Student: Thank you very much for coming, Ben. I had zero disagreements
with you until tonight, unfortunately. [Audience laughter]
Shapiro: Wow. Student: But this is a good one.
First of all, though, really quickly, I was the fortunate student that, when
you were originally blocked, started organizing a protest.
My disagreement comes... I do agree, we need faith and reason, of course.
Very useful things. But it seems that... I would guess, maybe, I was
misinterpreting, but it seems that you think we're in a decline of reason,
and it's going to be the downfall, possibly, of the American or Western
society. I would say that I've seen, in history, we've had different
periods of romanticism, transcendentalism, possibly the
Renaissance, and the hippie movement in the 1960s,
also paralleled by other movements, like the founding of the United States,
and other great periods of time like the Age of Reason and things like that.
So I would argue that, in maybe 20 to 50 years, the United States will begin
on an incline to an age of reason again, and we'll be fine,
and that we're not going to deep dive down into the depths of
nothingness and things like that. Would you agree or disagree?
Did I misinterpret you?
Shapiro: No. I think that it's possible. Maybe you're right.
One of the reasons I'm pessimistic is because all of the ages that you
mentioned did still have a Judeo- Christian underpinning to which
we returned. One of the arguments that I make is that the notion of
reason itself is rooted in certain assumptions about humanity and
our purpose. Let's take the secular materialist view for a second,
the scientific materialist view, which I oppose my view to, I think,
in a dichotomous fashion. The scientific materialist view argues
that we're basically balls of meat wandering through space.
We don't have will. We are a series of biologically adaptive neurons
that evolve over time to ensure the spread of our species.
And that means that reason itself is not particularly important to that
mathematics. It's only important so long as it's evolutionarily beneficial.
But there's no moral component to reason. There's nothing that makes
reason moral. The only thing that makes reason moral, presumably,
would be the greater spread of the species. But even that can be
achieved through force, most obviously. So you need the assumption that
humans beings are more than balls of meat wandering through space
in order to believe that reason is important. The value of reason,
in other words, is a moral viewpoint. Saying that reason is important is
a moral viewpoint. And I think that we are now moving beyond
that, and that's what scares me: when I see people who are saying
reason itself is a disaster area. So I think that there are some
elements to the romantic and transcendental movements of the
nineteenth century that were an attempt to revert to religion.
They were saying there are limits to reason.
They were saying not that reason is totally wrong, but that
people who are attempting to create these cloud castles
based on reason alone are bound to fail because there's more to
the human being than just sitting in a room and mathematic-ing things out.
So I think there was truth to that. I think that was an attempt to
rise to a spiritual call, but what I'm seeing right now it not an attempt
to rise to spiritual call, it's an attempt to sink to a spiritual depth,
it's an attempt to sink into feelings, and subjectivism, and emotion,
and "my truth," and, "All that matters is what I feel today. Not even what I
think and what I've logic-ed out, only what I feel today."
That's why I think that the gender versus sex issue is a really good
case-in-point of this. Sex exists. Men are men. Women are women.
Trying to pretend a man can become a woman or a woman can become
a man, in fully anti-scientific fashion, because it makes people feel bad to
say otherwise, is just emotion over reason. I'm scared of that, and
I'm seeing a rise in that. I think the reversion to tribalism is reason
being put to the side, being shunted aside, in favor of tribal affinity, which
is an emotional response, a natural, but a paganistic, emotional response.
That's what I'm afraid of. So the argument that I would make is that
in the past, when all of these emotional movements came to the fore,
there was still a religious undergirding that allowed use to return to reason.
There was a vacillation between emotion and reason, but you still had
this other pole of the bridge. So if you... My metaphor is that civilization is
built on this bridge. Here's Jerusalem, here's Athens.
And if Athens starts to waver, Jerusalem is still here.
So the bridge is wobbly, but Jerusalem is still here.
What happens when both of them just disappear?
And that's what I'm worried about right now, that Jerusalem disappears
and then reason starts to gradually move toward the water line,
and there's nothing left to hold it up on the other side.
Listen, I pray that you're right. I hope and I pray that you're right.
I hope that we're part of the movement that reinvigorates the need for reason.
[Audience applause]