so callow as to which to be virtuous without earning their stripes but because religion is attractive and so if you were surrounded by people who are brandishing this message that everything that you don't like is racist and you can get beyond it that way it's not that you're lazy it's not that you're trying to get stripes that you didn't earn but it's comfortable because part of being in that religion is that there's an us versus them conception which is very comforting you're part of a mission of uplift which is very comforting and in a university that religion is there it's as if there you know people from a church who are behind tables out in the plaza who are waiting to recruit people that's there as soon as you hit campus and so that's why so many people and now it's not just black kids it's also white kids fall for this way of looking at things where what it is is you become virtuous without having done the sorts of things that ideally one might have you can your virtue signaling and it is unearned virtue but it's because you wish to have a cloak you're seeking a comfort zone i can't hate anybody for that but it does mean an awful lot of mendacity that's the problem so i wasn't trying to imply too that all objections to that process are in and of themselves virtuous and i'm also not trying to imply that i'm somehow especially virtuous i'm actually quite terrified by the proposition that virtue virtue is something real and something necessary and that falling short of it is cataclysmic in some sense existentially and so anyone who doesn't tremble at such a thought hasn't thought about it very deeply and i want to have as much sympathy as possible especially for young people who are enticed into this ideological identification because you could look i was a committed socialist when i was 16. you know and and on intellectual grounds i mean talent is distributed equally amongst the human population yet they're inequities in society so how can that be anything but unfair well fair enough it's called the answer to that is extremely complicated but the problem announces itself and you can certainly see how someone with a somewhat compassionate bent and and even with an intellectual bent of sorts would be deeply attracted by the the extremely well honed arguments that have been put forward in favor of all those propositions so or it can be even more primitive than that i think that tribalism in and of itself is deeply attractive and that this is something that can happen regardless of intelligence level i remember in college i wasn't a socialist but i definitely hated republicans until i met met some and you know i couldn't have told you during most of the time when i was in college what the difference between a republican and a democrat even was i was busy doing other things it was easier not to know there was no internet but i knew that those republicans who were usually guys it was usually a few guys with their own corner room down the hall you didn't like them because they were republicans and ronald reagan was bad because he was white and he dyed his hair or something like that that was enough even for the smarter kids who were smoking cigarettes out in front of the dorm that would do i met republicans as time went on and realized that wait a minute i'm not one of them but i can't see them as insane but before that it happened i was very happily against a whole group of people who i knew nothing about i don't think i was unique in that no not at all that okay so maybe if you don't mind maybe we could close with this because i'm starting to get tired and i'm not going to make much sense soon so so if assuming i have so far so i've been considering this proposition that that's emerged from the woke end of the of the of the political spectrum let's say that all white people are racist and i think okay are all white people racist what's the answer to that and the answer is yes and no and how dare you frame the question like that that's the three answers so yes let's look at yes first well are all people racist probably probably probably like we have really really intense in-group affiliative tendencies and yet we're supposed to suppose that maybe especially north american white people can learn to not be racist unlike all other people in the world that's a tough proposition well all of us it's very difficult for all of us to overcome our in-group biases and we and we never even want to do it completely because we want to love our family especially and we also only have a limited amount of time and attention so we have to love some people especially or do nothing at all for anyone so so this is a huge problem so by stating it that way that all white people are racist you make racism a subcategory of white and you actually underplay that terrible catastrophe and significance of the problem and that's very dangerous because we all have to contend with this in-group preference and our proclivity to demonize anyone we put in the out group and now that's a terrible tendency yeah and that particular that question is one of them where i depart from what i wish were my comrades in that are all white people racist you know what probably to some extent the white person who couldn't have an ounce of racism identified in them even with sophisticated psychological testing is probably vanishingly rare sure and my sense of it is when it's gotten to the point that it has who cares and i've often said to audiences and i've watched some black people in audiences having not heard this understand what i mean if you really do have a basic self-love then the fact that the whites around you have various degrees of racism really just shouldn't matter because life consists of about a thousand things other than whatever that residual racism is in that white person across the room who is you know married to a black person and you know does all the sorts of things that these supposedly racist but hyper woke white people do it's just why does it matter so much now it's one thing for somebody in 1925 to talk about white racism 1955-65 but today my feeling about it is with most of the white people that a black person who talks about that sort of thing most knows the answer is yes most of the white people you know are probably very slightly racist but not in any way that will remotely matter in your life even including being friends with them and sometimes close friends why are we so obsessed with that and i think that's a very legitimate question life is about so much more than obsessing over something like that except that when you obsess over something like that you're part of a group it's us versus them and you have a sense of purpose and a sense of virtue because you're the person who's being racist but i find that a rather feeble way of going about an existence with true virtue i've never used that word so much as today it might also indicate uh interference with the process of coming to terms with your own in-group preference and tendency to deregrate whatever out-group you happen to be surrounded by i mean i do see this as a terribly deep human problem you know i presume that in the 1970s that jane goodall found that chimps go on raiding parties right and that that was a major league discovery it shows how that that proclivity to demonize the out group is at least six million years old right it's deep and it's in us and so and we all have to contend with it and so to make now we could have an intelligent conversation nonetheless about the manner in which the predominance of one ethnic group in a given society might exacerbate those tendencies of course but that's that's a that's something that's certainly independent of the notion that all white people are racist and then you can also see that you know it's easy to believe that progress doesn't happen than to admit that it happens slowly the degree to which most white americans are racist in 2021 not to mention white canadians from what i've seen is much much smaller than anybody would have expected about 30 years ago so the question is also just extend and yet virtue is excellence in my mind if we're talking about aristotle virtue is not moral you know moral upstandingness it's excellence you can't be excellent you can't live an excellent life if you're hobbled in distorted views of what racism is and how much it matters these particular things will not allow you to be the best that you can be unless you think that the best that you can be is somebody who is hyper articulate about discussing bias against other people and what a narrow topic there's so much to do and so i just chafe against it i think that's an excellent place to close if you don't mind and i really enjoyed our conversation it flew by as far as i was concerned and i i hope you guys for having me i hope you have the success that you deserve with your new book woke racism how a new religion is betraying black america and i i wish you well in the future and hope perhaps that we're we meet again and at least we're able to talk again certainly anything else i think we hit it all i think i liked ending on the virtue and the book will be coming out and we'll see how it does but i'm glad that we had a chance to talk i think that you and i are best known if we're talked about in the same sentences based on that exchange at aspen and i would venture to say that although that's really gotten around it meant more to the audience of people who've been watching it than it meant to either one of us and so i'm happy to have actually had a one-on-one with you yes i'm very glad that that was superseded by this definitely thank you very much for talking with me today i appreciate it thank you for having me jordan and as i said best of luck with your book and andy in general many thanks [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,787,862

Keywords: 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, john mcwhorter, john mcworhter, jordan petersen, race in america, jordan peterson race, are all white people racist, american studies, division, people, culture, jordan peterson thomas sowell, jordan peterson noam chomsky, language acquisition

Id: u9quq9NGUcM

Length: 77min 31sec (4651 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022