Well, good evening, London
Two weeks ago Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
Met in person for the first time on stage in Vancouver
Two nights ago the three of us got together for the first time in Dublin and it's a huge thrill for all of us
To now be here with you in the o2
As I said to Travis when these events were planned I'm not moderate enough to be a moderator
But I'm going to do a little bit of
fielding to begin with
so
Let me start by saying a little of some of the ground. We are going to be trying to cover here tonight
We're going to be dealing with the conflict between science and reason
We're going to be addressing the legitimacy did I say science and reason
We're not addressing that
We're going to be looking at the legitimacy of holding on to religion in any form and
We are also going to be addressing the fact that we need to hide in a sports stadium
to address serious issues
But I think to begin with I'm going to hand over to Sam and he's going to kick us off properly
Thank you. And first thank you all for coming out. I you really can't imagine how humbling this is
Be here with you
You really just should just take a moment to appreciate this from our side because
Justin Bieber is not coming out to sing and in the middle of this as amusing as that would be
and you know though we
Put a date like this on the calendar with apparent confidence
There's really no guarantee that you guys are going to show up and we will never take this for granted
So it's really an immense privilege to be here with you. So
I thought I could start by
first acknowledging how fun this has been to have this these series of dialogues
With Jordan now, this is the fourth event. We've done and the second with Douglas and
We clearly share a common project we are trying to figure out how to live the best lives possible
both individually and collectively and we're trying to figure out how to
build societies
that safeguard that opportunity for as many people as possible and I think we each have a sense that
Ideas are really the prime movers here
That is it's not that the world is filled with bad people doing bad things because that's what bad people do
Oh, there's some of that it it is mostly that
So much of humanity is living under the sway of bad ideas
And it's bad ideas that can cause good people or at least totally normal people like ourselves
to do bad things all the while trying to to
Live the best possible lives and that really is the tragedy of our circumstance that we can be that confused
So this is where the difference between Jordan and and me in particular opens up
Which is how do you view religion in this in this contest of between good ideas and bad ideas and for me religion?
emphatically
gets placed on the side of bad and old and and
worth retiring ideas or ideas worth retiring and
I
Guess I but by analogy I would I would
Ask you to consider astrology right now Hannah. Maybe I can just get a sense of what I'm talking to
What percentage of you I want to know believe in astrology which is to say but who among you and you can signal this by?
by applause or howls of
Enthusiasm what what percentage of you let me just spell it out. So I know you know what you're committing to
And you know how crazy your neighbor is in fact
What percentage do you believe that human personalities and human events and the difference between good and bad luck and a human life is the
result of
What the planets are doing against the background of stars?
Let's hear it somebody out there
Okay, so then you should know that something like 25% of your your neighbors believe that
There you go, so the
I'm here. Wait, wait wait, I'm hearing I'm hearing a heckler among the astrologers is that
Is the FIR the first?
Astrological heckler I've heard haha
You must be an aries, sir
So it won't surprise you I have a related question which is
What
what percentage of you I want to know our
religious which is say well who among you believe in God a
Personal God a God that can hear prayers a God that can take an interest in the lives of human beings and occasionally
Enforce good outcomes versus bad outcomes
What who among you and now again, I want to hear applause or silence believe in it that sort of God
Okay, so this is my concern is my concern with with what Jordan has been saying and right in
lo these many months
I
Feel that you're in danger of misleading these the second group of people that the way you talk about God
has convinced and will continue to convince some percentage of humanity that
It's it's fine to hold on to this old sword of God this God that can hear prayers and they can intervene or not in
the lives of human beings
And you know as we've begun to explore that I think there are a lot of problems with that kind of belief
If nothing else there are many such gods on offer and there and and devotion to them it becomes irreconcilable among the true believers and
My concern is it you could do
Exactly what you do with religion with astrology, right? It would be it would be no more legitimate to to
Obfuscate the boundary between clear thinking and and
superstition there because
the
This traditional God and the and the doctrines that support him or are no firmer ground
Than astrology is now today an astrology
Almost everything you say about religion
It's the fact that his organized human thinking for thousands of years that it's a cultural Universal
that every every group of people has has given rise to some form of it that it has archetypal significance that it
has powerful stories all of that can be said about astrology and it and in fact some additional things can be said about
astrology that are would argue in its favor for instance astrology is
Profoundly egalitarian, you know, there's there's no bad zodiac sign every whoever you are. Everyone's got a great zodiac sign and
You know, it's just a inconvenient fact of the discipline that if I read you Charles Manson's horoscope
you know 95% of the audience would find it relevant and
and that's just that's how easily falsifiable stralla g is but
My concern is that we could live in a world
Where societies are shattered over things like, you know different zodiac
Interpretations and we don't live in that world for good reason because we have beaten
Astrology into submission and I would say that religion in terms of revealed religion and belief in a personal God
is over the centuries getting the same treatment by science and rationality and should be and it is a a
Preferred circumstance that we live in a world that is that is shattered by religion
So, I think what I'll do first is adopt the
Exceptionally difficult and likely counterproductive position of saying something
Not so much in defense of religion, but in defense of astrology
knowing
knowing full well that that's fundamentally a fool's errand but there's something I want to point out is that
First of all
Astrology
was astronomy in its nascent form and
astrology was also science in its nascent form just like alchemy was chemistry in its nascent form and
so sometimes
You have to dream a crazy dream
with all of the error that that crazy dream entails
Because you have an intuition that there's something there
To motivate you to develop the intuition to the point where it actually becomes of genuine practical utility
now when we look back on the astrologers and
we view their contributions to the history of the world with
contempt we should also remember that the people who built Stonehenge for example, and the first people who decided
determined that our fates were in part written in the stars were people whose
Astrological beliefs were indistinguishable from their astronomical beliefs and you might think well in what sense is your fate?
written in the Stars and I would say
It's certainly the case insofar as there are such things as cosmic regularities
so it was the dream of
astrology that there was some relationship between the movement of the planetary bodies and the fixed stars and
Human destiny and that's what drove us to build the first
astronomical
observatories and to also determine that there was a proper time for planting and a proper time for
Harvesting and a way of orienting yourself in the world for example by using the north
It's also the poetic
ground that enabled us to identify the notion that you could look up and orient yourself towards the heavens and that there was a
Metaphorical relationship between that and positioning yourself properly in life and at a deeper level
The the the cosmos was the place that the human imaginative drama was
Externalized and draped itself out into the world as something that was essentially observable so that we could derive great
orienting fictions from the observation of our imagination and so
Part of the problem that that Sam is pointing to is the difficulty of distinguishing
Valid poetic impulse from invalid poetic impulse and that really is a tremendous problem
You you see that arise also in people who have religious delusions attendant upon manic depressive disorder or schizophrenia
but so much of what eventually
Manifests itself is hard core pragmatic scientific belief has its origin in wild flights of poetic
Fantasy and it's also the case by the way that that's actually how your brain is organized
As far as I can tell that when you and and it isn't just me. I actually it's it's there's a very large
What would you call it research literature?
Outlining the relative functions of the right and left hemisphere and it certainly appears to be the case that when we encounter something. Absolutely
unknowable or unknown
What we do is drape that unknown thing in fantasy as a first pass
approximation to the truth and then refine that fantasy as a consequence of
Iterative critical analysis and so Sam believes that what should happen
Is that the the poetic and fictional domain should be some planted by the rational domain?
Well, let me just close the loop there
it's not quite I think we we need poetry and fiction and then there's there's more to engage in with reality than being a
Scientist in a white lab coat, but we need to be able to clearly distinguish
fact from fantasy or fact from mere merely fertile flights of the imagination and
we want to be rigorous there and rational there and it's not that it's not that there's no place or
Mere creativity. That's not well, I guess well
then the rails of rationality look fair enough then but I mean then then partly what we are disputing is the the relevant the
What the relative import and the of those two domains?
Let's say the heretic and the fictional and the rational and status of religion now in that
Well, I have a hard time reconciling that to some degree with your with your more
What would you say formal statements about the problem?
because your mechanism the mechanism that you put forth above all outside of truth is
Rationality and it isn't clear to me if you're willing to allow the utility of spiritual experience
which you do and and and if you're willing to make
What would you say allowances for the necessity of the poetic imagination?
exactly how it is that that is also
Encapsulated under the rubric of pure rationality see
Let's see and here's something you can tell me what you think about this
And I've been thinking a lot about what Sam and I have been talking about by the way, you know
So I'm making the case in my writing that the democratic institutions not only grew out of the judeo-christian substrate
but that their that that they're properly ensconced within that substrate, but I'm also perfectly aware that
not every religious or poetic system gives rise to democratic institutions first and also that there are
Christian
Sub structures may be the most obviously in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church. Where the same
metaphysical principles apply but out of which a democracy did not emerge and so it does seem to me that
what we have in the West is the consequence of the interplay between the
fantasy predicated poetic
judeo-christian tradition and the
rational critique that was aimed at that by the
Enlightenment figures and that seems to me to mirror something like the proper balance between the right hemisphere and its poetic imagination
and the left hemisphere and it's critical capacity and
Then I would say that part of the way so one of the questions you brought up was. How do we
Decide which let's say religious in
Intuitions are valid and I think we do that in part through
negotiated agreement, you know because people have
Look even even among the Catholics say in the medieval time. There was an absolute horror of heresy
So if you were some mendicant monk
And you had a profound religious vision?
the probability that you were going to be tried as a heretic and burnt at the stake was extremely high because even the
gatekeepers of the religious tradition realized that
religious revelation untrammeled by
Something like community dialogue something like that was something extraordinary
Danger and so I would agree with you that
The poetic imagination and the ground of religious revelation is something that can lead people dangerously astray
But I would say at the same time that it constitutes the grounds of our initial exploration and that it's actually in a radically necessary
Okay, well briefly address that and I want to ask a question that brings Douglas directly in here
I I think this is an instance of what's called the genetic fallacy the idea that because
Something emerged the way it did historically
As a matter of historical contingency, it is the the the the origin is in fact good and worth maintaining
or that it was in fact necessary that we couldn't get these good things like democracy any other way or were unlikely to and I
Would say that that there's no Abrahamic religion
That is the best conceivable womb of democracy or anything else
We like science that were a great place to get Douglass involved so it but but I would just add one other category of
Thinking here we have what we think is factual and
Methods by which we derive facts and I would put rationality there and an empirical engagement with with reality
then we have
other good things in life like
Fiction and and flights of fancy that are pleasing for one reason or another and could be generative
toward the first category, but then we also have
I know I would acknowledge we've spoken about this before
Useful fictions and cases I would you know, hope rare cases where where fiction is
more adaptive or more useful than the truth right that there's a
Sometimes the truth can can be not worth knowing and I would argue that they you know, there are those cases
Okay
But they're not so they're few and far between but we should focus on that but some degree of so
I wanted to point to Douglas here and focus on that because I think your fear Douglas is that
my style or you know, Richard Dawkins or style or Christopher Hitchens a style of
Anti theism, you know, just let's let's just throw the vicar's from the rooftops now because it's time to end this thing
Literally get off Twitter now. But yeah
That's a hashtag. Yeah. Yes
Your concern has been that
And I think what Jordan shares this that that so much of what is good in our Western developed societies?
is
The very least maintained by mayn't maintaining
so-called
Judeo-christian values or the or the remnants of our past religiosity and that you know
there is a baby in the bath water that can be difficult to discern and
We can to empty the tub all at once because and this is very much of because there's a zero-sum
Contest with the the religious enthusiasm. We see coming from the Muslim world
And of course the Muslim world is all over the world at the moment
So in that contest between a very an older style of religiosity and the theocracy
really and modernity
You are not as eager as I have been to to pull up
Western religiosity by the roots
Or chocolate vicars. Yes
Yes, I think that's fair. I think I sit
metaphorically as well as literally between the two of you I
Realized from our conversation in Dublin some of
what your concerns are about what Jordan has been saying and what he is saying and I share some of the concern I
said to you then that I used the
analogy of water
And Eric Weinstein recently described to me as Jesus smuggling
But it was a consequence of a discussion about biologists. What do you do if you're discussing?
design intelligent design
You can be okay as long as your own
Bandwidth on this on the issue as long as your own depth of knowledge on the issue is very considerable. You can be okay
discussing that biology with somebody even a fundamentalist Christian
So long as you can follow every step of the way
But the fear will always be at the moment. You're not looking they're gonna smuggle Jesus in
Or they'll wait till the moment that you're not comfortable
anymore with the argument the bit when you're at the very end of your cognitive ability, and then they'll
Trust me. There's Jesus. There's Jesus
and
one of the things I realized from Dublin was
Although I think you may not think that Jordan himself is going to try Jesus smuggling on you
You fear that?
Somewhere down the line from what he's saying. Somebody else will do that trick. Yes, it's worse than that
I actually know the people the people who were clapping are doing that
I hear from those people on a daily basis
right so that the segment of Jordan's audience that is that is
Very happy to be told they can stay on the riverbanks of their traditional
Christianity for the most part and they don't have to get into the stream of
totally monitor and rigorous rational thinking about everything from first principles right that there's something that that the Iron Age
Scribes got right and it's right for all time
those are
those are the applause I'm hearing and and and
However, consciously or not Jordan is telling them it's okay to stay stick right there with a with a shard of the cross
Actually tried a little conscious Jesus smuggling on Sam to see how that would in a discussion we had about
The central archetype of superheroes, but I'm gonna try something a little different tonight
I'm gonna try a little direct God smuggling we won't bother with Jesus. Let's go right to God. Why not?
So one of the things I've really tried to do when I've been analyzing
Religious texts is to take them as to take them
seriously in the sense that I don't presume that I understand them and I presume that they're a
Mystery of sorts and at least the Bible for example is a mystery because we don't really understand the processes by which it was
constructed and we don't understand the processes by which we all agreed collectively over several thousand years to
Organize the book the way it
Is organized or to edit it the way that it's edited or the and to keep what's in it and to and to discard
what's not in it and why it's
Lasted and why it's had such a huge impact why I don't want to
Derail you but we do understand that the first part of the process all too
well
We know that the this there was a political and all-too-human
process of voting certain texts in for inclusion and some were in for centuries and then got jettisoned and
and sure a revelation came in far later than
whole
Generations of Christians who lived and died under the banner of the Bible and it was a different Bible at the time
They had the wrong Bible so well
But it's the same
It's the same issue that that we really don't just we really don't understand fair enough Sam and I'm not saying that political etcetera
Considerations didn't enter into it
I'm sure all human considerations entered into it
But there was some collective process of winnowing and you can attempt to reduce that to economic or political causes
Which is generally what secular?
Assessors like Freud and Marx both did and with a fair degree of success. I might add but there's still some mysterious
assessment of what it is that will be remembered that entered into it, but
It's a separate point to some degree. I'm just saying that my point my
My point of departure when looking at these texts is one of an essential radical ignorance. I don't
that I understand the mechanisms by which they were generated or edited or collected or kept or remembered or
Why they had the impact they had now
I've been thinking a lot about the idea of let's say God the Father because that's a very common archetypal
representation of God God the Father so I'm going to tell you an
Experience that I had that I've never really told any audience about I had a vision at one point
That and the vision had to do with a dialogue that I was having with my father and you know
You have a father right and when you're a little kid you
act out your father when you pretend to be a father and what you're doing when you're acting out your father isn't
imitating your father because you don't
Duplicate precisely the actions that your father ever took in his life
what you do is you you watch your father across multiple contexts and you abstract out something like a
spirit of the Father and then when you're a child you
implement that spirit of the father in your pretend play and you come to embody that
Deeply so the notion is that people can abstract out something like a spirit of the Father and that that's part of our min
Pneumatic tendency, which is a very powerful human cognitive tendency
and in this vision I
first started to talk with my father and I would say more with the spirit of my father because he wasn't actually there and
I would say it was the wisest part of him and then that sort of
transformed into a discussion that I had with a series of ancestral spirits and then that
transformed itself into a vision of God himself with whom I had a conversation and this was a visionary experience and
then that all went away and I spent months and months thinking about it and I thought
So you guys can tell me what you think about this and this sort of stretches my cognitive ability to to its utmost
Limit to contemplate such things but here's a biological argument
I already made the case that a child can extract out the spirit of the father and embody it and that's
Necessary insofar as you're going to be a father in the wise one
But we can also extract out the spirit of the father over much longer periods of time
Because my father was a father because he imitated his fall
Who imitated his father who imitated his father as far back in time as you can go and there's a cumulative
development of the Spirit of the Father across time
now then the question might be does this spirit of the father have any reality other than the
Metaphorical and I would say damn right?
It has a reality and I can describe a biological reality and and and I don't know what this says about any background metaphysics
But here's our hypothesis
We know
that human beings
Separated from chimpanzees over the course of the last 7 million years at least in large part because of human female sexual
selectivity so it was the spirit of
Femininity collectively that helped elevate us to the degree that we have been elevated above our chimpanzee Co ancestor
But here's in something interesting to contemplate
What is it precisely that makes men what makes men desirable to women and so I have a bit of a hypothesis about that
So here's what men do
They get together in productive groups and the orient themselves toward a certain task and they produce a hierarchy
around that task because whenever you implement a task you produce a hierarchy and
They vote up the most
Competent men to the top of the hierarchy and then the women select the competent men from the top of the hierarchy
But the vote that determines who the competent men are that are more likely to reproduce as a consequence of male
Evaluation of men and that's occurred over millennia
And so there's a spirit of the father that's embedded in the patriarchal hierarchy that acts as the primary selection mechanism
that offers men up to women and plays a
cardinal role in human evolution and it looks like we've we've
Personified that spirit of the father in our religious imagery and and that's that's how it looks to me
But then there's something that's even more mysterious and deep about that. That's worth considering is that
apparently the entire course of
evolutionary history has conspired to produce human beings and we could argue that it could have been different but it certainly hasn't been different and
That means that that selective spirit of the Father has been part of the process. That's
Generated our very being and it's certainly possible that that collective spirit of the Father
We fly something metaphysically fundamental about the structure of reality itself
Yes, well
Insofar as I
Agree with with virtually all of that. I should say that none of that
Should give comfort to people who want to hold on to this notion that
Certain of our books might have been revealed by the creator of the universe
Well, it depends on what you mean by the creator like well, you know
I'm just saying that that that the world we're living in now is one in which we have whole societies
Shattered over this notion that some books weren't written by human beings, right? There's a different class of book, right?
there's a different shelf in the library where the the products of
almost certainly merely human brains are
Venerated for all time and and considered uneditable and unag nora Bulai by the majority of human beings
yeah, it's it's clear clear that revelation can devolve into but
Unbelievers are real. But any
There's a risk in all this always is is it often made critique
But that when you're talking about religion you're talking about the Inquisition you're talking about the jihadists. You're not talking about
Somebody who wants to go to their local Anglican Church once a year
Maybe get the children to school and maybe when they're at some desolate moment of their lives
returns to this as the place that stores meaning
I mean the thing that I think Jordan and I are in agreement on in this is is that thing?
Quote from shop and how and the dialogue on religion when he says, you know
The truth may be like water and needs vessels to carry it and when we were talking about this the other night
You know you admitted that one of the consequences perhaps of the you know
The parents sort of going through the belief structures. They may not believe in anymore
But they keep doing it as a demonstration of what you said was the the you know
the non embarrassing options that atheists have come up with but it may also be that
That since we don't have very many vessels
that cracked and
damaged and sometimes transparent as they are what vessels you have might be worth holding on to
well, no, I think I think the challenge here is
I mean it feels that well, first of all, we should first notice that these comments very often take the form of
You and I don't need this stuff
But most other people do right and that is it can't do it. Yes
I mean that's inevitably and if it is it's sort of to took that format one moment the other night
whereas where you acknowledge that that people of low intelligence are best placed in a
Conservative paradigm like traditionally conservative paradigm because there's less to think through right now
Obviously, you don't want your your view on religion summarized by it's good for stupid people
well, I do I do want to summarize to some degree that way because for
The opportunity again to put a foot in your mouth I
Would say not not only I mean the thing is is that we're all stupid and and some of us are far stupider than others
But we're not we're not that stupid
Well, but there's another problem Sam I think and and and this is obviously a contentious one one of the things I I don't go
to church
But there is one thing I admire about the church and that is that it's managed to serve as a repository
for these
Fundamental underlying fictions for two millennia, and that's really something bloody. Unbelievable. I mean the great
What would you say is bloody? Unbelievable? Look Sam there. Everything's everything's everything's soaked in blood
We have no disagreement about that
but the secular
Alternatives that we produced in the 20th century were certainly no less blood sword and they produced nothing of any program within it whatsoever
We did not do it now, but we have to put to bed that secular canard what we are using
well, it's just it's just not so that
Stalinism was the product of secularism or atheism. And nor was that product
It wasn't an inevitable project or is our product
Well, it wasn't Bey and please anyone who has this meme in in your head
Please just allow the next sentences I speak to just push it out because it's I'm so sick of hearing this
This this idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were somehow the product of atheism, right?
They say when you look at what actually engineered these atrocities
It was something that looked very much like a religion
It was a religion in every way apart from an explicit commitment to other worldliness
It was based on that's a bit different dis dogmatism through and through it was based on a personality
cults that that grew up around figures like Stalin and Hitler and now
It's these were it was not the ideas of Bertrand Russell and David Hume
That brought us to the gulag or to Auschwitz, but then you say it's the thoughts of Jesus Christ. I very well know
It's true. No, I can say that I can say it was the thought of st
Augustine and I can say it was the thought of st. Thomas Aquinas
Explicitly that gave us the Inquisition. This is the fact
It can I make a suggestion? Yeah, I mean, this is a general one as well as one for tonight
but the whole discussion
I mean I said the other night in Dublin that to a great accessory
books are written about the period we're living in they'll probably be described as the
Post Holocaust period in history the post-world War two ERA in Europe. It's still going on
they were still we're still going through this try to work out what happened and
I
Have to say one thing that I had any rated equally tired of is the claim that this has got to be a tennis game
between the religious and the non-religious but people say
That the 20th century's crimes were committed by atheists
Sometimes true often wrong or that the 20th century's crimes were committed by people who are religious sometimes true often wrong
Why do you think nobody you're not observing a crucial distinction here because I would never be tempted to hold religion accountable
For the bad things that religious people do that have no connection to religion, right?
So if a Muslim Rob's a liquor store, I'm not gonna blame Islam for that
There's no job
Not a us
There's no doctrine that makes sense of that behavior what I blame religion for and likewise
There's no doctrine in the mere loss of religion a ie atheism that gets you the gulag, right? Oh, there is
No, there's not there's not I just let me just flesh out this point for one more a second
The only thing I blame religion for are the things that it becomes
rational to do by the light of these beliefs if you accept these doctrines a
rational and good person
can be tempted to join Isis
That's my concern a rational and good person can be tempted to support the Inquisition. But of the many things they had in common
This is the point that David Berlinski made in his book
What did the nkvd have in common with everyone who oversaw the gulag the SS
People who guarded the camps of people who put people on trains. What did they all have in common?
What are they have in common with MAO?
Among other things they had in common the fact that none of them thought that God was watching them
None of them thought that they were being observed and would be held it
You dick God is on your side
We have just as many examples where people do it because they think God is on their side, right?
Sure, cuz I think watching and clapping. I'm not denying that I'm saying that the attempt to make this at a tennis match
Over the 20th century's mistake. We we're still trying to work out what caused it religion had a role a fizz amader role
But that the perpetual tennis match of it
I think well and there is something to be said at a more sophisticated
level I would say for the idea that you have an obligation to a
Transcendent ethic now you make that claim in the moral landscape you lay out a transcendent ethic in my estimation
that's one that puts the
onus of the of
responsibility on the individual to act in a way that at
minimum
minimizes suffering and so and you think of that as a statement of fact that that's
The proper way of being and I think about it as an axiomatic statement of faith, and that's one of our differences
but I have
been very careful in my analysis of the relationship between the idea of sovereignty and the idea of
Religious belief and one of the things that I have worked out
I think partly from reading such people as le atta and Jung was that
the there is an emergent idea of sovereignty that does involve being accountable to a god and
Here's how he would justify that and I would think about this essentially from a practical and biological perspective
independent of any metaphysical reality that it might have so the ancient Mesopotamians for example believed that their
emperor was the incarnation or the representative of a god named Marduk and
That actually bestowed certain ethical responsibilities on the ruler
And so the ruler had to be a good Marduk in order to be a sovereign to be regarded as sovereign he had to be
the embodiment of these divine principles and it took the Mesopotamians a very very long period of time
perhaps several tens of thousands of years
they weren't Mesopotamian during that whole time obviously to work out what those principles of sovereignty should be and
The Mesopotamians encoded this in their fictions and their religious fictions
Making essentially the proposition that the proper ruler had to have eyes all the way around his head
because that was one of the attributes of Marduk, so he was someone who was genuinely paying attention who was capable of
Coming into voluntary contact with with the great
chaotic sub structure of being and cutting it into pieces and making the habitable world and also speaking words that were
truthful that that had the power the magic power of truth and
The the the ruler had to act that out if he was
going to be the sort of ruler that his people weren't entitled to slay and
Sacrifice and then once a year at the new year's festival
he would go outside the city the walled city and he would act out his role of Marduk and
The priests would humiliate him and ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn't been
good Marduk, so that he could remember that he had a
responsibility to undertake this this to embody this
Relationship with these divine principles and the thing that's so important about this
so absolutely crucially important is that it established the principle that even if you were at the top of a hierarchy
You weren't absolute
there was something above you that you were subordinate to and one of the extraordinarily useful ideas about the abstraction of
Even God as a personified spirit. Let's say is that it allows every leader to be subordinate to something
That's beyond him. Now. That doesn't mean it can't be misused
but it's a very very very
important idea except you can also you can get there the other way around you can realize that you
Even if you're at the top of the hierarchy
you are radically dependent on everyone else, but the
Tip of a hierarchy doesn't believe that sometimes they believe what they quote whatever the hell they want
But I'm saying if you if you're going to believe something that's compatible with with rationality
globally, and has the least conceivable downside I would put in that place not a
superstitious attachment to a notion of an invisible
friend
or Punisher
Who's above you? I would put in its place
They totally defensible and and palpably true fact
that we that even you could be the king of the event of the world and you are dependent on
Everyone around you to eat to not be murdered by them. I mean like you are like you are
You are I mean, it's it's amazing. It's amazing how
precarious
even a a
totalitarian regime is I mean the amazing thing is that that these last at all because in many cases it would just take
50 people to act in unison to kill the tyrant
Right, but it never happens because we either so have a first mover problem
Everyone is afraid to be the first person shot
but it is it is a genuine mystery that these systems even perpetuate themselves and when they unravel when you see, you know Qaddafi being
Murdered in a crowd you realize wow. It really is just a matter of the restraint and fear of human beings
Keeping any of these things together a benign if you if you wanted a hierarchy where you had a kind of philopon. Ein philosopher-king well,
Pulling the reins of a society. I'm not saying we do but even there
You could have an ethical one. You could have one where an anon superstitious one with one where someone recognized
Hey, this is this is how we're doing it, but we are radically I at the top of the hierarchy. I'm radically dependent on
Having being surrounded by as many happy people as possible
Well, look, I mean I don't I don't in some profound sense. I disagree what we're actually late
you know, we're living this sounds like a
Fiction, but we're living with this problem and we encounter this more and more when you talk
you know in Silicon Valley as you and I occasionally do and I'm sure you do as well where you meet people who are
fantastically wealthy
who seem
Uncannily detached at the by the
detach at the fact that the there's this growing chasm between
Them and those they know and the rest of humanity and then and you one who begins to wonder what level of wealth inequality
Will everyone find alarming and some people are acting as though there is no level that is alarming that there's the kind of a law
of nature that this thing can grow
it just
Impossibly to the point where we have trillionaire is walking around
and you know in driving in their motor caves and it's kind of as sort of the libertarian religion one occasionally runs into
and
Clearly there's some level of inequality
That's untenable or at least would be undesirable there
well
It's it's a funny thing because that's a place where our thought loops and then agrees to some degree again because I do believe that
You can in some sense
rationally derive an an
ethic
So so let's let let's take the argument that you put forward and say that well
You're and this is an extension of your well-being argument to something which ever with which I've thought about a fair bit it's like well
Okay, what's the optimal solution for you?
Well, okay. Well, first of all, there isn't just you now
There's you now and you tomorrow and you next week and you in a year you in five years
So there's you and the you that propagates across time. So one of the implications
Of that is that you can't do anything
That's really good for the you now. That isn't very good for you a week from now, right?
so that means you have to imagine yourself as multiple individuals across multiple timeframes and
Then you have to figure out what's good for all those individuals across all those time frames
although you
Discount the future to some degree because of its unpredictability
but then
so that's a very tight set of constraints and
You might say well a rational person would calculate what was optimal across all those all those
Multiple timeframes then you do the same thing with other people which is the point you just made
well
It isn't just you because who's you there's you and your family
And most people are in a situation where they would regard damage to their family as perhaps even worse than damage to them
So whatever they are, obviously encapsulate s-- their family and then to some degree that flows off into the community
and so there is no isolated you and then that's sort of yeah point with regards to the ethic but then
so so I agree with all that but then one of the things that I would suggest is that
Because that's an incredibly in in difficult rational calculation and perhaps an impossible one. Technically speaking
But for certainly very difficult
that's what that what has happened in part as our as our great narratives havoc have emerged across time is that
We have observed ourself attempting to solve that multiple
identity multiple time frame problem and we've told stories about people who do that exceptionally well,
And then we've whittled out those stories and we've produced these powerful narratives that encapsulate the ethic that does in fact
reflect that wisdom and so so and I think you actually
Accept some of that in your in your moral propositions, which is something that we've talked about before
so for example
Although never really agreed on you certainly believe for example that the embodiment of truth
Is one of the means whereby you solve the problem of ethics and I would say that that's a deeply rooted
judeo-christian concept that that
so deeply rooted that it that it precedes any notion of
religious
Provincialism it's deeper than judeo-christian. It's deeper than our humanity on some level at one point
we talked about the Golden Rule and I said that you think that the the
Precursor to the Golden Rule can be found even among monkeys. Right? Right Golden Rule is the ground rule even for monkeys. Yes, exactly
Exactly and sort of let me just add to the picture you sketched out
I completely agree with we have a we have an ethical obligation even to our future selves, right?
I mean we are in relationship to who we will who's going to be the person is drinking
His fourth scotch tonight will be well
it has some ethical relationship to the person who's going to wake up with a hangover tomorrow morning and
We and one thing we know for sure in which we have begun to dimly understand and describe
Scientifically is that we're bad at all of these calculations?
Yes
hyperbolic discounting of future rewards
Well, that's also why I think we have these stringent limitations on rationality Sam is that we can't solve the problem through calculation
well, no, but we
Increasingly can and and even where it's best
Summarized not by capital what one thing I'll grant you is that it's not always best conveyed or rendered
indelible and actionable by being given a nature paper or you know
a saw an abstract from from a paper in the literature and being told
This is the way you want to behave to maximize your well-being
It may best be conveyed by certain stories, right or certain books that are that are in the philosophy section of the bookstore
not the science section and
maybe where you and I were at the book signing the other night and someone came up with with a copy of the
meditations of Marcus Aurelius write a
Fantastic book there's so much wisdom in that book
Right, and there's nothing about stoning a girl to death if she's not a virgin on her wedding day now
we all recognize that Marcus Aurelius was a human being who wrote this book and
that that
Providence is no barrier to take in the book
deadly, seriously
it's an incredibly useful book and stoicism a
stoicism could be
the quote religion or the guiding philosophy of the West it could it would be a much better one than Judaism or Christianity and
and as have not virtue aliy none of the downside and and so that's my point that we're in this perverse circumstance of
Being held hostage by certain
products of literature and
We need to break the spell and if and if we're finding it this hard to break
What do we think is gonna happen in the Middle East or in the sub-saharan Africa? I mean we the
Moral progress we need to engineer is a common humanity coming together those shared values
Those are perfectly credible arguments
but but the weakness in the argument I think is the one that we started to talk about earlier, which is that
When you talked with Dave Rubin a while back and Michael Shermer said the same thing recently
He he basically said that atheism is it is a doctrine of negation
That's what I said with Rubin is that there isn't that positive a ethos? And atheism? All it says is that there's no there's nothing
Personified there's nothing personified
Transcendent, it's something like that. There is no God
And so and so the problem with the Atheist, it's not even the assertion that there is no God
It's just that it's a failure to be convinced by any of the gods on offer fuck
It's just like not believing in Zeus fine. And it's not like it's a weak. It's not like it's a weak argument
I mean I'm perfectly aware that
Making a de istic case or a case for religion in the face of the claims of the rationalist
Atheists is perhaps. Well, it's a very very difficult thing to manage but
it is also the case that
and and this is where I think we differ with regards to what happens say in the Soviet Union and perhaps to to
also in Nazi Germany is that
when when when when your doctrine demolishes the
That's called it the literary or fictional sub structure and leaves nothing behind
an F Oh an ethos needs to be provided because something will rush in to fill the void and
it's certainly the case and this is what Nietzsche warned about even though he was a strident anti-christian and it's also what
Dostoevsky first saw he said if we knock out
The logos from the substructure of Western society and we need to believe that it was
Christianity's emphasis on truth that destroyed Christianity which was an extremely an interesting criticism, you know
The Christian adhere the elevators to truth to such a degree that it was it actually
resulted in the demolition of its own dogmatic sub structure, but be that as it may Nietzsche's
prognostication was that if we allowed
God to die and perhaps there were reasons for that that the consequence would be that would we would be awash in both nihilism and
Totalitarian bloodshed and that is what happened in the 20th century. And so so and there's another there's another aspect to that
Which is if you may you may try to knock out the whole thing take out some of the substructure but not the whole thing
that's what Nietzsche also shows but his prediction I think is
Blindingly, obviously true that you might in this post Christian era have a remand of Christianity such as guilt
overbearing guilt and
no means of alleviation or redemption which is actually part of the problem of Protestantism, by the way, because it's you know,
and and and there are other things to that it seemed to be that it seemed to be fundamental religious issues that the
secularists I think have a difficult time accounting for it's like so you actually have to
grapple seriously with the problem that a
Doctrine that's essentially one of negation doesn't offer a positive ethos
And now an E and you are doing now to be perfectly fair. You said that reading a nature paper about the necessity of
Calculating your ethic across multiple
Multiple time frames and multiple persons doesn't have the motive force that's going to drive you to act ethically in life and I do believe
That's true. But I think the fact that the rationalist ethos doesn't have
Motivational push is actually a fatal flaw. They don't every week to read marcus aurelius
Yeah, and they don't
Like there's no music that goes along with it. There's no art that goes along with it
there's no architecture that goes along with it like
Weifare, but to be fair to the present most music and most art and most architecture
yes is no longer religious that it has flown the perch provided by religion traditionally and
most of what we care about
in
increasingly
cosmopolitan at the end secular societies is not
tied to religion in any direct way and there's even whole religions like Judaism where you have to look long and hard to find
Anyone who believes much of anything that is religious. I have literally sat on stage
Debating what I thought was a religious rabbi who was a conservative rabbi
And when I asked when I said something that assumed that he believed in a God who could hear prayers
He threw up his hands and he said what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers?
And I thought I was just you know, I practically lost the debate just in in my astonishment, you know
It's like wait wait, you know, what does it mean to be a conservative rabbi in this case? There are religions that have made that
transition to a an increasingly
attenuated
Commitment to the truth of the doctrine and there are religions who haven't moved an inch
right and we and and it but I think we have to acknowledge that that
this this movement in this direction is progress because what it what it actually is at bottom is
Increasing sensitivity to the difference between having good reasons and bad reasons for what you believe
Right and and the fact that that this book has been around forever is not a good reason
The fact that mommy hates it so well
It's actually it's not a terrible reason though because the fact that something has lasted for that length of time at least
Makes the fact that it's lasted a mystery and you can't just attribute that to casual politicking or economic circumstances
There's through something
look
You can say about many of the biblical stories is that they're incredibly memorable and that means that in some sense
They're adapted to the memory structures of boys. So is the the mythology of ancient Greece?
It's incredibly memorable, but I'm but I don't know luck. All those gods are dead. The stories still can be useful
Yeah, the gods on let's say yeah, but it lives on in a way that is benign. It lives on in a way where
You learn about them in mythology class in school, right? You you don't have it. You don't have a fear of
Hades drummed into you as a child by your parent
No
the other thing that is lacking as far as I can tell in the in the
rationalist doctrine and this is something that I've observed in my clinical practice and
so one of the things that's happened over the last year is that I've had many people especially
Ex-soldiers come to my lectures who have post-traumatic stress disorder and they say that listening to my lectures
especially the ones on good evil and tragedy there's a
particularly sure that I suppose you might be you might think about as devoted to people at post-traumatic stress disorder and that
the language of good and evil that I lay out in those lectures is
Actually what allows them to recover from the post-traumatic stress disorder and dealing with people like that in my clinical practice
The same thing has been the case if we can't
Transcend the language of the merely rational and move into an intense conversation
About good and evil in some sense as metaphysical realities. We can't enter a realm of seriousness conceptual seriousness
That's of sufficient depth to help heal
someone who's been touched by malevolence because that actually is what happens to people with post-traumatic stress disorder is that
Inevitably the reason that there are so shattered isn't because something tragic has happened to them
Although that does happen upon occasion
it's because someone malevolent has made contact with them and sometimes that
malevolent being let's say orb level and force or spirit for lack of a better word is something that resides within them and
So there we have these limits on rational debt
And the reason I'm making this case is because we've already identified another limit of rational discourse. It's like it doesn't have the
motivating power of great fiction and great literature and great poetry, but it also doesn't have the healing power of
language that that
takes the ethical realm to its
Extreme in some sense and and then the next problem with that and this is something that Douglas has been has been
Contemplating I would say is that
What what evidence do we have that a merely secular?
representation a rational
representation of our ethic is going to provide us with a motive force that would be sufficient for us to do such things as
identify what's valuable about our culture and be motivated to
sufficiently protected assuming that we do something of protection, but we know it what a few of those things are and
They have they have nothing to do with what's on the inside of a church or a synagogue or a mosque
they have to do with things like free speech right like
the trench we are all fighting in is at least one of them is
Defense of the free exchange of ideas and that is put in peril by many kinds of orthodoxies
But some are the old orthodoxy is the blasphemy laws and the people who want, you know apostates to be killed
We're leaving in this case Islam. So it's it's a
That those are some of the sacred I would even if we were gonna list the
The sacred artifacts of art that that keeps that keep our society
worth living in
There it's I think the list is gonna be very long before we start getting to the the actual
sacred objects of any one faith, but we'll be things like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and and
the the
The free exchange of ideas across boundaries the fact that we are no longer
religiously or
Linguistically or geographically partitioned in the ideas. We can entertain well, it seems to me though like and this may be my own my own
idiosyncratic reading of the of the of the domain but when I look at something like like I
And considered a cathedral dome
Let's say and there are very very old cathedral domes that have an image of Christ put up against the dome, right?
So as as creator of the cosmos, okay
and I'm trying to look at that from a psychological and even a biological perspective and what I see is the
elevation of a particular image that represents an ideal and so the the the Christ that's
Represented on the on the on the dome of a cathedral is something that's projected up into celestial space
So it's it's an ideal to which you are supposed to be
Subordinate or that you're supposed to embody and the ideal is the ideal of the logos
Technically speaking the logos the word made flesh, which is not only the word free speech for lack of a better term
but also the embodiment of that elevated to the highest principle and and
and that is given status as the creator of the universe and the reason for that in part and this is written into the
judeo-christian doctrine right from line one is the idea that it's through the discourse that you value so much that we actually
engender the world as such and that is a divine principle and it's it's also in my reading the divine image of God that
men and women are made in and so what I see in the underlying metaphysic where you see superstition and and
Fundamentalism and look fair enough and it's not like I would ever argue that that's not a danger
I see the imagistic and and and dramatized
Representation of exactly the idea that you hold to be paramount above all else, which is your commitment to truth expressed in speech
Okay, what's my concern? And this is this is where I started with you is that you could give the same charitable reading of
Astrology and you'd even be tempted to do it as we as we talk about astrology as you showed at the outset now
But I don't why is it a charitable reading Sam?
How else would you explain the existence of something like a cathedral with that? Hey, what the hell I'm people going when they built
I'm saying we could is it's by dint of mere historical contingency and
Questionable look that we're not living in a world where the cathedrals
Have stained-glass windows with signs of the zodiac on them
right
We could be in that world. What we are we?
were very close to being in our in that world to some degree because the astrological
endeavor in the judeo-christian landscape expanded to incorporate
Christianity and there's an entire astrology of Christianity including
representation
Yes, but my point is is that we recognize that the literal claims of astrology the the mechanism by which
astrologers think it works is
intellectually bankrupt
Right and if any significant mayhem were being caused by people's commitment to astrology if we had presidents of the United States
Who couldn't get elected unless unless they paid lip-service to a literal belief in astrology
If we had presidents who were consulting their astrologers to figure out when to meet with other world leaders
right the this this would be a problem that that
Rational people would recognize me astrology can be disproven in a single hour
You simply have to go to a one hospital in one city sometime and find find two unrelated
children born in the safe within 20 feet of each other and
follow their lives
and if they have different lives than then there's then signs of the zodiac mean nothing part of your argument is and
Invalidly so is how in the world do we determine which revelatory?
Axioms are worthy of respect and of maintenance and fair enough salmon, maybe none. Well, maybe a revelatory
Maybe that's not it is just a matter of K conscious agents like ourselves having better and better conversations
Well that well, it is certainly partly that it is certainly partly that but let me again revelation
The I in my book is nothing other than the record of past conversations
so you've either got Iron Age conversations shaping your worldview or you have conversations like these shaping your or you have both
You could have both but then you have a dialogue with the past. Let's beautiful which brings me to Marcus Aurelius
I read him with great pleasure and great and and and astonishment frankly, I mean that yeah
it is such a modern and edifying take on ethics and
and one's own personal well-being and just not getting just not being encumbered by by thoughts and and
and vanities that that are that are so easy to cut through once you notice them but so
captivating and arranging of your life when you don't and he I mean
There's no wisdom in that book then then then almost any book I can name and you don't have to believe any
Bullshit to honor. Okay. Let me offer you a continued explication here
so and you didn't answer my question about what all these crazy medieval people were doing spending almost all of their excess capital building a
Representation of the sky and putting an image on that. So just hang on a sec
So so let's talk about what it would mean to embody the truth
So there's a deep idea in Christianity that this is what it would mean it would mean to confront the suffering of life
voluntarily to its fullest which would mean to accept the necessity of death and betrayal at the hands of your fellow men without
undue bitterness
to accept that
voluntarily and to still understand that your
fundamental ethical task is to work towards the redemption of the world and that's associated with that image that's cast upon the heavenly dome and
And that isn't a charitable reading Sam that's that that's an essential analysis of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity
Yes, but I could do the same thing with Buddhism and give you a slightly different story
but nonetheless inspiring and edifying and I could do the same thing with
It but we can't do it with rationality, but I can do it. I can do it with Greek. No, no
No, that's not true. I yeah, I can do it with Greek mythology
I can do with any of these domains
But the the crucial bit for me is that in order to make use of those stories? I
Don't have to believe in Revelation. I don't have to put I don't have to believe that you get everything you want after you die
No, no
But but I'm talking about the applause of conventionally religious people who think that their conventional religion is in some way
cashed out or redeemed or
Supported by the reading you're given now of the of Christ in starry heavens
it's not unless you're adding this other piece, which is
Some probabilistic claim that yes
This book probably was dictated by an omniscient Dean unlike any other book well
Or maybe the Muslims are right that our angel Gabriel did show up to Muhammad in his cave and give him the one
final revelation never to be superseded and
Just on the merits of the text. We know that's not true
We know for all it gets wrong and all it fails to get right about the nature of our circumstance
We know that book is not the best book ever written on any topic and here I'm speaking of the Quran
But it's true of the Bible. It's true
It's true of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius
But the book but but no one's claiming that about the meditations and that's a crucial difference. It's a difference that that
explains so much unnecessary suffering in our world and
again what I fear about the way you talk about religion is that
At the end of all these conversations I'm still not sure what you believe on that point frankly and
if I'm not sure no one out there is
Well, I don't know why I don't know why you would expect to be sure about what someone believes how do you think that any?
One of you are capable of fully articulating what you believe you certainly aren't you are. No I it's completely ridiculous
You're not transparent to yourself by any stretch of the imagination
You act out all sorts of things that you can't articulate butthat, but how about if how about a best-guess?
Ya
Know if you look let's go all cognitive neuroscience on this. Shall we?
Ninety-nine percent of your processing is unconscious. You're not capable of articulating yourselves if you were you'd be omniscient
Okay, but that's gonna give me any nonsense about that for that. That is a
I've never heard so many people applaud an evasion of a simple question
It was a good yeah
okay, I
honestly
Yes, everything you just said about not being fully transparent to yourself is true
And you are ruled by committee in there all the time
No doubt, but I'm at I'm asking what you actually believe
I mean, there's several things I can ask. I mean almost any one of these threads can can pull the whole tapestry, but
To take Christianity as an example
What do you believe about?
This the origin of this sacred book the Bible old a New Testament
Do you believe that just maybe it has a status?
Unlike any other book or is it?
Simply old writing of human beings just like ourselves. I think it's both
Okay, so, but but but so what does that mean that you're saying?
You're saying that there's somebody who's taking dictation that is unlike any other dictation
So it's so Homer though creators or Shakespeare is operated within
Hours of inspiration, okay
Everyone's been inspired if you talk to creative people
Yes, they say they often describe themselves as something approximating a conduit through which higher wisdom is pouring again
You're dodging shakes that Shakespeare could say that and yeah, and any writer can say that
Yeah, and it's also the case that we would or we would rank organize
we would rank order those writers, which is why you pointed to Shakespeare in terms of the
Generalizable validity of their revelations sure, and so well look so you run into the same issue, you know
You criticize the Bible and look fair enough, you know, man, but you're you're also evading a very important issue
Which is how do you how do you?
Quantitatively rank the contributions of literature without assuming that there's a hierarchy of Revelation you although this a hierarchy of wisdom. Sure
There's a heart a hierarchy of human wisdom
I will grant you that every day of the week, but this it is but we're talking about
primates like ourselves having conversations and
This is the most important game we can play
this is the best game in town and it has always been so but
People are imagining and it includes as you said at the outset
what I would call spiritual experience and spiritual experience is
Admits of a fact-based discussion about the nature of human consciousness. And why do you allow that as an
Exception like because it's not an exception as part of that the data set. So it's possible to have the e ritual
So this is spiritual experience without the possible of possibility of concretize revelation
So it's a formless spirituality that you're advocating
No, no it you can have a money
Even I'm not even discounting the possibility that there are invisible
entities out there in the universe far smarter than ourselves who we could possibly be in dialogue with I mean
There are many strange ideas that we could defend to one or another degree of you that they're people walking around
Speculating that we might be living in a computer simulation that all of this is being run on some
hard drive of the future or or some you know
Alien supercomputer now that you can actually I mean Nick Bostrom at Oxford gives a very cogent argument in defense of that thesis
Right now you can you can deal with that on its merits I'm not saying the universe isn't stranger than we suppose or even can
suppose but
one thing we know is that when you read the Bible you can turn every page of that book and
You will not find evidence of omniscience. You will not find anything in there that
Someone as smart as Shakespeare or actually a little bit dumber could have written
No, I don't think that's true Sam. They're incredibly potent. There's whatever I'd say about the biblical writings that are incredibly potent
But so it's impossible to write something virtually impossible to write something like Cain and Abel. It's a paragraph in shame
You're saying the Shakespeare the Shakespeare of the two 3,000 years ago couldn't have written Genesis
He couldn't have written to Cain and Abel not intends it so that so then it's okay enable is 10 sentences long
So then who gains more wisdom than you can then you can dig?
Okay, let's go now, but now we're getting to the nub of it
Then you think because that it was not the product of a human mind
I think it was the product of a vast collection of human minds working over millennia, okay
so we have a
city of Shakespeare's so but still which is really what we so we've just got people about this and this but this
concession if indeed
You're making it and I'm still not sure is the eradication of traditional Christianity if something is deeply wise its
reflective of a deeper reality
Otherwise, it wouldn't be what I've okay. I'm in love with deeper realities
The deeper reality that something is wise is the story of Cain and Abel reflection. It's the real
a landscape of mind that we we are
That either takes great training great luck or pharmacological
bombardment of the human brain to explore
Right there. There's a way there are ways to get there. There are ways to have the beatific vision, right? And and if and
We will we understand this to some degree but experientially and we can understand it to some degree by by this
third-person methods of science and
It's not it's not like I don't know
I've had many experiences that
If I had them in a religious context would have counted for me as evidence of the truth of my religion
right
but because I I
have was not brought up up in a religious context and because I spend a lot of time seeing the downside of
That form of credulity. I have never been tempted to interpret these experiences. That way try a higher dose
Yeah, I've tried believe me. Yes. Oh, I'll go I'll play that game of poker with you all day long
You know surprise. Yes. Well, maybe
Maybe maybe there's our next podcast. Yeah
Did you just see a card that I've got to ask all of you a question now, so we're an hour and
15 minutes into this discussion and
hypothetically, what we will do is stop and
and go to Q&A but our
Experience so far has been that when we asked the audience because we have done that each time
Whether we've asked the audience whether we should continue or whether we should go to Q&A
so the first thing I'm going to do and you can
Vote on this by making a certain amount of noise if you're inclined to do
So how many of you would like us to stop talking and go to Q&A?
How many of you would like us to continue this discussion for 45 more minutes
It's it seems to me that it's an objective fact, it's louder people have the floor
So it really is gonna be a rude awakening when those applause are reversed. However, yeah, we know it's timeless
Was I gonna ask something? Yeah
Something let's go back to let's go back to thee to one of the core problems that we've been trying to address which is the
the apparent
failure perhaps of the
The the rationalist atheist types to develop a an active ethos that has
Sufficient beauty and motivational power to serve as a credible replacement for the religious rituals
So there seems there must be a reason why that's that failure has occurred
right, so
Maybe a short list of reasons one is that
Traditionally the impulse to do that in a religious context has been fatal
Right. So to declare your apostasy has been the almost as reliable a way of committing suicide as jumping off a building
in most
cultures and most
societies for the longest time and still is in many places as you know in the Muslim world, so
if there's been a barrier to entry to thinking creatively about alternatives to religion and
so much of atheism and secularism is just a a
pitched battle against the the
Eroding power of religion and when religion really has its power, right?
We know what it's like, you know
they again I think what we spoke about this at one point it just yet at the moment that it makes this most salient is
You know Galileo being shown the instruments of torture by men who wouldn't look through his telescope, right?
I mean that's that was the point of contact between
untrammeled human rationality and
The womb that bore it right give the religious awe at the beauty of the heavens, right?
So the moment was a person like Galileo stepped a little too far and to connect us to astrology again
Galileo was a court astrologer, right? Mr
Doe did they were there was a cunt there was a point of contact between astronomy and astrology at that point. So
We're still under the shadow of that kind of dogmatism and oppression in much of the world
And for the longest time, I mean, it's still in the United States
You cannot run for the presidency without pretending to believe in God
It's amazing. It's amazing fact, right?
When will that change it?
Someday it will
But we have we have just had almost no time talks if it's to experiment in this base and intervals means some time
I mean some decades I suppose the thing that unites Sam it would be nice to Auden to me on this is
If if we face some of the problems some of the enemies might even say that you identify as well
And the question is whether you should face them in the midst of an experiment that may or may not work
ie a leap into pure rationality or
Whether you might decide it's worth among other things
Taking some of the versions of things that you've had that have been of worth in your past and using them where they're useful
Well, but what do you picture in there because there really is no leap. There's no global leap to pure rationality
There's just there's this incremental
erosion of
Religious answers to terrestrial questions. So there's that. Yeah, I guess at the moment
You you have a science of neurology. You begin to look at epilepsy
Not as demonic possession, but as a neurological problem before there's a science of neurology. You don't know what the hell is happening, right?
So so into them say something obviously drove Douglas. I would say in some sense
surprisingly
to make the assumption that one of the things that we need to do to
Defend whatever it is that we have a value in the West assuming that we have anything of value
was
something like the
reincorporation of this
Religious substructure, so white it's not something that I would have expected you to conclude. Oh, wait, what are you?
Why did you conclude it? Well?
Partly for the reason I just suggested
That the leap into pure rationality
There's no evidence yet that it's going to work or there's gonna be enough for enough people are gonna be able to partake
Give me the precise amount place where you're worried that it's gonna fail and what can you what are you imagining?
Well, you wake it now
Yeah
Let me give you one example and we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing
Worse than religion is its absence?
When we're where are we discovering that look at the religions that people are making up as we speak
I mean every day there's a new dogma and you and I and Jordan have repeatedly tripped over his dogmas
some are usually survived it has to be said but
They're stampeding to create new religion all the time at the moment every every new heresy that's invented and
They're not as well thought through as past terraces
they don't always have the bloody repercussions yet, but you can easily foresee a situation in which they do a
New religion is being created as we speak by a new generation of people who think they are
non-ideological who think they're very rational who think their past myth who think their past story who think they're better than any of their
Ancestors and have never bothered to even study their answers
But
Can't you say that
Dogmatism is the problem
okay, the generic problem here is dogmatism a firm belief in the absence of good argument and good evidence and
Absolutely, we can agree that dogmatism of any kind has that danger or will always have that danger
but the void
Also has a danger the void that you can create if you throw out all the stories that help get you to where you are
also has this danger because people come up with these news stories and
Every day's news now is about this every hour politics is now basically about this
up, I mean well and what and what's flown in to fill the gap seems to be something like a new tribalism absolute is exactly
What you'd expect in some sense, right?
If you if you demolish the superordinate system, you know religion divides people no doubt, but it also unites people
yes, and so one of the things that
Arguably unites people above their mere tribalism is their Union and an abstract religious
superstructure and then if you demolish that well then one of the things that does seem to happen is the emergence of a
Reflexive tribalism because people need to need a group identity of sorts
And the easiest thing to do seems to be to revert to ethnicity and race and gender and sex, etc. Etc
And then we do end up and have ended up in this situation that Douglass outlines and you know
One of the things I think that distinguishes us temperamental II
possibly maybe because you're a little more on the liberal side and I'm a little more on the conservative side even temperamentally speaking is that
your
Fundamental terror, is that of fundamentalism?
although you also state in the moral landscape that you understand that the perils of nihilism and I would say my
fundamental terror, is that of nihilism even though I'm
Susceptance ative to the catastrophes of fundamentalism, but I don't think you do address the problem of the void sufficiently
because I don't think that you have anything to offer except an
And I'm not trying to minimize your offering you you make a case that people should work to
Alleviate suffering and that we should live in truth. But Jesus Sam you can summarize that in two sentences
it doesn't have the potency of the
Fictional literary artistic substructure that seems necessary to make that into something. That's that's a compelling story
So it's the this is where we might disagree. This could be a fundamental disagreement
because I actually I don't see the problem of nihilism the way you do or the way it's advertised like
once you rip out
the false certainties and the bad evidence and the bad arguments and the and the the mere dog was imposed on us by
prior generations
That hole
never closes
Safely with anything else you have to put something in its place that's shaped just like that some other false certainty or some other story
I simply don't think that's the case
I think there's so many things we outgrow both individually a you know, if in art your own childhoods and
Culturally that where there is. No, there is no void left
there's no Santa Claus shaped void that we have to fill with the
Experience but people certainly experienced some people you people I'm not discounting the fact that it is hard to be happy in this world
I mean we are living in a world that seems designed perfectly designed to frustrate our efforts to find
Permanent happiness, so you asked me
What my answer is I just think there's the recipe for a good life or least least a
Minimal recipe for a good life. That's not that this is all that's entailed. But this is this is this is certainly necessary
If not sufficient is to live a life that is
Increasingly motivated by love and guided by reason
Right, you can't go very far wrong if you are motivated by love and guided by reason, right? And and the problem is is that
Well, okay
Well, the first thing I would say about that is to me. That's a
recapitulation of the judeo-christian ethic which is be guarded by love and up and use logos to serve that that you gotta
Regenerate the fine print on reason. Oh, yeah clever didn't say reason I said logos cuz that's the that's something that's deeper there
There's the Jesus smuggling. Yes, exactly. Well, yes. Yes, definitely
Okay, so but but so look I've been I've been trying to part of the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing is to try
to address the void
Let's say and I suspect that many of you are actually here because you would like to have the void
addressed and so the way it looks to me is something like this and this is what I've derived in part from my studies of
Religious tradition so I could say that at the beginning of Genesis
for example
there's a proposition that it's truthful speech that generates habitable order from
chaotic potential that seems to me to be the fundamental
Narrative and I do believe there's something dead accurate and real about that because we do
generate the world as a consequence of our
communicative
Effort and then there's a second proposition
which is that the world that we generate from the the chaos of potential is
habitable to the degree that the communication that we engage in is
truthful and that's why God who uses the logos at the beginning of time to generate the world is
Able to say that his creation is good. The proposition is the world you bring into being through truthful. Speech is good
and that's the image of God that's implanted in man and woman and
There's a grandeur about that idea and you think well, you don't need the grandeur because it's just a fiction
It's like just wait a second here
It's not just a fiction
unless you don't believe that in some manner you partake in the creation of the world and that you have an
Ultimate responsibility that might well be described as divine to participate in that process properly
truthfully and with love and there's every reason to think that that's an
elevated ideal so high that it's worthy of conceptualizing as divine and also to presume that it represents some
fundamental metaphysical
And that's a lot more powerful than you need to be good. Yes, but that the problem here Jordan
It's that I could do exactly what you just did with
Buddhism or Hinduism
and it is just as grand and
just as deep and just as anchored to the the first person experience of
Contemplatives who have taken that as far as they could take it, you know, well then ask Sam
You should do that and see how people respond to it. Well, no, no because I yes seriously
No, no because I see the end of at the end of the game
it's not that doesn't arrive where I want to get to where we need to get to because it is
it's
It would be to different effect
It's to it they're they're different claims
Ultimately about the status of truth and good and evil and about the beginning of the world and the fate of a human
Consciousness after death, it's completely they're completely irreconcilable
worldviews, you know, I also do not that we're if there are Hindus in the audience, they believe something that is totally
Irreconcilable to what Christians believe I don't think that you can offer
pardon me a watered-down version of Buddhism as a consequence of psychedelic experience as a cut as an
acceptable and credible alternative to the power of the fundamental founding myths of the Western culture and if you think you can
Try no I'm trying. Well, I'm not trying that but that's that's not
That's not what I thought. Well, first of all just to just to get my biography straight. It's not just the psychedelic experience, right?
And I'm also not making light of the psychedelic experience
Listen to take this
we're having most of this conversation on the side of
Where we're in it seems reasonable to worry about the faith of civilization
Right you we could have started at a very different point with just the nature of consciousness
Right just the just our first person encounter with being itself, right you wake we all of us wake up each morning
we are thrust from a condition of deep sleep which we've seen nothing about and
Would just have pushed through the veil of dreams into this apparently
solid reality that we call the world and we're engaging one another in this space of
just consciousness and its contents and we're trying to make sense of it and science is
The best language game we play I would argue in trying to make truly rigorous sense of it
But it's not doesn't exhaust all the language games. We play we play
others that are also fact-based we talk about what happened historically before we arrived here we talk about
Facts as we can understand them that we just didn't witness but others did and we call that journalism, right?
So we're trying to have a family
Yes we use to call that journalism
It's getting harder and harder to discern what's actually going on now, but we are we are
thrust into this condition of
Being our apparent selves moment by moment and we notice the difference between happiness and suffering
Right, and this is not merely sensory
it's not merely that you know, I don't like the feeling of a hot stove and I do like a
warm bath, it's
ideas
the ways of thinking about ourselves and the world can can
Open the door or close the door to various states of happiness and suffering and religion comes into religion
leverages that
people it that the difference between believing that your dead child is in heaven with Jesus and
Not being able to believe that is enormous right? I want to ask a specific though
You've expended a certain amount of reputational energy and much more on the jihadists
in your
battles should we say there how much allie ship to use a
Very vougish term have you found from fellow secular rational people who want to love and reason like you?
Well, that is a leading question, isn't it I've got fingers if you need more I
Know you your fingers are safe
No, unfortunately but it's but this is a problem of I wouldn't describe this too
Well, the Allies you can easily find among deeply religious Christians. Say are
well not surely not all of them
There for the wrong reasons right? I mean I can find you know them
Well know note that the reason they're there for the wrong that will they they see the problem clearly
For the wrong reasons. So for instance I so I meet
secular
scientist types, you know
Anthropologists say who?
Are so far from knowing what it's like to believe in revelation
That they don't believe anyone else does right. So when you tell them that members of Isis really believe that
if you die in the right circumstances
You get 72 virgins and you're you're in you know surrounded by rivers of milk and honey and all the rest
If you go into the ivory tower
You meet people who don't believe that anyone believes that stuff
But if you go into a megachurch, they know people believe that's not because they believe their own dogmas, right?
that's
That's what it's like to be to be effortlessly right for not especially good
reasons the fact that you believe a book the fact that you believe a book was written by God and
Therefore it's trivially easy for you to understand that someone else believes that but they just have the wrong book
That's not the rational basis for understanding our circumstances
We're looking for I'm not saying whether one is right and one is wrong
But one seems to have more commitment in that and in one battle, you're fighting commitment, maybe important
Yeah, there may be many reasons why the people who?
Deeply want to love and be rational
Are absolutely no damn use in that fight
because they want to
preserve their happiness a bit longer
Preserve their comfort a bit longer cannot understand people who genuinely come from a fundamentalist standpoint
Yeah, and then there's also other well there to steal man their case for a moment it is
understandable to be
sensitive to and guilty about the history of colonialism and the reality of racism and
to be so committed to
tolerance as your master
Virtue that you're tempted to tolerate intolerance and not recognize it to be cowardice
Which in fact it making tolerance your core value is much different than making truth your core value
yes, which is an interesting thing because and perhaps this is one of the places where you and the
Fundamentalist radical leftists, let's say differ
is that the core value that's emerging there is definitely one of tolerance whereas the core value that you espouse is one of truth and
Truth and tolerance are not the same thing. And so it might have been yeah
Yeah
As more as the pursuit of truth and the belief that as a result truth can be found
That it's not a single thing on its own. You just pursue it as a hobby
There's just something you do but that you believe that at the end of it. There is a truth to be found
Yeah, you know, so it's over Douglas, what what do you fear is the case here if if there were more people like me
In the West right? Well, maybe I'm not maybe I'm the I'm the outlier here. I'm I'm
somehow infected by this over waning commitment to truth and
Rationality and science and yet, I'm still motivated to worry about jihad
But you're you worried that there are many people like me who are oblivious to the bomb
Are you worried about it when so many other people who are hypothetically the question you ask?
Why are you so worried about when there's so many people who are hypothetically like you that don't seem to be worried about it
I mean, maybe you're wrong you shouldn't be worried about
It's a possibility that's my worry at any rate that we may be living in an era when we are discovering that
the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment values never went very wide and didn't go terribly deep and
this is a very painful realization to make
But not only do we go all around the world and discover that we find that at home
The roots turn out not to have gone very deep in even this society and the problem it is a problem
But but hence my my commitment to making them deeper and and to reiterate the point
I'm very happy if it was entirely Sam Harris's all the way down
Ok, I'd have no problem with that. It's just that underneath Sam Harris. Its he'll
Know me too. Well, yeah, and that has to be very carefully edited on
Rationality in the service of love, like this isn't interesting. Like I'm not sure you get to get away with that because
Like is it rationality or is it love?
because well
I don't understand the place in your conceptual system for love given your emphasis on
Rationality as the ethic of as the mechanism of ethics
So I would say to the degree that I smuggle in Jesus which by the way isn't
Accidental in some sense and I'm fully conscious when I'm doing it you smuggle in love and it plays the same role. No
No the love but love is a an experience reality. I mean love love is its state of consciousness?
It's a state of and I wouldn't ultimately act. Oh, it's a it's a fact that one can experience it or not. Well, yeah
There are the fact that you can experience something but their apparent you're experiencing is
there's also the thing that you're experiencing as a fact well know that there are facts about the the
the range of human experiences
Not even just human just conscious experiences that if we can build
Computers they can feel loved and that's not inconceivable and will either succeed in doing that or not
but consciousness admits of a range of experiences and
Love is
One of the best on offer it's not the only one we care about but it's the one that anchors us to a
positive commitment to the well-being of other conscious systems and
But but the crucial thing is those are far I agree no snow do you know what it is
It is a fact that loving someone
entails a
Really of it's their their love and it's counterfeits right there. People can confuse, you know romantic
You know attachment or lust with love, right?
so I've been and the Buddhists are especially good at differentiating these various states of consciousness and and
It's a II
a
This this true pleasure
mental pleasure in the company of another that is colored by a
Commitment to their well-being I wanting them to be happy a wanting them wanting to have their hopes realized a nonzero-sum
commitment
Or sense of your entanglement with them and you can see your failures to love me
You can be with people who you think you love
You know
I'm with my best friend say and I just find out something fantastic has happened for him into let's say in his career and
I feel a moment of envy say well then you see well
Okay. What I just how much do you love this person if the for your first reaction?
To this something good happening to them is you feel poorer for it, right? That's the Cain and Abel story exactly
So so this is these are all kinds of defects you can witness in your own mind
and yes, you pay enough attention to the Nate to what it's like to be you the full horror show of
An almost, you know biblical unwinding of all possibility is available, you know
And it's and you add psychedelics to that cocktail and it gets even more vivid. Alright?
So are we do you think this is it but but the painting attacks of you know?
the fact these are facts about the human mind and it is also factual to say
That it is possible to navigate in this space. It is possible to design
Institutions and and social systems and ethical commitments that help us navigate in the space
It's not that we all have to get up every morning
naked and
try to
rebuild civilization and all of human wisdom for ourselves each day you we inherit we inherit the most useful tool the
tools you don't have to figure this all out for yourself and my appeal to you is that
What we should want to use all the best tools available
without hamstrung in ourselves by this notion that certain tools are
Must be the best for all time or certain books
must be read in on every page with equals to diligence because
It that this book came from the creator of the universe
when we're reading Marcus Aurelius if he gets something catastrophic ly wrong on page 17 we say well what the hell he
Lived 2,000 years ago. There's no way he knew everything right and we turned the page
okay, so we can't do that with the Bible's the
mythological
representation of that
so there's an ancient idea a
Very ancient idea that when you face the void
what you do is confront it and leap into it and
What you discover at the bottom is a beast and inside that beast you discover your father
Lying dead and then you reanimate your father and you bring him back to the surface and that's the means of dealing with the void
Right and so in his in essence in some sense, that's just what you said
you said that if we accept accept that again this
there's something
confabulate ory about that because you can do you I could change the valence of virtually every word you use there and
It would also sound profound and true
I could I could swap father for mother and I could swap void from mountaintop and I and I could it could be the same
seemingly archetypal journey and
Somebody makes a it's not that easy sound like that's the same damn easy
I've done with a cookbook, but look if it's that easy, then you can write great novels
Great story, so these things can't be swapped out with these
well
There is a reason that it's your father that you rescue from the belly of the beast and not your mother in those sorts of
situations you
Can't I give you buddhism and hinduism that had that have completely different
Iconographies and mythologies and other different variables but not at all
It's like languages, but there's but there they're not they're crucially opposite in many of these cases
I'm just saying that this is this kind of
Reading meaning into story is
There's a reason why it's not science
Because it's because it is in some basic sense unfalsifiable
I
There's nothing you and I can do
for the rest of our lives to be sure that the mother isn't at the bottom of that void and it's really the bottom to
Develop a factual approach to the analysis of literature
well, yes on its own terms you can say well it but that that extends to things like it is a fact that
Hamlet was the Prince of Denmark and now I'm a in terms of the writing of literature
Well, yeah, but that you can make true and and false claims or more and less plausible claims about literature
But that's what I'm trying to do or it takes more its effects on you. But again,
But this is a very different game than what most religious people think is on offer
Well, look if you look at the domain of science most scientists aren't very good at what they do
And if you look at the domain of religious thinking most religious thinking people aren't very good at what they do
But that doesn't mean that the whole damn thing should be thrown out
There's relations of religious revelation and and and and wisdom. But but there's that word. Obey because a
Revelation if revelation is something that we can all do
You know you me and Marcus Aurelia's right? That is a very different world than the world that
Muslims think they're living in but you just said Sam that we have to go in
This is why I use the the going down into the void to rescue your father metaphor
You just said that we have to and you've said this before it
I know you believe it as well that we have to go it back into the past and find
The the wisdom that can help guide us because we don't have to do this as if we're encountering
Everything for the first time and that's exactly the idea of going into the void to rescue your father
that's how bad in that is the
eternal age-old
Medication for the confrontation of the void and you said it yourself?
And so I don't know which it is is like do we have to go into the past to rescue what's best?
Given the understanding that there is something there worth rescuing or not. Is it pure rationality and nothing else moving forward?
unconstrained by convention it is it's it's just
again, it's it's I want our certainties and
I think we all in every other area of our lives
We agree about this effortlessly, right? If I'm pretending to be certain of something that you can sense
I have no good reason to be certain about you begin to mistrust me in
Every area if it's in business if it's in in sports
Or if I told you I knew that France was gonna win the World Cup
And I was absolutely sure and and and yet I magically didn't bet any money on it
I mean these are these are conversations we can have that everything else and yet on this topic of religion
people change the rules right and I'm just arguing that the rules should never the rules of by which we
Dole out our our credence
shouldn't change and
and if they don't it and again
It's we couldn't be misled by the the duration of the past. Maybe this is what this is
the the
the comparison of something like Scientology to Christianity is so
Invidious because we can practically meet l ron Hubbard, right? We've got film of him
Confabulating about the galaxies the ruled by by overlords whose names he magically knew right?
We we see we see the man behind the curtain
we don't see that with the Apostle Paul or anyone else who brought us the the the quote real religions and
Yet it's always just been human beings doing this
right
and and and if you go back far enough
They were doing it in a in a situation. That was completely
uncontaminated by the kinds of concerns we have as scientists and
Secular rational people for evidence and consistency and a knowledge of the past. I mean they had nothing even recorded
It had no mechanism by which to record their observations. No, and I'm going drop to you
Yes, because festival I saw was signs saying five minutes. Yes, and I'm very conscious of a number of things
apart from my own silence
And the
We had a long
Session on love just then and I refused to finish this evening on such a positive note
and
I'd like to turn that round. We're all them
in agreement on certain aspects free speech
civilized discourse on the most important matters and much more
but there's also I'm sure a lot we have in common of what we just can't bear and
I just wanted to hand over to both of you at some point
To give an idea not of your loves but of your present hates
That's Jordan
Hates
Well, I would say
That I spent a lot of time over the last thirty years
Trying to understand
The part of me that could be deeply satisfied as an ostrich prison guard and
I would say
that
That part is something that's worthy of hate and
I think the best way to overcome it
is to
Recognize it in yourself and to do everything possible
to constrain it and that's what's given me an
Overwhelming
horror both of the
nihilistic void and
the catastrophes of totalitarianism and
The reason that I've turned to the degree that I have to the analysis of religious traditions
Not losing my scientific perspective in the meantime is because I've done everything I could to
To extract out the wisdom necessary to understand how to deal with that bit of unredeemed evil that every bit of us possess
Well, I would say that I hate
Unnecessary suffering and especially my capacity for it and I see so much of my time
Conscious time moment a moment devoted to
This experience that should be familiar to all of you which is it to be captured by thoughts of the past or the future
which are
Which almost by definition have a
Mediocrity
so
Transcendent that it's just a it
it is what makes human life just
Just pure monotony and pettiness and and everything that religion
advertises itself as a corrective - right say that what I'm sensitive to is that someone like
SCI Utica - when he came to
This is Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher
When he came to America in the in the 50s, he saw his hosts and their neighbors
spending all their time
You know bragging about how well mowed their lawns were and and what just what new?
Chevrolet as they had purchased and he looked at all of this as just it's just the quintessence of
Desecration and lost opportunity and the lack of profundity and
For which for him? The the corrective obviously was Islam and
Half of that is right
It's possible to be totally captivated by the wrong things in this life and to make yourself not
it's so obviously being a guard at Auschwitz with a clear conscience is the
Extreme of the extremes of that happiness all that or being a guard at Auschwitz with happiness. Yes, okay
Yeah, even worse still right. So that's the extreme case enter and to realize that that is
that that that job was not only filled by psychopaths right that
Psychologically normal people could could be brought to that point. That's yeah. I recognize that
That's the situation we're in but most of us live our lives
in a different place where it's just
mediocrity and pettiness and and
and needless anxiety and
very dimly, we recognize the possibility of overcoming that on a day-to-day basis and
you know, honestly, I think
The atheism the lack of belief the lack of faith in an afterlife for instance the lack of the lack of belief in the notion
That you get everything you want or may get everything you want after you die
And helps
Lalit's leads to greater depth rather than to
Superficiality here. It's like when I kiss my daughter's goodnight
Right. It is with the understanding that
I
May never see them again
right
It's not with the assumption that if the roof caves in where we'll all be reunited in heaven along with our pets
Right, which is what both many people find consoling about faith
but that and and so what I would say what I hate in myself and what I hate in our
culture is
Everything that conspires to make the the preciousness and and and sacredness of the present moment
Difficult to realize and that's that's what I as the tide against which I keep slipping
Iemon I'm not going to answer my own question primarily because of the length of the list and the knowledge of the time
But I would say that if there's one thing I hate it's the fact that conversations like this
Civil discussion on the most important matters between people who have enormous amounts in common and have important
disagreements which engage with the past and
Which are going to be facilitated for a long time by knowledge of all the extraordinary progress. We're about to hit
Can take place in an arena like this?
with an audience like you
Who have all come out and now set sat here for?
two hours
And I think it's at any rate from my point of view
One of the most positive things I can imagine in the world at the moment that an evening like this is happening
with an audience like you
And
Unless either of you want to say anything I think on behalf of all of us
I just like to say what a thrill this is for us and
thank you to you and
I hope that this is an example of a constructive discussion of a kind that might even at some point catch on
So, thank you
Everyone please put your hands together for sam Harris Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. Hi