Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson & Douglas Murray - Dublin

alright ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage Douglas Murray Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris [Applause] thank you Mike okay thank you all for coming out well good evening Dublin as you've just heard Jordan pizza and Sam Harris met the first time in person two weeks ago now in Vancouver they covered an enormous amount of ground and there is I think an enormous amount of ground still to cover but I've asked them if they would start this evening in the following way you're all familiar with straw Manning anyone who follows politics knows straw Manning but I've asked them to do the opposite tonight to start by Steele Manning the arguments of each other to present in the best possible most fair most rigorous light what they understand to be the others argument on all of the major issues we're about to discuss I'm gonna ask Sam Harris to go first and we're gonna go from there okay thank you so first thank you all for coming it's really it's an immense privilege for us to do this and I should say many of you have sacrificed a lot to come here people have come from other countries I'm told you all dealt with a ticketing system that seems like it was run from a cave in Afghanistan it's so again thank you all because it's you know it's it's one thing for us to put this date on the calendar and say we're gonna speak here it's another for all of you to show up and this is a privilege we certainly don't take for granted so and it's an immense one so Jordan and and I should say that though much of our conversation together will often sound like we're debating it will definitely none of us are in the in the habit of pulling our punches there's an immense amount of goodwill here and it's it's true on stage it's true off stage and we're all trying to refine our beliefs together in conversation so this one of us view this as a debate though we might stridently disagree about one thing or another what so what Jordan I think disagrees with me about it I think he's worried that I dunno we clearly have a common project we are both concerned to understand how to live lives worth living how can we do this individually and how can we build societies that safeguard this project for millions of people attempting to do this in their diverse ways and so it so many questions immediately come online when you try to do that but what is the relationship between facts and values for instance or science and spiritual experience or our ethical lives and we have you know as for the moment different answers to those questions Jordan is concerned I in my allergy to religion insufficiently value the power of stories in general and religious stories in particular that there's there's something more than just naked ly engaging with facts as they are but we do we don't simply come into contact with reality we have to interpret reality we interpret it through our senses and and with our brains obviously but you need frameworks and as Jordan would say stories with which to do that you don't get facts in the raw and Jordan believes that I because my purpose so often is to counter what I view as the dangerous dogmas within religion I ignore the the power and even the necessity of certain kinds of stories and certain ways of thinking about the world and and our situation in the world that that not only bring many many millions and even billions of people immense value or in fact necessary for anyone however rational to build a society where all of our our well-being can can be conserved so I think if in brief that's that's Jordan is concerned about me so Sam is concerned I would say above all with the minimization of unnecessary suffering which seems to me to be a pretty good place to start and he's concerned that he's concerned that in order to do that we need to develop an ethic and that ethic should be grounded in that realization that unnecessary suffering is worth contending with and dealing with and that and that if we make too much of the divide between facts and values then we end up in a situation where our value structure has no super subordinate foundational grounding and this is a big problem so generally in the philosophical community it's accepted although not universally that it's difficult if not impossible to derive values from facts but the problem with that proposition is that you end up in a situation where either you lose all your values because they're just arbitrary or you or you have to ground them in something that isn't that that's what's revelatory and Sam is concerned that one of the negative consequences of grounding your fundamental ethic in something that's revealed is the emergent consequence of irrational fundamentalism and so obviously that's worth contending with and so he's taking issue with the philosophical idea that facts and values have to be separate and formulating the proposition that we can in fact ground a universal system of values in the facts and that we can mediate between the facts and the system of values using using our facility for truth but even more specifically our facility for rationality and that rationality can be the mediator between the world of facts and the world and the world of values and so the the problem I have with that I guess if if we can skip briefly two problems is that it isn't obvious to me how to produce an ethos with sufficient motivating power to to ground that conception of the minimization of suffering say and the promotion of well-being in a way that's that grips people in the unites a society and so I think that's that's part of what we're discussing and trying to sort out with regards to the potential role of narrative and religious belief as an underpinning to this ethos we seem to agree on the necessity for the universal ethos we even seem to agree I would say on what that is because certainly the minimization of suffering seems to me to be a very good place to start we share our concern with and a belief that the pathway to that ethos is in some manner related to our ability to speak the truth but we disagree on what that has to be grounded in and how it has to be grounded my sense especially after thinking about our discussion is that Sam makes what rationality is do too much work and I'm hoping that not that rationality is irrelevant or unimportant because it clearly is neither of those but maybe the Devils in the details and hopefully we can get down to the details tonight and weave weave for me we brought Douglas into the conversation he's here to serve as much more than a mere moderator and partly we've determined that as Sam alluded to that what we're actually trying to figure out is what are the minimal necessary preconditions for the construction of engaged productive individuals with meaningful responsible lives in a society that's stable enough to sustain itself and dynamic enough to change what are the minimal preconditions for that what are the and and and how do we ground those presuppositions those preconditions and what price do we pay for for having them because you never get something without a cost and we thought that Douglass would be very interesting addition to this conversation because of course he's concentrated on such things as borders and when you set up preconditions for social order you also automatically produce such things as hierarchies and borders and they don't come without a cost and so we hope expand the conversation to include a discussion of those issues as well yeah before Douglas chimes in I just want to reiterate the fact that he has not been cast here as our moderator though if Jordan and I run off the rails I expect Douglas to put us back on in the King's English I'm not enough to know but you're more moderate than either of us are but so I want I want you to reset the part of your brain that is poised to begrudge the moderator taking up too much time because every moderator has felt that and Fred Weinstein was brilliantly aloof and uninvolved in much of our exchange together but but Douglas really is a third participant here and and he stands between Jordan and I on some issues in an interesting way so that there say we have a three-way conversation here where none of us is really sitting in the same spot so can I make a quick observation about some of this some of the progress that you've already made in Vancouver some of the progress I hope we can make tonight seems to be I see one thing that hampers it and let me go straight to it with Sam which is I discovered the terrific phrase the other day that our mutual friend Eric Weinstein came up with we're talking about the manner in which you can discuss within the sciences certain scientific problems and he said look if you've got a scientist who you know is also basically a very literalist Christian you will listen to their argument a whole long part of the way and there's some where at the end of it you know you're going to be worried about it and he came up with this phrase I've I love this face he says Jesus smuggling right Jesus smuggling is you're gonna follow all the way yes yes and then the worry is that when you get to the bit that you're not so good on that's when they're gonna smuggle in Jesus yeah my suspicion is that you have a reservation about some of what Jordan is saying substructures on stories are much more because you're worried but at some point either on this stage or off it at some point when you're not looking no no when I am looking it's going to Jesus smuggle yeah yeah just carry them in on a cross well that is an all too apt analogy because it's it is what worries me and it's but it's it's more subtle than that because it's not just to think that you're consciously doing it is is a different claim like there's I don't think there's anything insincere about your argument for the for the importance of religion but it's it's also possible we've all met the people who we believe are making insincere arguments and are really they're they're consciously putting the rabbit in the Hat and then pretending to be surprised when it pops out right and and in the analogy of magic is actually interesting here because we we had over dinner we're talking about the the the difference between real and fake art and when we're talking about this parrot is paradox that art seems to be incredibly valuable and yet the value isn't located in the object itself or can't be obviously located there because a forgery that is the materially the exact copy of some masterpiece is essentially worthless and the real masterpiece even if it suffered some damage would be incredibly valuable and so where is the value to be located but it what worries me about your enterprise Jordan and the way in which your you seem to be linking our national project in our scientific project where the religion is is right here there's there's a difference between an magic as a decent analogy there's a difference between paradoxically real magic is fake magic and fake magic is real magic the only the only real magic in the world the produced by magicians is the fake magic where the magician like someone like Darren Brown will tell you actually no I can't read minds and I did put the rabbit in the Hat and this is fake but but the the surprise is that even knowing it's fake you can't understand how this effect is being achieved whereas the fake magicians are the ones who are pretending to be real who are who are hiding who are not acknowledging the mechanics the real mechanics behind what is in fact effective you know the the illusion of the rabbit pops out of the Hat and what I worry with with some of you are the way in which you discuss the power of story the power of metaphor and the religious anchoring there is that the the leverage and the utility can be had even while acknowledging the real mechanics of it you know the fake the fakeness of the magic right and you seem to suspect that it can that takes all of them and out of the sails I'm not so sure I'm not so sure what if it's fake and what if it isn't well like let so I would say that I do consciously participate in the process that you described but but you see I would also make the case and this is certainly one of the things that we've been we've been discussing that you do it unconsciously and let me make the case for that for a minute because I'd really I've been thinking about a lot and I'd like to see your response so here's here I really read the moral landscape a lot and I thought about it a lot you know and so this is what it looks like to me so you you you make the proposition that we have to breach the gap between facts and values because otherwise our values are left hanging unmoored and that certainly brings about the danger of nihilism but also a potential danger of swing to totalitarianism something will you bring about I truly do believe that right you perform an operation conceptual operation and you say surely we can all agree that and then you outline a story about this woman who lives in this horrible country and who's basically just being starved and disease-ridden and tortured or whole life and having just a hell of a time of it to put it in a phrase and then you say well surely we can all agree that that's not good and then you contrast that with at least in principle the sort of life that we would all like to have if we could choose the life that we have and then you say well we could start with the proposition that we should move away from this this terrible hellish circumstance and we should move towards this more ideal perspective and you say if we could only agree on that then and so and so like so far so good but this is this is there's there's a couple of things that go along with that that are quite interesting and so the first is that actually what you're claiming is that the highest moral good isn't existing in that better space the highest moral good is acting in the manner that moves us from the hellish domain to the desirable domain it seems to me to be implicit in your argument so there's a pattern of behavior that constitutes the ethic well I would say that existing and that's in that better space is good enough as well as I mean that there's the there's the question of what it takes to move from where you are to someplace better and then there's just someplace better both of yes well but but we perhaps we could say look what's the ultimate hell it might be existing in the hell that you describe but it also might be this is something worse I think I think that participating in the process that brings about that hell is actually a hell that's even deeper than the hell so it's an analogous argument there's the state of being in a good state but there's also the state of being that brings you to that good state and then there's the state of being that's in a tip that's a terrible state and the process that brings you to that terrible state and one of the things that I've learned from the archetypal and religious texts that I've studied as well as the philosophical texts is that the process that transforms society into something approximating hell is a lower hell no the reason well let me just close the loop on that because I'm pretty sure I disagree one you can imagine to counter examples one is you can imagine a sadistic being a you might even call him God who would create a circumstance of Hell and populate it with innocent souls right now that's presumably that action it need not be attended by a lot of suffering or you could imagine something no but it's still still wrong wrong yes no you could even imagine someone who enjoys generate yes I would even be more wrong than not enjoying it right okay so so we want to separate out two things we want to separate out these states of being and the process that brings them into being and I do believe you do that in your work because basically what you suggest is that the appropriate way to act ethically is to act in a manner that moves us away from hell and moves us towards a desirable state now the thing is is that as far as I'm concerned there's a couple of things about that the first thing is that I wouldn't say that that mode of acting is a fact I would say it's a personality and that what you're suggesting is that people embody the personality that moves Society away from hell towards heaven for lack of a better term and the reason terms and the reason I make that argument is because I think that you recapitulate the essential Christian message precisely by doing that because symbolically speaking at least as far as I can understand stripped of its religious content of its metaphysical context let's say that the purpose of positing the the vision of the ideal human being which independent of the metaphysical context it's certainly what the symbol of Christ represents is the mode of being that moves us most effectively from something approximating hell to something approximating heaven and then part of that part of that message is and this is also something that's dead along the lines of what you're arguing is that the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth I mean so because I would say that the fundamental Christian ethic metaphysics accepted once again is to act in love which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected and to pursue that with truth and that you should embody that and then I would say that the purpose of the representation we could call the meta fictions or archetypal representations is to show that is in embodied format so that it can be imitated rather than to transform it into something that's diluted in some sense to to an abstract rationality because I don't think the abstract rationality in itself has enough flesh on it so to speak which is partly why in the Christian ethic there's an emphasis that the word which is something roughly akin to rationality has two main has to be made flesh it has to be enacted but is the is the flash made of dogmatism and superstition and other worldliness is that part of what gives it its shape and necessity I think it traditionally historically it has been and that's been the problem with religion if you if you denude it of everything that is unjustifiable in the light of 21st century science and rationality I think you what you have to get down to is something quite a bit more Universal and less provincial than any specific religion Christianity per se well it's interesting too though you know one of the one of the things one of the points that you do make is that you do appeal to or assume the existence of a transcendental internal ethic something like that which I would say by the way just since we're going down this direction seems to me to be something very akin to the idea of the holy spirit which is something like the internal representation of a transcendent Universal ethic now remember I'm trying to strip these concepts of their metaphysical substrate I'm not making a case at the moment for the existence of the great man in the sky we can we can get to that later I'm saying that what what seems to be the case is that we have underneath our cognitive architecture and our social architecture a layer of symbolic and dramatic a narrative representation that instantiates the same concepts but but you know in a in a multi-dimensional context one of the things we talked about in Vancouver for example is that the religious center prai's doesn't only emphasize rationality it it brings music into the play and it brings art into the play and it brings drama and it brings literature and it brings architecture and it brings the the organizing of cities around a central space like it's it's pushing itself it's manifesting itself across multiple dimensions of human existence simultaneously and to me that gives it a richness that cannot be diluted without loss and and and also a motive power that that a pure appeal to rationality I don't think can manage and this is see one of the things this is maybe a good place for Douglas to leap in see one of the things that Douglas who claimed upon multiple occasions to be an atheist and I don't know how he's feeling about that at the present time but it doesn't matter if you did one of the things Douglas has pointed out was that there are things that we've done in free countries let's say broadly speaking in the West that are worth protecting and that in order to protect them in the longest sense it's conceivable that we need a cognitive structure or something like that that can act as a bulwark against those forces that would seek to undermine and destroy it and Douglas has been driven I would say to some degree to hypothesize that for Christianity for all its faults or we could say judeo-christianity to broaden it for all its faults might provide something approximating that bulwark if we could only figure out how to utilize it properly so yes I mean one of my problems on this is that it seems that we are where we are with belief in whether we wish it to be or not we cannot believe as our predecessors believed even if we wanted to we know too much more now and it puts us in this very difficult position but to denude ourselves of the entire story seems to me to be a fool's errand for a set of reasons one of which is from a lot of travel a lot of speaking to people from all around the world it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that what we have in countries like this one is the default position of human beings in fact it strikes me as being very rare order even political order political liberalism political freedom very very unusual things and if you like the things that helps to get you there with all of the caveats with all the caveats we can we could throw in all evening and it's not the only thing that got us there obviously but that if you like broadly speaking where we are you've got to be very suspicious at the very least of saying the whole story is no good we don't need the story we can move on I quote quite often the radical theologian don cubit it was often described as an atheist priest and Cupit so somewhere in the recent book he said you know that we can't help it he said for instance the dreams we dream they're still Christian dreams whether we like that fact or not and without being able to believe myself certainly not being able to be a literal believer I worry yeah I worry about what happens when the square is denuded completely and that's why this discussion tonight and you two in particular are right on the cusp of this because this is this is where I think a lot of us ah even if we really wanted to believe we basically can't and by the way very quickly that's why I think there's an ax just to refine my previous point to you Sam that's why there's this additional thing I think there is a fear which you may have which I also have which is if there's a risk that even what I've just said never mind what Jordan has also said there's a risk I think some people feel or that you're going to soften up the land somehow and that even if neither Jordan nor I are going to suddenly start Jesus smuggling we might create the conditions that make it easier for someone else to do that yeah is that fair yeah and it is no photos very straight of you so thank you let me see if I can sharpen up what my concern actually is here because it's not even true to say that I think you need to get rid of the Jesus story or even or even not hey I don't even think there's something problematic with orienting your life around the Jesus story I think that that can be reclaimed but so first I was walking yesterday and this fine city of yours and saw someone on the sidewalk giving tarot readings to people yet you know the tarot deck spread out he had a few cards spread out and he was soliciting people and and I'm sorry to say I didn't sit for a reading but you know two tarot cards if you're familiar with them are they kept the quintessential artifact of New Age woo right I mean these are not you thought of as legitimate tools of divination except by people who think that there are legitimate tools of divination and yet a tarot reading can be truly powerful right I mean it is it's the this is built on something right this is not just a a massive example of self deception on the part of people reading and people getting their cards read it these cards can seem prescient I could give you all a reading right now and 95% of you would find what I would what the cards would say to be relevant to your lives I mean I could do it with an imaginary deck I meant only an invisible imaginary deck I don't know anything about tarot cards but I'm gonna turn over to cards now one is the Sun and the other is the the fallen man now I know so little about Tarot that I'm not even sure the Fallen man is a tarot card I think was the hanged man okay so I've got these two cards and you know the Sun is clearly the the representation of wisdom right and the hanged man is the is the representation of lost opportunity and I can tell you with some degree of certainty that all of you are at a crossroads in your life right where you have you you have good reason to believe that you're not making the most of your opportunities right now I could go on like this for an hour right and pretend all the while that it has something to do with the car it's actually being working in concert with the dynamics of the cosmos such that these cards that I turn over were they real would be the ones that in this day of necessity we're revealing something about your mind in this moment and obviously people think in these terms about astrology and sympathetic magic and all the rest and religion is built upon this kind of superstition there's a way of understanding the utility of using a device like this and the real effect it has on you I mean if I turn over the cards and ask you to look at your life in this moment as though for the first time through this lens considering in this case lost opportunities right of course it's going to be valid that doesn't make it can be an incredibly useful thing to do the met my main concern is that at no point you have to lie to yourself about your state of knowledge about the mechanism right you don't have to believe tarot cards really really more there's deeper deeper mechanisms that work with someone who's actually good at that and so I agree with what you said but they need not be supernaturally I don't think they are supernatural in fact I think what happens when you use a projective technique like that because that's essentially what it is if I'm good at interpersonal attunement and I'm quite intuitive what I'm going to do this and everyone does this in the course of a dialogue that's actually working well I'm gonna flip over the cards and I'm going to start with generic archetypal statements that are that are true in some sense for everyone but then I'm gonna watch you both consciously and implicitly unconsciously with all of my social intelligence and I'm going to see through very very subtle signs on your part when you respond positively to what I'm saying and when you respond negatively and I'm going to continue down the lines that you established by your positive responses Aaron Brown does that's he's a mentally right well it's exactly what happens when children are interviewed for example by people who lead them as witnesses right the children infer from the emotional expressions of the person who's interrogating them what it is that they actually want to hear and so they'll even work with that horse clever exactly right that's right exactly horses can do this so tarot card readers can definitely do this so so they so so so the the mechanisms behind something like that even if it appears entirely superstitious on the surface are often deeper than is revealed at first approximation so and I wanted to talk a little bit if you don't mind for a minute about rationality because the the we've already agreed I think definitely start me if I'm wrong that there has to be an intermediary mechanism between the world of facts and the world of values and well since we've talked I've been reading a variety of commentaries on an annual Kant mostly these have been written by Roger Scruton by the way and this is actually that the the issue that can't what obsessed about for most of his philosophical life and what he concluded was that empiricism can't be right and rationality can't be right as philosophical disciplines because you need an intermediary structure that and that we have an inbuilt intermediary structure and that structure is what mediates between the thing in itself the world of facts let's say and the outputs the values so then I was thinking about we don't quite agree on this I mean in my summary of you look view of me I would have agreed with that but for me it's just facts all the way down okay so you're great you're describing facts glad to hear it why do you need to bring them well brain is yet another part of reality I mean we're not what I mean by a fact what does do anything there what does the brain do it has to do something because otherwise you don't need it it does a lot the the your concern to the other I think we're going in this conversation is how is it that values can be another order of fact that seems problematic to you it seems problematic to David Hume well it's problematic for me for a technical reason which is that in order to app you know and we see if we agree on this in order to perceive and to act which I believe are both acts of value to perceive as an active value because you have to look at something instead of a bunch of other things so you have you elevate the thing that you're perceiving to the position of highest value by perceiving it by deciding to perceive it okay back development I just that gets translated in my brain into just more facts just give me the facts of human perception well that's fine that's no problem I'm perfectly happy about that and then in order to act you have to select the target of action from among an infinite number near infinite number close enough of possible mechanisms of action and so what a biological organism does is take the facts and translate them into perception and action and the only organisms that do that with one-to-one mapping are organisms that are composed of sensory motor cells like sponges marine sponges which are composed of sensory motor cells they don't have an intermediary nervous system so what they do is they sit in the water they make a sponge they're so simple that if you grind a sponge through a sieve and in in salt water it'll reorganize itself into this sponge so that's quite cool and the sponge sits in the water don't do and what it does and what it does is there's waves on it and so it those are patterns and then the sponge opens and closes pours on its surface in response to those patterns so it Maps the pattern of the waves right on to its behavior with no intermediary of a nervous system but it's it can only map waves that's all it can do and it can only open and close pores that's it so it does one to one fact to value mapping now what happens is that as the as the complexity of a biological organism increases two things happen the first thing that happens is that the sensory and motor cells differentiate so now the organism has sensory cells and motor cells so sense senses to detect and senses and sorry cells to detect and cells to act ok so then it can do it can detect more patterns because it's more sophisticated at the sensory port perspective and it can do more things because it has specialized motor systems but then what happens is that as it gets even more complex then it puts an intermediary structure of nervous tissue in there and that structure increases in the number of layers of neurons and what that means is that as that happens and as the sensory cells become more specialized and as the motor output cells become more specialized many more patterns can be detected those are roughly equivalent to facts and many more motor outputs can be manifested but a tremendous number of calculations have to has to occur in that intermediary nervous tissue and that's the structure that I'm talking about that structure exists and it translates the patterns into motor output and it doesn't do it on a one-to-one basis because there are more patterns more facts then there are motor outputs so what has to happen is this tremendous plethora of facts that surrounds us has to be filtered to the point where you pick a single action because you can't act act otherwise and so the mechanism that reduces the number of facts to the selected action is the mechanism that mediates between facts and values and it's not simply in and of itself it's a fact that that exists but it isn't a simple that what it does isn't a simple fact you can't it you can't explain it you can't understand why not the same reason that you can't look for the same reason for the same reason that you don't know what a neural network is doing like you can train a neural network notice there's a distinction between facts and facts that we know right there there is whatever it is the case right and then there's our understanding of it and our misunderstanding of it so there are many things that we think we know that we're wrong about there are many things that we are where we're ignorant of and there's this there's this larger always this larger space of reality that we're struggling to engage with and it may in fact be the case that in evolutionary terms but we we know it's the case that we're we have not evolved to understand reality and large perfectly that's not the sort of monkeys we are right and you could even argue that one one cognitive scientist who some of you may have heard of Donald Hoffman is arguing now you know very colorfully that human consciousness or the human mind is is actually evolved to get things wrong in a fairly specific ways so that so as to maximize survival and that that was the argument I made in our first discussion no but but but he was not quite because there's still this still preserves the difference between getting things right and getting things wrong his argument is that getting things truly right having a nervous system and a cognitive architecture that could really understand reality quote reality as it is would be maladaptive and he has some he has some mathematical demonstration of this that that that the the true the quote true representations of reality are categorically maladaptive and you had that there's certain kind of error that is and I'm not I'm not sure I buy this argument but the fact that you can make this argument the fact that you can differentiate the adaptively useful misunderstandings versus a true understanding that's maladaptive the fact that we can even talk about that demonstrates to me that we have this larger picture of what in fact true whether we know it or not and this is what this is what religion gets so catastrophic ly wrong about religion gives you some other mechanism whereby whereby to orient yourself this revelation religious religion does provide those those functional simplifications purpose they're simplifications appropriate to the Iron Age approach well some of them if then some of them are for sure and that's why we have to have this discussion because because mirror mirror revelation and mirror tradition is insufficient and I truly believe that we can agree on that but back to the back to the biological argument so because I thought tonight I would make a very strictly biological argument is that so now the question is now so now you've got your sensory systems that are detecting the world of facts and you have your motor output system which is a very narrow channel because you can only do one thing at a time and that's one of the things about consciousness that's quite strange it's a very very narrow channel so you have to take this unbelievably complex world and you have to channel it into this very narrow channel and you you don't do that by being wrong about the world but you do do that by ignoring a lot of the world and by using representations that are no more complicated than they have to be in order to attain the task at hand it's like you're losing using low resolution representations of the world they're not inaccurate because a low resolution representation of the world isn't inaccurate any more than a low resolution photo is but they're no higher resolution than they need to be in order for you to undertake the task at hand and if you undertake the task at hand and that goes successfully then what you've done and this is basically the essence of American pragmatism what you've done is validated the you validated the validity of your simplifications so if the tool you have in hand is good if the acts you have in hand is sharp enough to chop down the tree then it's a good enough axe and that's part of the way that we define truth pragmatically in the absence of infinite knowledge about everything okay so now you build up this nervous system between the world of facts and the world of values and it and it narrows the world of facts and the question then is how do you generate the mechanism that does that narrowing and this is what's useful and that's not quite having the the cake is layered what because the facts are up here to write it for me and for me to even notice that you're a person right or to attribute beliefs to you or to have a sense of being in relationship at all this is one of those higher-order interpretive acts based on a many-layered a nervous system yes it's not only bottom-up yeah yeah but yeah it's bottom-up and top-down yes and and but fat but facts are also on the top right it's not that we have facts here and values here it's it's well I think what I'm trying to do I think maybe it's one way of thinking about it is that you you are using you're positing that we can use rationality as a mechanism for mediating between facts and values I believe because otherwise there's no use for rationality we can just have the fact but it's a process even simpler than that it's just that for me and I think for everyone if they will only agree to use language this way for me values are simply facts about the experience of conscious creatures good and bad experiences give us our values yeah but they're not simple that's a little bit but there are the goods in the balance some are very simple you have in your hand put on a hot stove he's incredibly simple and you notice it'll save your child if you do it well but again to the unpleasantness of it no it's not if you look at the way the reward and Punishment systems work in the brain you can easily train an animal using reward to wag its tail if it's being shocked electrically you can do that and you can wire it very loaded yet there's a range of unpleasant experiences we can have where we can construe them as pleasant or necessary right and that's a kind of a higher level of donation but I'm talking about you know the worst possible sensory experience that all of us will greet will agree is unpleasant right that doesn't require a story to for us to feel aversion to and there's there many things like that in life that are just just rudimentary where's just we are we are organized in such a way that if you put us into fire we like it so are you are you claiming then like this is another problem this is where I think that the argument that you make although accurate in its rudiments let's say is in sufficiently high resolution because now it sounds to me like you're including the domain of qualia unquestioningly in the domain of facts now you can do that and but we need to know if that's what you're doing like what are these facts you're talking about are they mere manifestations of the objective world or do they shade into the subject there are there are objective facts about subjective experience so yeah I can make I can make true or false claims about your subjectivity and and you can make you can make those about your own subjectivity right you can be wrong about your own subjectivity we're not subjectively incorrigible and I I might have said this last time in Vancouver I made the example i all i all in use here is to speculate about what JFK was thinking the moment he got shot right is not a completely vacuous exercise they're they're literally an infinite number of things we know he wasn't thinking right so we make claims about his conscious mind and at that moment in history which are a scientific even though the data are unavailable I said many people get confused between having answers in practice and they're being answers in principle I mean there there are many trivial fact-based claims we could make about reality where we can't get the data but we know the data are there so you know do you have an even or odd number of hairs on your body at this moment you know we you know we don't want to think about what it would take to ascertain that fact right but there is a fact of the matter right and and so it is with anything but so what is somebody what is a person way there's a many many facts are blurry because you get you're gonna way way amp down to the the one hundredth decimal plate place no so it's like at a certain point you were going to be round in and someone's weight at that point is changing every microsecond because they're exchanging atoms with the air so there's so there there are facts that can be loosely defined this is still this is true of our subjective lives - so if it is a fact about you that when you when you were praying to Jesus you felt an upwelling of rapture right subjectively that can be an absolutely true thing to say about you we can we can pair that subjective experience with an understanding of the neurophysiological basis for it you can think about it in terms of a larger story about your life but all of this can be translated into a fact-based discussion about what's happening for you and my only claim is that the value part and hence the ethics part relates to the extremes of positive and negative experience that people have in their life first of all I wouldn't dispute I don't want to dispute the fact that there are stable qualia pain and pleasure for example and also that there are fundamental motivational systems that structure our perception so as the nervous system increases in complexity these underlying nervous system subsections that produce these rather stable qualia evolved hunger thirst defensive aggression sexuality all these subsystems that that that label experience with with certain somewhat inviolable labels I understand that happens but the point that I'm trying to make here is I think to try to increase the what would you call the breadth of the conversation about how facts get translated into into values because it seems to me the other thing that your account doesn't take proper and this is what surprised me so much about your thinking when I first encountered it see I think the manner in which facts are translated into values is something that actually evolved and it evolved over three and a half billion years the three and a half billion years of life and it built the nervous system from the bottom up and it built this reducing mechanism that takes the infinite number of facts and translates them into a single value per action and it does that in layers and so there is a relationship between the world of facts and the world of values and there has to be but it isn't derive above 1 to 1 in the confines of your single existence through pure route it's way more complicated than that well yeah there's more to it than rationality yes I mean again it's not rationality that causes you to remove your hand from a hot stove and it's not rationality that causes you to like the experience of love and bliss and rapture and creativity over or more than pointless misery and and despair things other than rationality are clearly necessary absolutely but the question is do we ever have to be irrational to get the good things in life and I would argue that that the answer to does clearly no there's nothing irrational about loving your wife or your best friend or yourself or even a stranger if what you mean by love there is genuinely wanting happiness for that person genuinely taking pleasure in their company genuinely wanting to to find a way of being where you're no longer in a zero sum condition with a stranger or with a partner but you're you're collaborating together to have better lives so rationality moves through that situation continuously because rationality is the only way that you and I can get our representations of the world to cohere it's it's when I say okay there's there's a lion behind that rock don't go over there that only that that only makes sense to you if you're playing this rationality game it the way I'm playing it if I mean something else by lion or I mean something else by don't go over there you know you're confused and very likely dead or not if we're trying to establish the proposition that rationality is the mechanism by which we make our worldviews cohere I would agree with that in part we also make them cool here because we're actually biologically structured the same way and so there's a proclivity for them to go here to begin with but we iron out our differences through the exercise I wouldn't call it rationality I would call it logos because I think it's more in corporate it's a it's a broader and that this is where he's smuggling it Jesus let's say so I'd like it there's a point of order here I wanna I'm I'm disconcerted by Douglas of silence no I want to pivot because I know I know how good he is when he actually speaks so I want to pivot to another subject because we can return to this we need to first before you pivots I mean having said to you what I think your concern is with Jordan I mean it strikes me that Jordans concern and I share this just as I share some of your concern expressed at the outset in Jordan's fundamental concern it seems to me is a one I fundamentally share which is rationalism isn't enough and it's or let me put it another way can you both show me where it where it's obviously insufficient like noise like music but but there's nothing but again so to say that it's not to say that there's more to life than being rational is not to say and perhaps never to say you need to run against rationality you need to be irrational in order to get something good let me express it a different way yeah we haven't tried the purely rational approach yet we have applied it for very long well many of us have been trying for a couple of centuries at least which is a blip yeah I mean the tiniest dot at the end of human evolution so I think that a concern which Jordan has and certainly concern I have is if we try this we can think of all sorts of ways in which you can go wrong if you take away all that's a supporting structure you can think of any number of ways in which you can go wrong and that I suppose that that's at the root of the the concern about where you might be taking us or to put it another way if we enter the world that you would suggest not everyone may necessarily come out as Sam Harris what can you give me one way where you think I can go wrong and again this we can't forget your caveat what you started with you're not very smart well but that's the person so then you're basically saying that the stupid people need their myths you know we smart people on stage don't need them right well I am NOT actually I'm I look I actually am saying that to some degree that this look look if you're if you're if you're not exceptionally cognitively astute you should be traditional and conservative because if you are if you can't think well you're going to think badly and if you think badly you're going to fall into trouble and so it is definitely the case and this has been and what would you call a cliche of political belief for a long time if you're not very smart it's better to be conservative because then you do what everyone else does and generally speaking doing what everyone else does is the path of least error moving forward now that doesn't mean that rationality is unnecessary what does it mean little conservative it doesn't mean that either right precisely it doesn't but all conservative structures are not the same either and that we have many warring and incompatible versions of being conservative true true and this is exactly this is we're rational that actually does play its role although I don't think it's best conceptualized as rationality precisely it's it's definitely the case that we it's to take Douglass's point that we need to be bound by our traditions but we need to be judicious in their reason Tatian and update and we have to do both this is what says he says he describes the tragedy of the clergy yeah he pretty much he pretty much says look if they don't believe it they recognize it's a very useful metaphor but they don't need to believe it it's they tell it and he says the tragedy of the clergy is they can never admit that what they're saying is just a metaphor right before or after he threw his housekeeper down the stairs look we can all find flaws we all have skeletons in our closet but that but that yes that there is a way in which religion is what he describes as philosophy for the masses and that if you recognize that most people are not going to spend their lives studying philosophy they're not going to be reading about the difference between light nits and Kant that religion has to do now I'm not saying that I agree with that particularly but there's a heck of an argument with in there which a lot of people will be living their lives in I don't think it's a good argument if you recall or just to just imagine what it's like to be a child but especially from the perspective of being a parent I mean you know I have two young girls and they you know they're very smart young normally they're smart but you know one of them's four-and-a-half years old and those almost nothing right so she knows what I and my wife and our society tell her a level of me at what point is she going to to think for herself about these fundamental questions and I mean she again she's currently spending half the day dressed up like Batgirl or Catwoman right so if I told her that these superheroes were real she would believe that for the longest time and if she did if we lived in a cult that thought they were real or a whole society that by dint of its Geographic or linguistic isolation managed to maintain a conversation about in this case Batgirl and Catwoman that they were real and that it was absolutely important to honor them and you'd burn in hell if you failed to do this but this would be we would be meeting fully grown adults who believe this but it seems to me Sam that you bring up the superhero thing quite a bit so I think I'll go directly so then I won okay so you make the case in a moral landscape that they're an ideal is real because the ideal that you define an ideal is real and the ideal is whatever maximizes well-being and gets us away from hell you said not only is that real you all say that's the fundamental axiom that's the claim in the moral landscape so you do make a claim that there is a real ideal and I would slow it well I wouldn't necessarily are in a circumstance where things can't matter right weight consciousness is the key is the condition in which things can matter where there can be a range of experiences some of which are very very bad if the word bad means anything they're bad and some of which are very very good if the were if the word good means anything and we are navigating in that space we can't help but navigate or seek to navigate in that space and religion is one okaywell conversation and that's that navigation means business now but that girl in catwoman are approximations to a higher ideal that's what they are and and to attempt this is a biblical idea and I'm fairly sure for personal expense that a lot of parents are perfectly content with bringing their children up vaguely within the story they've inherited and at some point the children realize that the fairy doesn't bring the money when their teeth fall out and at some point maybe around the same time or a bit later they discover the Santa Claus doesn't really come down the chimney and at some point they realize that actually the whole religious thing is a kind of metaphor but he's got them through the formative years in some way often with terrible damage along the way I concede that but also with something else and I'm struck by the number of people this is why I share some of what I think is Jordan's concern about the possibility of the world your envisaging which is I can think of a lot of parents now my country and other countries as well who I'm just very struck they themselves a kind of baby boomer or 60s atheists humanists whatever and I start to notice for instance that they're enrolling their children in Christian schools and I saved them why are you doing this and they have fairly coherent arguments along the lines of what I just had look I don't particularly believe this myself but I think it's a pretty good way to bring up the kids it's a structure of a kind I'm not sure I can find all sorts of flaws in that but enough people are doing it that it's something that needs to be addressed well I it's I would say yes it speaks to a real failure of imagination and an effort in the secular community to produce truly non embarassing alternative exactly and this is this is across the board this is not just school this is how do you conduct a funeral how do you get married you know all of it what rites of passage can you offer a thirteen year what are you doing here what are we doing yeah yeah just to have how to have the first people in history to have absolutely no explanation for what we're doing at all yeah it's a big moment yeah yes and and then that sharpens up my concern perfectly because to to shrink back from that moment and resort to one of the the pseudo stories of the past I consider to be a failure of nerve both intellectually and morally okay so let's go back to the to the superhero idea one of the one of the things you might notice about superheroes is that some of them are actually deities right so in the Marvel Pantheon you have Thor for example and so there's a there's a very thin line between the idea of a superhero and the idea of a god especially if you think about it in a polytheistic manner so the modern superheroes and the Greek gods for example share a tremendous number of features in common and so here's here's here's something to think about so there's a reason that people admire superheroes and it's because they act out parts of the hero archetype that's the technical reason they're obviously acting something out because that's how you can tell they're superheroes they share some set of characteristics across the set of superheroes that makes them super heroes now the question might be what is the essential element of being a superhero that makes you a superhero and the answer the way that that was solved historically is that as polytheistic societies developed and that was usually a consequence of isolated tribes coming into contact with one another they each had their our separate deities and then over the course of time those deities ward in actual wars with people but also conceptually and out of that polytheistic framework was extracted something that was vaguely monotheistic as all of those cultures came together to try to determine what their highest ideal should be so that's the God of gods that's a way of thinking about it or the king of kings that's another way of thinking about it and that's an implicit ideal I could make a case tells that to the Hindus you tell that to the Hindus we've got 1.2 billion people or maybe it's 1.4 now who are operating in a in a religiously saturated system that does not conform to that ideal there is no one on top there still there still is so arguably there's three on top of it all but there's still there's still an attempt to generate that polytheistic to integrate that polytheistic reality underneath a single rubric or you have nothing but continual dissociation of the culture and I'm not saying this yes that's a pretty good description of what's going on in India at the moment well I'm not I'm not saying that this is inevitable either and there is a tension the problem the problem this is Nietzsche's observation and Elliot as well the problem with extracting out the highest God from the panoply of gods as the ideal becomes so abstract that it disappears that's the death of God and Eliot has tracked that phenomena over multiple cultures not it's not something that's unique to the West so the danger of that abstraction is that it gets too abstract and disappears and leaves us in the situation that Douglas just pointed out can I throw us back to the key the the key issue of Elton John's class which you came up with the other night that's something I wanted to add to that explain why I said Elton John's class just now oh well we came back to this question of what makes something valuable and I used as an example in Vancouver one of those nights if I had a glass here which I which I said was actually it was the glass that Elton John used the last time he played in this theater suddenly it seems to be a more valuable glass and then if Jordan and I argued about putative what the status of that value was I don't know where you want to take well it's just one thing in particular which is that the whole issue of what it is you give value to and let's let's say that that glass was demonstrated for a time to having been drunk from by Elton John at his final concert of work latest farewell tour whatever so that's already a glass with something let's say that over the years the whole attribution of that glass becomes debatable over a long period of time a lot of things are going to have happened around it and to stretch this to breaking point possibly let's say at some point people lose their lives over whether that is Elton John's glass let's say that people lose blood let's not just say that let's recognize that use the world we're living at with respective religions so the problem is that we end up when we're talking about religion when we're talking it's the same thing when you're talking about land you're not just talking about any inherent worth you're talking also about the worth of things people have given up for this yeah and so we end up giving the layers of things what no it's more than that we inherit more and more layers of the meaning because other people before us have given that meaning to it so that by the time you have this object it's an object of worth even if it's no no worth in itself at all because of the amount of worth of people before you have given to it and that seems to some extent what we're doing with the religion I think so see when you start with the hypothesis of facts then you kind of have to define what effect is and so I think the simplest way of doing that to begin with is that there's a set of objective facts and that's the facts about objective reality you can think about that from a scientific perspective and we're going to we're going to agree that that exists although it's very complicated and difficult to understand that exists as one set of constraints on what we can do and what we can't do that's the objective world and then on top of that and this is where things get very very complicated you have this layered system of meaning which is partly a manifestation of these layers of the nervous system that I described but also partly a manifestation of those layers of the nervous system operating in social space over vast periods of time so that would be the social sociological agreement that's all layered on top of the objective world and it actually constitutes part of the the lens through which you view the world to the degree where you actually see that the layering in the thing so like when you go to a museum and you look at Elvis Presley Elvis Presley's guitar you don't look at the guitar and think that's Elvis Presley's guitar that's not how your brain works you actually see Elvis Presley's guitar it's an active perception so it becomes built right into your nervous system even though the fact that that is Elvis Presley's guitar and the reason that that's valuable is because of a sociological agreement about what position Elvis Presley occupied in the dominance hierarchy that we're all part of and so what you see when you look at an artifact like that is you see a layer of dominance hierarchy overlaid on top of an objective reality and that's actually your phenomenal reality now the thing that's so interesting is that that layer of perception that's mediating between the facts and you has a structure and that's the structure that I've been insisting is a narrative and I think Sam thinks it's a narrative too because his fundamental ethic is that you should act in a way which means to embody a mode of being which means to be a personality that moves us from hell to something approximating heaven okay back Jordan what I'm struggling to understand what I don't understand is how any of that is a counterpoint to my concern about religion so fret because I agree with all that I mean there there are some caveats I would issue for instance is pause it's possible to walk into a museum be shown a guitar not know it's Elvis Presley's guitar and then be told it's a Elvis Presley's guitar and you can see in real time the change in significance so that you can see the layers of the perceptual or the meaning accrue you might actually not even keep you might know it who Elvis Presley is and not care right so there many different things on on on the menu here as opposed to just holding the awestruck Elvis Presley's guitar Sam and the same is true of the Jesus story or anything else that that people you can find layers of engagement with it that be maybe more and less useful yes but my fundamental concern is that the the way you are tending to dignify the religious sub set of stories as being foundational necessary just we criticize at our peril is giving people license to believe things that they clearly shouldn't believe things that are intrinsically divisive intrinsically less-than-optimal as far as organizing an individual human life we can do better than Christianity on almost every question but with the possible exception of building churches okay so well the first thing is the first thing is that I deeply agree with you that that mechanism can go wrong okay so you have the objective world and it's one set of constraints and then you have this interpretive structure and I'm not saying that that interpretive structure is infallible it clearly isn't and neither is the process that gives rise to it you see this for example in conditions like manic depressive disorder with religious delusions or schizophrenia you see what what you see in those situations is a pathologize ation of that overlay of meaning that can clearly have yeah okay now the question is what do we do about that how do we keep those perceptual structures which are somewhat arbitrary how do we keep them functional and this is I think where your discussion of rationality is so important particularly when you say rationality is what enables us to establish what will you agree on in our shared reality okay so so imagine this so part of the way you were in yourself in the world of facts objective facts is through your senses so you basically have five dimensions of triangulation so to speak to help you determine what's there in the objective world and then you have this multi-layer structure that's part of a biological and partly socio-cultural a cultural that enable you to distill that but it can go astray partly because it ages and becomes archaic which is and demented for that matter which is partly your objection to the fundamentalist types this has been known for a very long time that this sort of thing happens so what we do with the way we solve that we have a solution to that so partly the way we solve that is through articulated discourse right because you have a way of looking at the world and I have a way of looking at the world and we have to occupy the same space so you're probably wrong about some things and I'm probably wrong about some things and hopefully if we talk we can sort out the differences and make things more stable right so but it and I would put rationality right in that place that's my rationale is prime but the problem fair enough but but there's a problem with that too and and I think see the all the times we've talked so far you've been I would say the avatar of a scientific viewpoint and I'd been cast let's say as the avatar of a religious viewpoint but I've actually thought this through scientifically a lot and I can make a biological argument for all of this and a developmental argument so it isn't only rationality that does this so this is what the thing that was so cool about studying for example Jean Piaget because one of the things Piaget pointed out is that children engage in negotiation if they negotiate their rent they in reality just like adults do but they don't do it only through articulated speech and neither do adults what children do is they get together and play and this is why play is so important for children that starts to happen when they're about three years of all old because they can look outside their own idiosyncratic perspective at 3:00 and they can start to take someone else's viewpoint into consideration which is what you have to do if you're going to play and then what children do is they invent little fictional realities that's what they do when they're pretending and so they assign each other roles and they assign a plot and a drama to the to the pretend play and then they act it out and in that action they bring themselves into harmonious union right which is the act of generating a game that everyone wants to play and Piaget his observation was and this is Nietzsche and observation as well that the morality that character society isn't rationality top-down although it's partly that it's also interactions that are say play-based and bottom-up and that's actually how it evolved to begin with because animals generate societies that are functional but they don't do it through rationality they can't because they don't have rationality they don't have articulated speech they have something like an embodied game now what happens and this is a Nietzschean observation he's the first person I learned this from is our morality emerged from the bottom-up through through thousands hundreds of thousands of years of shared games let's say and and the interweaving of those shared games into something approximating a morality that we could all live within peacefully that happened bought him up and then what happened was because we didn't know the mechanism behind that because it's instantiated in our nervous system invisibly we watched ourselves act which is what we do and then we told stories about that because that's what we do when we watch yourself act and then we encapsulated the morality that evolved in the stories and that's the religious essence of the story ten seconds so we have to pivot to Douglas for a important question but I would just say in response to that Jordan I don't disagree with much of consequence in that my concern however is that there is there's a there's a reason why we differentiate childhood from adulthood and all of us are stunted to some degree or another in a fairly perverse childhood and the reason we what we confront now is a world largely populated by dangerous children right who are in their fifth and sixth decade of life I mean run by populate a tent run by yes and and it's so and really and if anything typifies the childhood of our species in my view it is religious orthodoxy and insofar as we're breaking free of the orthodoxy part and getting something that's more scalable and with it and can survive a more pluralistic and cosmopolitan world it is because it is being win at every point by rationality and I think that that at some point we could have a fully defensible rational honoring of many of the things you think are essential like the power of story or the power of ritual or the power of art that is focused on some sacred purpose and if the question is how to get there we have a point of water here that's one question but I want to hand over to the audience for Q&A and for a couple of minutes I've had a sign being waved at me saying Q&A and really should obey design yes so I think what's going to happen is we're going to use your computer we're going to we're going to ask the audience first I think that was what we decided and you guys yes you guys get to vote by noise there's an inflection point here we can do one of two things and all lit one well let the first people yell and then the second people yell but the question is we can either continue the discussion or we can stop and go to Q&A so the first thing we'll do is say okay how many of you would like us to stop and go to Q&A okay second second question how many of you would like us to continue with the discussion [Applause] that's that's a successful vote okay I know the fish I want to go so I'm gonna seize the floor I want to ask a question of both of you okay it's about the three of us but I think it's more about the two of you each of us to one or another degree has been described as a gateway drug to the all right we've been attacked by by people left-of-center as somehow inspiring or pandering to right-of-center and in many cases far right of center ideas and and and ethical and pseudo ethical commitments I'm wondering yes I'm wondering I'm wondering if we can steal man the concerns that people have with us for a few minutes before addressing them well how do you how do you view this this reaction to you to your work and well do that first yeah can I just say before I do I was going to say it if we were gonna go to audience Q&A I understand who I was reminded today that there still a blasphemy law in Ireland am I right on that I I await the police I'm right aren't I yeah in which case can I just say that I'm not gonna be happy if we leave the stage tonight and I have not both committed and if Jordan would like to do quickly we could make it a full house I really do think we should be blasphemous I think I must have done that already but I I'll have to go to the tape on that um so well here's the thing we've all had similar issue experiences on land there are a number of people among our friends and colleagues perhaps you might say have had it as well and I think what's happening at the moment is that there's a set of tripwires that have been put across the culture and for a long time if you went across these tripwires you died reputationally speaking because of the nature of the media new media among other things that sudden death isn't possible anymore all these is not always possible so for instance if the New York Times says that Jordan is you know sort of leading member of the Ku Klux Klan it's not just that people don't believe the New York Times anymore it's that they can go and find out for themselves that this is a lie and that's a fundamental difference and it means that people are surviving the tripwire experience but there's a whole set of these tripwires and I think they've been they've been planted very strangely among other things I tripped on was he Islam one think to an extent it was the one you tripped on Jordan it was more to do with funds and pronouns was the first one the great the great thing about this by the way is that once you survived the first tripwire you know in my case they sort of merrily jump along in no-man's land landing on ie D after ie D and strangely I'm still here but but you said I should steal a man it here's what I think is probably happening there is a fear that in this realm of uncertain values which we might concede at anyway that we're in there is only one thing we all the one thing we all agree on is we mustn't become Nazis okay oddly speaking that's the basis of ethics it's the only bit of history anyone knows and they don't even know it so they think they're all over the Hitler thing haven't got a clue most of them all they know is Hitler's a bad person this is why by the way anyone anyone doesn't like in politics is Hitler that Joyce W Bush Hitler if you had any sense of historical reference you might say Henry the fifth domineering father whose shadow he had to step out of for instance but there henry v smith who knows about that so it's everything's Hitler so if we agree that the one thing we're all meant to do is not become Nazis you build these incredibly deep big trenches around anything you think could be as it were something that would lead us back to that the problem is is that people who have done that trench building include people who are doing it for their own personal political game so they build a set of trenches around their political views and they say if you come near this and you've trodden into that trench and you're a Nazi some of it is for short-term convenience and I have no doubt that some of it is sincere but the amount of the amount of lying about it makes me doubt that last bit and let me add one other thing to that one of the books I recommend people read most to do with politics is a brilliant book by Paul Berman who I think you know as well called power and the idealists it has by the way the worst subtitle of any book it's called power and the idealists the strange passion of yashka Fisher now distinguished left-wing German politician though he is it's not it does it doesn't leap off the show anyhow the strange passion of Yasuo Fisher is an amazing book which I wish was taught in schools because he describes in this book how this group of Germans who grew up in the 1950s at one aim but one aim was we're not going to become like our parents okay it's they think it's enough to orient their politics around what happens the green movement melds with a part of the German Left whole set of things happen they end up agreeing with the PLO and the hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s and before you know it one of your skir fishes housemates is on the plane as it's on the tarmac and he's separating out the Jews and the non-jews big we've done it again the one thing we were meant not to become was the people standing on the ramp saying that way that way and we did it if we went all the way around so there's something about this that I just wish was better known but it's not as damn easiest all that like your enemies don't come with jackboots and swastikas like this it's just not that easy no they live inside you that's really the case so let me try to steal man approach okay so so the first thing that people assume about me is that I'm no fan of the radical left and that's absolutely and that's absolutely true I am no fan of the radical left [Applause] and that's primarily because there's a variety of reasons but it's primarily because I believe that the radical left airs in insisting at every possible opportunity that the proper defining characteristic of each individual is their group membership I think that that's you and you do have a group membership in fact you have a whole plethora of them which makes things quite complicated as the intersection lists have already figured out but whenever someone brings a primary orientation to the world that is group centered rather than individual centered I think they've already made a catastrophic mistake and so I don't approve of the collectivists now I don't approve of left-wing collectivist and I don't approve of right-wing collectivists but the right-wing collectivists haven't overrun the universities and the left-wing collectivists has so so that's a distinct difference now the left-wing collectivists enjoy acquiring a certain linguistic hegemony because they know that that's part of the way they can win the battle and that's what they were trying to do when they passed compelled speech legislation in Canada as far as I was concerned so I made a video saying I'm not going to abide by that because I'm not using the reprehensible linguistic maneuvers of collectivists who I detest so now when I did that you see it was a very strange thing for a Canadian to do because Canadians don't do that partly because Canada works just fine and so nobody comes up and says waves the flag saying look we're wandering off a dangerous cliff here and so then if someone does stand up and say that then the first thing that all the other Canadians think and should think is that there's something wrong with that person and that would be me so then the question would be well what variety of things could be wrong with dr. Peterson that's a very long list but the ones that might cause actually a better subtitles in it yes terrific title yes so so what happened was I objected to the radical left that was my perspective but the people who objected to me or who were even critical of me are curious about me thought okay well if Peterson isn't part of the left then where the hell is he and the answer could be well anywhere on the political spectrum including Nazi and of course that's hypothetically true and if I was a Nazi then that would be really useful for all the radical leftists because if you're a Nazi as Douglas has already pointed out we've already decided that you're a bad person and if I was a bad person that no one would have to listen to me and so it was in the interests of the radicals who I was just whose positions I was disputing to cast me as a Nazi but it was also a reasonable cognitive maneuver because there was some possibility although it's infinitesimal given the tiny proportion of actual Nazis in our society that I would in fact be one and have gotten away with hiding that at two major universities for 25 years and also also at that point I had 250 hours of my lectures on YouTube which was basically every word in essence that I ever uttered to a student since 1993 and a huge part of that actually consisted of very trenchant criticisms of Nazis so it was difficult to pin that on me so so so but to give my critics credit they had their reason for vilifying me and the reason was if you object you might be a villain okay so that's that steel man number one I'm not at least the kind of villain they think I am although I might be some other kind of villain altogether so then the next steel man issue is the left has a place okay so why well here's why in order to act properly in the world you have to do things everyone agrees on that and to do things you have to do them in the social world you have to cooperate and compete with other people and when you cooperate and compete with other people in the service of valid goals valuable goals productive goals you produce hierarchies you produce hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of power those aren't exactly the same thing but at the way you produce hierarchies and hierarchies dispossessed people they dispossessed people because the spoils go to a few that's the problem of the unequal distribution of wealth and because in any hierarchy of competence a disproportionate number of a small number of people do most of the creative work and these are ironclad laws okay so the problem with hierarchies are necessary but the problem with hierarchies is they produce dispossession and the left in principle speaks for the dispossessed and someone has to speak for the dispossessed and so when the lefties look at me and they say well dr. Peterson is always speaking about the necessity of hierarchies and how can we be sure that he's not trying to justify them in their current position and obscure the fact that they tend towards tyranny and deception which they clearly do how do we know that he's just not real fiying the present power structure for his own aims and why should we trust him and that's a perfectly valid objection now I believe it happens to be wrong because I understand the downside of hierarchies and and I also think I understand how to go about rectifying that but that's why they're objecting insofar as they don't as insofar as they're playing a straight political game is the ideological form of grandeur grandiose behavior so there's one other thing in this which is worth mentioning which is the perception is that as it were aside from let's say this is the center of the political access and have to do this for you but okay that's the right the presumption is it's just a clear like if you start by saying I don't know I think people should pay smaller taxes there and you just gone like that and then it's not sysm and here's the really weird thing that is disco because all of this look all of this is just the footnote still to the 20th century and we're still trying to work out what happened and why and we don't know and in the history books the period we're living in will be the post Holocaust post-world War two post gulag world when they were still trying to sort out what happened behind the crime-scene tape okay so on the Left there's a very interesting thing which is that you can go pretty much all the way like this and first of all there's not a very wide recognition that you have the gulag not there's not very much known about that people don't read Solzhenitsyn they don't mean it so so you think they left you just hit the vegans he might be like radical in your fairness okay so the problem here is not just they don't know what happened on that side but it's worse than that there was a there was a young girl a commentator on the TV in London a couple of morning's ago arguing about Trump and so on as usual not very enlightening discussion she's arguing the Piers Morgan and she says you you keep on saying I'm you know some supporter of Barack Obama I mean I'm a communist she said I'm literally a communist if this girl had said you know you should be more careful I'm I'm literally a fascist by the way edit that one carefully on that I'm alive to YouTube literal fascist admits but everyone is busy searching around like in Canada at one of the big discussion forums the Human Rights Commission's found that they were like eleven people on this neo-nazi forum and it turned out half of them were working for the Canadian government trying to find neo-nazis Canadian government concert 50% of the neo-nazis in the Canada so their scurrying around looking for the Nazis like this and on the other side it's like mainstream all the television yeah I'm a communist I'd love to go through that again well okay so so here here's another problem this is a really interesting problem okay so you brought out two things and one is no one knows about what happened in Maoist China or what happened in the Soviet Union which is absolutely appalling because we should all know that and so there's obviously a cliff on the left side now I would say actually there is the possibility that as you move farther out on each end of the political spectrum the rate at which you deteriorate accelerates so it's not linear I think that's possible but having said that that's also the case on the left now one of the things we could say is well those idiot leftists should get their house in order because they won't differentiate themselves from their radical brethren okay so now we might ask well why we might ask two things why and whose problem is that exactly okay so the first issue of why is well people who are left-leaning have a hard time drawing boundaries that's what makes them left-leaning and I mean this technically because left-leaning people are high in openness to experience which is a creativity trait so they like information flow and they don't like borders between things and they tend to be low and orderliness so disorder doesn't disgust and upset them okay so they can't draw boundaries and that's why they're on the left but boundaries have their problems so there's some utility and people who don't like them okay but the second problem is and this isn't a problem that's only germane to the left it's the problem of the damn 20th century it's like okay when does the Left go too far and the answer is nobody knows like with the right wingers you can tell man it's like they make a claim of ethnic or racial superiority it's like barks Nazi right and then you can see that this happens because even back in the 70s when William F Buckley was sort of a leading conservative he put a box around the Ku Klux Klan in the John Birch types and he said I'm not but none of that's happening on the left okay why well they say while we stand for diversity it's like well everyone likes diversity and well what about inclusivity damn right man let's include some people but what about what about equality that'd be good that'd be good let's have some equality it's like okay well how much equality exactly well then it's gradations right well equality of opportunity damn straight equality of outcome sounds good how about no under no circumstances whatsoever but you know I can't look but here's the problem you get somebody you get somebody saying race or ethnicity group member X is detestable because of their group identity and you think evil Nazi but then you see someone saying well I just wish that everybody could have an equal outcome what are you gonna do you gonna punch them that's what you're supposed to do with Nazis no you're not you're gonna think oh that's a pretty nice person it's like just because you're nice doesn't mean you're good and just because you stand for equality of outcome doesn't mean right but it's but the thing is it's a complex technical problem right because it looks like you need a multivariate equation to define pathology on the Left it's like well if you believe this and this and this and to disproportionately then we have to put a box around you but it's not like someone wears a symbol on their damn shirt or cat hood onto their face that enables you to identify them so we have a real structural problem here we don't know how to box in pathology on the left yeah no one knows including the moderate leftist but none of us know an additional problem is that many of these issues may not have a solution that we can happily live with right so if it takes it let's sharpen this up and this is more in in the interest of steel Manning our critics you take a problem like immigration right now the the the intuition that's driving the left does take the extreme case and open borders ethic you know but borders are illegitimate borders are it just in principle a sign of selfishness and xenophobia and and unearned privilege right you none of us can take credit for the fact that we were born into the societies we were born into and yet we have all of the advantages of having been born there and so it is with with all of you and we none of us are currently living through this civil war in Syria now and that's a good thing for all of us and so the the the concern here is that the moment you say well immigration is potentially a problem right immigrate we can't just all throw open the borders to all of humanity because what would happen what would happen is people would continue to cross those borders until the the level of well-being in in the developed world diminish so much that there was no reason to cross the borders anymore right maybe they were just some principle of osmosis right so okay so so so it's even it's even worse than that sir but the concern is that this is totally ethically speaking this is a totally illegitimate situation and to shine a bright enough light on any particular story in Syria say I mean you just you give me the right family with children and I learn enough about them and their plight and I recognize within you know 30 seconds that if I were them I would be desperate to get to Dublin or New York or San Francisco or anywhere but Syria right and it seems like a completely it seems evil to in any way perpetuate this lottery where you pulled a bad ticket and sorry that's this is this defines the rest of your life and the lives of your children and we end and it there is no bright line where any of us you know well-meaning people wherever we are in the political spectrum or wherever we are in any other question there's no bright line where we can say AHA that's exactly the that's the solution that we we know is ethical that we know we can defend against all comers and it can survive every test of narrative I mean this goes straight to the power of stories you tell you tell people a compelling enough story about one little girl and it changes policy I mean it's not what happened to Uncle amiracle and she just was faced with one one denied refugee and all of a sudden that the policy for Europe changed and so this is again this is a I'm not saying there's a solution to this but this is the fear to fit that there's that there's a there's an imputation of callousness on the part of speaking specifically to you Douglas because it's been your issue or more than ours yeah but how callous must you be to be worrying about immigration and that's that that's obviously there's a counter-argument from the right side but there is a there's an ethical core to it that is it's difficult to dismiss and this is something which I mean it's not just that issues almost every issue we were talking about bit of dinner that right we seem not to be well we just aren't ready for the communications age we're in mmm and we're just not ready for it our brains are not yet able to cope let me give an example the notion of private and public speech that's just basically evaporated so that if you this is the problem try out an idea with your friends just throw around an idea we've all done it for around ideas with your friends if even one person is videoing it and my post did this is whatever it is well we're all in it's too dangerous to try things out for most people that's a problem of no borders and so this is it so we are always vulnerable that are for instance most people in Europe for instance one borders I mean they're like overwhelming majority in every country want there to be borders but if you show them a footage of somebody being turned away at the border that morning there's but we don't know what to do with it we have abstract principles we need to apply we want to abide by everybody wants to abide by it but we don't know what to do in this precisely this era and I think we've just got among other things work and all sorts of ways to find ways to think about this sort of deeper than the ones we've managed so far one of them yes is to cope with the idea of the unbelievable luck but we've all got unbelievable luck and then the questions from that if I'm lucky what am i what are my priorities my obligation what am i open again cuz I'm lucky what are my obligations and some people say my obligation is to share my home with the rest of the world if that's not that it's worse than that because it's because I know lots of people who've taken in a refugee and things like that okay and I have unbelievable admiration for them that's really working the walk but if the different people who called your bluff when you said I don't see you taking in refugees into your home and they said although there's one in the living room right now I always want to turn up to their houses with some refugees they I've got yours there also are 50 in the living room exactly okay so let's let's let's this a bit more okay so the issue is borders exclude right and that's a postmodern proposition or maybe you could take that even further that borders exclude and privilege those within the borders it's like yes okay so let's take that seriously now part of this seriousness is poor innocent children are hurt at borders that happens all the time okay the question is are you willing to give up the borders now let's think about what borders are your skin is a border okay and you're prejudiced in protection of your skin for example you won't just sleep with anyone you reserve the right to keep that border intact right and to be choosy about the manner in which it's broached you're you likely have a bedroom it probably has walls you have clothing you have a house you have a town you have a state you have a country and those are all borders its borders within borders within borders within borders and you need those borders because otherwise you will die so we could not be too hypocritical about the damn borders he's like we don't know how to organize fragile things without putting boundaries around them and you see that in Genesis right as soon as people realize that I'm sneaking in a little religion here in cases as soon as people realize they become self conscious they wake up and realize their vulnerability the first thing they do is manufacture a border between them in the world and we need borders between us in the world and we pay a bloody price for borders and I and I say those words very carefully we play pay a bloody price for borders and it's often in the price of other people's blood and so then the question might be well how should you conduct yourself ethically in a world where other people are paying in blood for your borders and the answer that I've been trying to communicate to people is get your damn house in order mayor as much responsibility as you can act as effectively as you can as an individual in the world because then you can justify your privilege you can justify your luck and your good fortune and maybe within the confines of your border you can be more productive and useful than you would be in the absolute absence of borders altogether and it seems to me that that's the case and then we have to have a discussion okay the left doesn't like borders and the right is more fond of them and they're both right and so because we don't know how strict the border should be or how permeable it should be it shouldn't be absolute so nothing moves between borders if everything dies then but if the borders disappear then we can't survive so we have to have a discussion about borders all the time and that's partly that's partly what we're doing here we have to be more sophisticated about these sorts of things very few people end up getting held accountable for their own use in this matter among so many others there's an enormous amount to gain by saying something that's wrong and there's very little to gain by saying something is right on this I mean you just it's just a world of suffering we're ready and look the problem with this I mean this is this is your this is your area of politic Warner is mine but these lines that are being put down on the left at the moment of which this is one these are the ones that are now coming up I mean you could today's one you can't now act a role that you're not you can't pretend to be someone else a this is a brand new rule the film ed Scarlett Johansson who was cast in the film as a trans transgender woman I think a man will become a woman it might have been the other way around but it scarcely matters oh it matches that's your fascist my talking that's actually a boundary to that's actually a border to it so it's another case where these things reverse in a perverse manner like where did that come from yeah well probably came from the west coast yeah yeah it seems to me that we need to somehow get comfortable with the increasingly public moments of uncertainty on topics like this because so much of so much of safety reputational safety as you were just alluding it's predicated in the public sphere in either pretending to be certain or falsely being certain on a safe answer a safe and wrong answer to a complicated part of this is is is the pathology of basal instinct and so because the rule now is if I feel sorry for you I'm good right and so so let's say there's a complex situation that requires a tremendous amount of adult cognitive computation to solve like what do we do about the borders because tearing them down is not the answer well the person who stands up and says well I see someone who's hurt by a border and I feel empathy for them then immediately says therefore I'm good which isn't so bad but therefore I'm also morally superior to you and this is this is one of the true pathologies of the empathic collectivists is that they presume that their reflexive empathy marks them out as morally superior and that's appalling because part of it is a it's too easy just because I feel sorry for you doesn't mean I'm good partly because I can feel so sorry for you that I'm actually harmful to you and that's what happens in the case of overprotective parents for example so we know perfectly well that that empathy is not an untrammeled moral virtue it has to be tempered by other virtues and carefully tempered by other virtues and so we have to stop allowing in our public discourse the unquestioned assumption that just because I manifest more pity in the moment than you do that I'm somehow a morally superior individual in fact not only do we have to question that we in fact have to we have to deeply question it and say what makes you think that you're that you're just not taking things too far right there because there's just as much error on the side of too much empathy as there is on the side of too little empathy and that's a hard thing for everyone to learn because empathy feels so good like if you feel mercy towards a suffering child it's like that is kind of an indication that you're an ethical person but that's not the basis for complex and sophisticated foreign policy we know it isn't because it we we know our empathy diminishes yeah almost linear way with the numbers of people to empathize with right so we spoke about this one one night in Vancouver but this has been tested where if you tell someone that the about the plight of one little girl you will elicit the maximum empathic response and the met the maximum of an altruistic response though they'll give the most amount of money they're gonna give to any cause to one compelling story to save one little boy or girl but if you start adding boys and girls to the to the one keeping the one the same people's empathy degrades and their actual that their altruism to grace oh I said empathy is non-quantitative almost it's also partly because in your life if you see a person in trouble yes you but if you see a million people in trouble what you should probably do at least to begin with is run yeah what are you gonna do it maybe you could give $1,000 to one person but but if you divided that up among a million all that would happen would you would you would be happy you would have no money and they wouldn't be any better off but but but this is to say that so much of moral progress today entails unhooking from the highly salient empathy driving story and connecting with the the actual quantitative reality to learn that it's five hundred thousand people dying every year from heart disease or whatever it is or there's there's this five hundred thousand people dying from this famine the fact that that that can't be made sexy for our news cycle right the fact that we lose attention is something we have to figure out how to correct also again it's very interestingly akin to your objection that you raised before is that there are there are adult forms of solving problems that aren't akin to children's play which is something by the way I agree with because I don't think that the manner in which children organize the world is the end of the way that things should be organized it's the basis for some of the organization but this is akin to the same issue is that the the basal motivational responses the emotional responses no matter how well-meaning aren't of sufficient conceptual sophistication to deal with incredibly elaborate and complex systems and then we have another problem too is that well that's really troublesome for people because they want to do the right thing globally and then you tell them look you don't know anything you don't know how to take this insanely complicated system that we have and improve it and just because you're feeling pity doesn't mean that you're an expert in the retooling of hydroelectric systems for example and there's one there's one straightforward way to do that I mean give an example there's a brilliant Kurdish demographer who's a Swedish citizen now who cited this fact that it costs the same amount to bring one refugee and keep them in Sweden as it does to look after 100 refugees in Jordan Turkey or Lebanon okay so the obvious thing from there did you say look it's madness there to be for instance bringing in thousands of refugees to Sweden you could be looking after hundreds of thousands of people in the region why is that still a tainted argument it's because people aren't sure you're not going to smuggle in racism I think are you sure you're not just coming up with this democracy with NGO figures and before we know it it's outfit that's what but here's the thing there's the shortcut solution to answering almost every single one of these problems is assume that your interlocutor has good motives assume that they are being on this in the way that they're looking at it and that's why I say comment about that okay so this is something I deal with in my clinical practice all the time okay so imagine that you're naive and then what what you are when you're naive is someone who thinks you trust people because you think everybody has good motivations which is some sense what Douglass's is recommend it and I say well that's just naive it's like just wait a second though because here's the developmental pathway first you're naive and you trust everyone and then someone cuts you off at the knees or multiple people do or maybe you cut yourself off at the knees because you trusted yourself too much and you didn't take into account the malevolence that lurks in your heart and the hearts of others and so that you get traumatized by betrayal and then you become cynical and you think Jesus I'm a lot smarter now that I'm cynical and you are because cynical is actually a move up on naive but it's not the last move the last move is to transcend cynicism and to say that even though I know that there are just as many snakes in your heart as there are in my heart I'm going to hold out my hand in trust because that's the best way to elevate both of us and that is the prerequisite for a sensible discussion and to concede that is one I'm always going on about Aristotle on this to concede that it's not between good and evil but between competing virtues but when it comes to something like the Border's discussion you're dealing with justice and mercy mercy itself will lead you to hell justice on its own blind yes unseeing can lead you to hell yes well and so this also and we're running very short on time here so this is also why your emphasis on truth and that emphasis on truth is so absolutely important because you and I obviously differ on a variety of different things and and as Douglas does with both of us but you know that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that I think that you're a bad person I don't think that actually what I what I think and what I fervently hope is that some of the things that you think are wrong actually turn out to be right in a way that would be extremely helpful to me and everyone I know if I incorporated them like I really hope that because I'd rather not be stupid and wrong if I could help it because then I don't have to wander into a pit and so I'm hoping that if if we can have a genuine dialogue and we can tell each other the truth which is the crucial issue here then I can find out what you know that I don't know and that'll make me stronger and it'll fortify everyone around me and that's the basis for the right and responsibility of free speech right you have the right of free speech but that's so that you can be a responsible bearer of free speech so that you can say the truth so that you can set the world right and adjust the hierarchies and make sure the borders are properly functional and so that we can keep this thing going properly and that is all dependent at least in part well in large part on the truth but also to some degree on this faculty that you described as rational because we're engaged in a rot I know rationality isn't enough that that's my sense you know but it's certainly an adult form of communication and it's definitely the prerequisite to a discussion like this which seems to me really highly useful and which I'm so happy that you're all willing to participate in how strangely how strange that is notwithstanding yes well we've been showing various cards that would have diminishing increments of time and now they have just stopped showing his cards because we're totally incorrigible but yeah I just want to reiterate what Jordan just said there you you all really are the occasion for this conversation though you are are in the audience and we're on stage we very much feel that that this conversation is with all of you and we know the conversation continues in your lives and again it's just a tremendous honor to show up and and and meet all of you in this space and so thank you for that I do I want to I want to thank I want to thank both of these men we have we have never gotten together before like this and it's really it's a it's a great pleasure to be confronted and cajoled and in your company like well yeah thank you thank you Sam Harris and Douglas Murray

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 987,531

Rating: 4.8357148 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, jordan peterson, douglas murray, travis pangburn, pangburn philosophy, god, religion, debate

Id: PqpYxD71hJU

Length: 118min 30sec (7110 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SheCutOffHerToe]

Having listened to the first two and now 35 minutes into this one, I'm compelled to say: this is really awful.

Maybe this passes as entertaining as a superficial introduction to these topics or an introduction to a certain type of conversation. But for anyone else - and especially for those who have listened to or read Sam before - this is just tedious and terrible.

Most of the blame is Peterson's. He is a competent rhetorician but he uses none of his skills for good. He takes every chance he can to obfuscate and equivocate. But one of Sam's greatest skills as a speaker, writer, and thinker, is his ability to cut through the woo and concisely call it out.

He fails here - now for more than 4 hours straight. I don't know whether it's deliberate ($) or not, but I don't really care.

This was awful.

[u/xRadio]

I like how Sam asks them to steel man the concerns of them being a gateway to the alt right and they both proceed to straw man like there ‘s no tomorrow 🙄

[u/[deleted]]

Did anyone score a Sam Harris bingo in this convo?

[u/[deleted]]

I cannt stand Peterson jiberish, how can people hear that and say, yeah, that makes perfect sense. What the fuck am I missing?

[u/McSeemG]

thank you very much!

[u/Electrivire]

Couple questions.

First how many dates/appearances did Harris and Peterson do and where did they take place.

Second which ones have been uploaded in full video form as of today

And Third why is this video unlisted?

[u/Staunchy]

This has been my favourite event as far as SH and JP goes. I think Douglas Murray was a great addition as they were forced to consciously move to a different topic like borders instead of hovering around metaphorical truths for two hours. I liked the send off as well, very sincere, you could tell it meant a lot to them.

[u/ZacharyWayne]

Jordan was on fire this talk. He really stepped his game up a notch for this one.

[u/melasses]

Audio version