[Music]
welcome to the wakin up podcast this is
Sam Harris okay well today back by
popular demand I have Jordan Peterson
Jordan is a clinical psychologist and
professor at the University of Toronto
he formerly taught at Harvard University
and he has published articles on drug
abuse and alcoholism and aggression but
he has made a special focus on tyranny
and of late he has been fighting a
pitched battle against political
correctness up in Canada and he's
attracted a lot of support and criticism
on that front as I said last time around
he is far and away the most requested
guest I've ever had and we did a podcast
about four or so episodes back entitled
what is true podcast number 62 and that
to the disappointment of everyone was a
fairly brutal slog through differing
conceptions of epistemology if ever the
phrase bogged down applied to a podcast
it applied there some people enjoyed it
but most of you didn't but as I say in
the conversation today with Jordan I did
a poll online and 30,000 of you
responded and 81% wanted us to try again
because there was much more to talk
about and as it turns out there was we
had a much better conversation this time
around it was very collegial and if you
have anything to say about it feel free
to reach out to Jordan and me on Twitter
or make noise wherever you want and now
I bring you
Jordan Peterson I am back here with
Jordan Peterson Jordan thanks for coming
back on the podcast my pleasure
let's just take a moment to bring people
up to speed while we can assume many
have heard our previous effort at this
all won't have so we did a podcast a
little over a month ago it was podcast
62 I believe on my list and it went
fairly haywire we intended to speak
about many things but got bogged down on
the question of what it means to say
that a prophet
is true and I consider this actually a
very interesting problem and philosophy
but it seemed to me that we got stuck at
a point that wasn't very interesting and
many of our listeners felt the same and
at the time I didn't let the
conversation proceed to other topics
because I felt that it would just be
pointless I knew you wanted to talk
about things like the validity of
religious faith and Jungian archetypes
and many other controversial things and
I felt if we couldn't agree on what
separates fact from fantasy we would
just be doomed to talk past one another
I think it's it's still possible we are
doomed to talk past one another but we
ran a Twitter poll after our first
podcast and despite all the complaints I
received about our conversation 81% of
people wanted us to make a second
attempt I think 30,000 people answered
that poll so it was a considerable
number of people I decided we should
give our our people what most of them
claim to want and we'll just see how it
goes because I don't want us to fight
the same battle all over again I think
listeners who are curious about how that
last conversation went can listen to it
and I'm sure the topic of truth and
falsity will come up but if it does I
think the best thing to do is kind of
flag it on the fly and move on and I
think this will be an exercise in seeing
just how much can profitably be said
across different epistemologies with
that warning about the various road
hazards I think we should just see where
we wind up and I think it could be
someplace interesting because you and I
appear to share many of the same
concerns I think we both find the
question of how to live in this world to
be the most important one and I think
we're equally concerned about some of
the very well subscribed answers to that
question that are obviously wrong and so
I think we should just do our best to to
make sense and see where it goes well I
hope so too that seems right I mean you
place a tremendous emphasis on the moral
necessity of the spoken truth and that's
certainly something that I'm in accord
with and you're also concerned with
ethics in relationship to the
alleviation of suffering from from what
I've been able to understand from what I
from what I've read of your writings and
you're also very much concerned with the
relationship between scientific fact and
value and so we do share this intense
concern about the same domain and I
think for many of the same reasons and I
think that you're an outstanding
exponent of your particular position and
that makes you an excellent person to
talk about these things with I was
actually going to start with a bit of an
apology because I listened to our talk
twice trying to figure out where it went
off the rails it actually went okay for
the first hour and then we got bogged
down in the truth issue and I think I
made a couple of strategic errors which
I hope not to repeat the first one was
that um I started the conversation by
more or less accusing you of being
insufficiently Darwinian and that was
designed to be I thought playful and
provocative but when I listened to our
conversation again I thought that that
wasn't a very wise strategic move that
was one mistake I made in the second
mistake I made was that I had just read
a number of things that you had written
and I told you a lot about what you
thought instead of letting you say it
and I was doing that partly well partly
because there is an argument to be had
here and I suppose partly because I was
nervous but also partly to demonstrate
that I had actually familiarized myself
with what you had read and I wanted to
indicate or what you had written and I
wanted to indicate to you that I was
taking it seriously but I'm going to try
to not be the least bit provocative in
that manner during this conversation
because I really do think that we have
something important to talk about and I
think that that's why so many people
actually want to listen to us talk
so anyways Hollywood get bogged down
yeah yeah just in the interest of
completing that bit of housekeeping I
don't think the first was an error at
all I mean to say that I'm
insufficiently Darwinian is
bakka t'v and i don't take it in the
least bit personally we just didn't find
a path through that particular thesis
that we could converge on as far as the
second point telling me what I think in
advance of our actually hitting that
topic I think that is that's almost
certainly a mistake with me or anyone
and that's fine that you did that
postmortem and I agree with that bit so
let's just start with a clean slate here
and I think kind of a natural starting
point would be to ask you and I again
I've heard a few of the things you've
said on this topic but I'll just let you
invent yourself anew however it strikes
you what is the relationship in your
view between science and religion well I
think that religious systems are
descriptions of how people ought to act
and I think that the way that I think
that those rows in a quasi evolutionary
manner and so imagine imagine the
dominance hierarchy structure of a
chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack okay so
well we'll use the the wolf idea first
and then switch if it's okay to the
chimpanzee idea so as a consequence of
the behavioral actions and interactions
among social animals you could think of
something as a something that might be
described as a procedural covenant
arising and that would be the animals
knowledge of the structure of the
dominance hierarchy which is kind of ill
named but we'll use that for now so that
there's a there's a hierarchy of of of
rank and every animal in the social
community understands that hierarchy of
rank that's essentially the culture of
the of the of the troop or the or the
pack and there's an implicit recognition
of the value of each individual within
that that troop or pack such that for
example if two wolves square off in a
dominance dispute of course they puff
themselves up to make to make them
look large and they growl at each other
and they engage in ferociously
threatening displays and generally
speaking the wolf that has the lowest
threshold for anxiety activation will
capitulate first generally without much
more than the the pose of a fight and
rollover and expose his neck and then
the dominant wolf will not deign to tear
it out basically and you can think of
the Wolves acting out what you would
describe proposition Li as respect for
each individual's value and then in the
chimp troupes Fran's de Waals research
has indicated for example that if the
dominant arc is only based on brute
force and that chimp at the top who's
generally male is there because he's a
barbarian dictator let's say then he's
very likely to be taken out by two male
chimps three-quarters his power who are
much better at social bonding and who
made a very tight compact between one
another and and so that the chimp troop
that's based on a tyranny is unstable
what Dewald indicated was that the chimp
troops that tend to be more stable are
run by dominant males who actually are
very good at social bonding and
reciprocity and who pay a fair bit of
attention to the females and infants in
the troop so the dominance isn't power
so much as as it might as you might
think of as good politics and so there's
an emergent ethic that and I truly
believe it's emergent ethic that's very
similar to what Piaget described as
emerging among children when they play
games that not only specifies the nature
of the social contract let's say but
also is structured as if the individuals
within the social contract have some
implicit value so imagine that as human
beings diverged away from their
chimpanzee progenitors there
the common ancestor we have with
chimpanzees we already started to act
out this ethic it was coded in our
procedures to speak technically because
we have a procedural memory and then as
we develop cortically we watch each
other and and ourselves very very
intently and once we developed language
we were able to start encapsulating that
procedural ethic first in stories and
that story those stories were partly
about what a very well structured
procedural ethic might be and how it
might go wrong but also about how an
individual within that procedural ethic
should be treated and should act and the
storytelling which was the mapping of
that procedure was the birthplace of the
image and story basis of religious
aviation as far as I can tell so that's
the basic thesis
it's like piya Jai's notion that
children when they first come together
to learn a game if they're if they're
young enough they can play the game when
they're together but if you take them
out of the game and ask them
individually about the rules they give
widely disparate accounts so they've got
the procedure in place but they haven't
got the episodic representation
chemically speaking it's only until it's
only once they become more
linguistically sophisticated that they
can actually come up with a coherent
representation of the rules and then
it's only later when they start to
construe themselves not merely as
followers of the rules but also as
originators of the rules and that's akin
to the recognition of I would say
constructive individuality in
relationship to the state so I see these
things as very very very deeply
biologically predicated whereas the
concept of an archetype come into this
picture well okay imagine this Sam you
tell me what you think about this so you
know how if you if you have a can I tell
you just a two minutes tour sure so okay
so one time I was at the hockey rink
with my son and he was playing he was
young he's about
oh and they were playing this
championship game in this little league
that they had and uh my son was a pretty
good hockey player but there was a kid
on the team who was better than him who
was kind of a star but he was uh he was
a diva
you know and even though he would score
goals and all of that he wouldn't pass
and he wouldn't he wasn't facilitating
the development of any of the other team
members and so anyways we watched this
game and it was very close it was a very
exciting game and in the final few
minutes of the last period the other
team scored and my son's team and this
the Stars team lost and so then the kids
went off the ice in that and the diva
kid smashed his hockey stick on the
cement and started to complain bitterly
about how unfair the game is and then
his his idiot father came running up to
him and told him how unfair the reffing
had been out and how it was stolen from
them and how catastrophic all of that
was and I thought it was one of the most
Highness displays of poor parenting that
I'd ever seen now so there's there's a
there's a moral of that story
so his kid was very good at playing
hockey but he wasn't very good at being
a good player and so you know you always
tell your kids doesn't matter whether
you win or lose it matters how you play
the game and of course you don't know
what that means and neither does the kid
and it's often a mystery to the kid what
that means because obviously you're
trying to win but but imagine it this
way imagine that human beings that the
goal of human life isn't to win the game
the goal of human life in some sense is
to win the set of all possible games and
in order to win the set of all possible
games you don't need to win any
particular game you have to play in a
manner that ensures that you will be
invited to play more and more games and
so when you tell your children to be
good sports to play properly
what you mean is play to win but play to
win in such a way that people on your
team are happy to play with you and
people on the other teams are happy to
play with you and so they
you keep get invite getting invited to
games hmm now if you think of each game
as a as a small hierarchy of value or
dominance then obviously the appropriate
thing is to move up the hierarchy but
and that's what animals do is they move
up to in their specific hierarchy but
because human beings are capable of
abstraction we've been able to
conceptualize the hierarchy as such
rather than any specific one and then
also to characterize a mode of being
that is most likely to move you up the
hierarchy no matter what that hierarchy
is and as far as I can tell that's the
archetype of the hero the hero is the
person who's most likely to move up any
given dominance hierarchy at any time in
any place and the hero is also and then
so that the nature of that archetypal
hero first was acted out it was it was
laid out in procedure and then it was
acted out and then it was described but
it's also it's multi-dimensional it's
not only he who plays to be invited to
play again but also he who goes out into
the great unknown to face chaos and the
dangers there but to gather what's
valuable as a consequence and to bring
it back to the community and that's the
that's the basis of the dragon myth
archetype which is of course plays out
in art and literature throat while
throughout recorded history the oldest
story we have which is the enuma elish
from mesopotamia is a story about Marduk
who's the culture hero and also the the
highest God in the Mesopotamian Pantheon
he confronts the dragon of chaos cups
her into pieces and makes the world in
fact one of his names was nem I can't
remember the name unfortunately but it
meant he who creates ingenious things as
a consequence of the combat with Tiamat
who's the dragon of chaos so he cuts off
he cuts up the unknown into pieces and
makes ingenious things out of them and
it's a perfect description of of the
human archetype
the fact that we are hyper exploratory
and that we use our capacity to explore
the dangerous unknown to gather the
treasure that lies there and then to
distribute it to the community so and
that in terms of the evolution of that
archetype sound think about it this way
okay and again you can tell me what you
what you think about this so we know
that roughly speaking that human females
mate across and up dominance hierarchies
whereas chimpanzee females are
non-selective mater's the dominant
chimps males will chase away the
subordinate chimps from the females in
estrus and so they're more likely to
have offspring but the females will mate
with anyone whereas human females are
very selective and they have hidden
ovulation and they made across and up
doormen it's her cue so imagine the
woman wants the man who's most capable
of rising up the set of all dominance
hierarchies so what happens is she
outsources that problem to the
computational capacity of the male
hierarchy and she lets the men fight it
out among themselves compete and
cooperate to determine who the best man
is he's provided with the majority of
the mating opportunities and so that's
how the extended religious phenotype
manifests itself in evolutionary space
which was something that you and Richard
Dawkins were wondering about the last
time that you talked like it's not
psychopathy which was in some sense you
know you were thinking about the
charismatic liar but really what's being
selected for is the the consciousness
because that's the right way of thinking
about it that's best able to rise across
the set of all dominance hierarchies and
females are selecting very hard for that
which is at least in part why we've had
this tremendously expanded cortical
capacity well let me see if I can wade
into this picture and find places of
agreement and disagreement for clarity
sake I think it's useful to distinguish
between two different intellectual
projects here with respect to values and
morality and
and the question of just how to live in
this world which is our least nominal
starting point
first there's the description of how we
got here right and this captures all of
evolutionary psychology and much of what
you just began to say about selection
pressures with respect to dominance
hierarchies and the kind of heroic male
mate that female Apes will find
attractive and all that then you can add
religion to that as perhaps an extended
phenotype or the possibility of group
selection pressure more religious tribes
have a way of organizing themselves in a
more durable way than less religious
tribes and therefore we have there's
something in our evolutionary history
that has selected for religiosity say an
overarching story that unites non-kin in
a way that is more energizing than some
other story you know I don't really have
much of a dog in that fight I think some
of that is plausible some of it isn't I
think group selection though you haven't
mentioned it is working to some degree
in the background of this way of talking
about religion in evolutionary terms and
at the moment I happen to be convinced
that group selection is implausible and
based on some bad analogies but again
this is not this doesn't strike me is
important for this conversation or for
really for anything that I've written
about the relationship between morality
and science or facts and values because
I view this problem of describing how we
got here how is it that apes like
ourselves have the moral attitudes and
concerns that we have that's a distinct
project which is quite separate from the
question of deciding how we should live
now given what we are and given the
opportunities available to us and given
the way in which we're continually
flying the perch that has been prepared
for us by evolution with our technology
and with our institutions and with our
new moral norms that have absolutely
nothing to do with ancient selection
pressures and this is even true in a
religious context so you have in many
religions perhaps even most you have
certain ideals that could never have
been selected for because they are the
antithesis of anything that would offer
an adaptive advantage celibacy for
instance anyone who was committed to
celibacy in our ancient past by
definition didn't breed you could say
that they might have helped their kin
but still celibacy is not an ideal that
you can make much Darwinian sense of and
yet you can have the most committed
adherence of any faith tending toward a
life of celibacy and the very least
promiscuity is taboo and most religious
traditions now I'm not taking a position
that that's a good thing or a bad thing
I'm just saying this is where evolution
is no longer relevant to a discussion of
how people should live and as I think I
said in a blog response to some of the
things you said after our first podcast
if you wanted to just take a jeans.i
view of how human beings should live
especially how men should live well then
you would conclude that given current
opportunities every man should be
passionately committed to doing more or
less nothing but donate his sperm to a
sperm bank because then he would could
father possibly tens of thousands of
offspring for whom he would have no
financial or emotional responsibility
from a Darwinian perspective that should
be every guy's deepest dream you should
just get up in the morning with just a
commitment to that project unlike any
other that could be discovered in life
so we have motives and norms and
concerns that don't narrowly track a
gene level analysis of what we should be
doing so I just put that out there I
think the more interesting conversation
is not to talk about how apes like
ourselves could have gotten religion but
to talk about what we should do given
the way the world is now and what we
seem to know about it through science
well that that's fine I just want to
make a couple of comments about that I
mean the hypotheses that I'm proposing
is certainly
not dependent on group selection so so
we can leave that one aside as far as I
know I think the jury's out on the
ultimate validity of the idea of group
selection but I'm not interested in
going down that rabbit hole because it
doesn't matter to me one way or another
really how that's resolved with regards
to the potential validity of
evolutionarily derived motivations to
the present day I think I think that's
more complicated so the first thing I
would say is that I believe there has
been a central march forward with a set
of very productive ideas as human beings
have evolved their morality but those
have spun off counterproductive
evolutionary dead ends like everything
doesn't it's possible for example that
celibacy is one of those with regards to
the donation to sperm bank idea I mean
that's essentially the mosquito way of
propagation right and that's it's our
versus K is that the tremendous that the
correct terminology I don't remember it
correctly but there's two fundamentally
different strategies extreme strategies
for propagating yourself in the world it
one is to disseminate yourself as widely
as possible and let the offspring live
or die as they may which would be the
sperm bank approach and then there's the
other one which is high investment in
children which is maybe taken to its
extreme in human beings and so we're
tilted a lot more towards that and so
you can't really imagine a human being
being motivated to take the mosquito
approach because that's really not built
into us but but that isn't to say that
the sexual morality that's part and
parcel of our being which seems to tend
relatively strongly towards monogamy for
example as marriage is a human Universal
although there are variations of it
we're still very much tilted towards the
high investment in single offspring
patterns so let me just clarify one
point I certainly am NOT saying that you
can't see the thumbprint of evolution in
more or less everything we do you
obviously can and as you point out our
sexual morality and our commitment to
monogamy all of that is amenable to
being interpreted in evolutionary terms
no doubt those stories are
interesting to understand my point is is
that we are in the process of
repudiating and struggling to outgrow
most of what evolution has prepared us
to want and care about and fear
tribalism xenophobia and the list is
long but we want we want to get out of
our tribal violence program and all the
rest let me address that because you see
most of the evolutionary psychologists
that I've encountered have what I
consider the misbegotten notion that our
primary period of evolutionary
determination was on the African veldt
and my viewpoint I would say spans
broader times spans than that so I'm
starting from the presupposition that
the most permanent things are the most
real which which i think is a reasonable
reasonable starting point but I have a
reason for saying that because what I've
been able to understand by delving
deeply into the grammatical structure
underneath mythology is that the
religious landscape actually describes
that which is most permanent in what
shaped human evolutionary history and I
mean way back I mean three hundred and
fifty million years back before trees
before flowers back when we shared when
we shared common ancestor with
crustaceans and so one of the most
permanent features of the biological
landscape is the existence of the
dominant archaea
that's roughly portrayed in religious
mythology as culture or explored
territory or the known and it's it's
usually given the characterological
representation of the Great Father and
there's a positive one and a negative
one as the dominance hierarchy can
support you in your development or crush
you completely so the doorman is our key
is one major selection mechanism and
it's it's known territory there's
another major selection mechanism which
is roughly speaking mother nature and
that's that which exists outside of
explored territory and it's generally
been kept conceptualized as feminine
which
and I think the reason for that is
because the unknown it's the unknown
cognitively speaking or territorial
speaking that gives rise to new forms
but it's also more importantly that
female human beings so the feminine
plays a very vicious role in the
selection process you may know and
probably do that you have twice as many
female ancestors as male ancestors so as
far as human beings are concerned the
feminine is a bottleneck through which
genes must pass so to speak and it's a
very narrow and picky and choosey
bottleneck so it has a positive element
and a negative element so roughly it's
the same thing Sam that's represented in
the Taoist yin-yang symbol because that
yin-yang symbol basically is predicated
on the idea that being is partly the
known or the interpretive structure
that's brought to bear on the situation
and so that's the white paisley it's a
serpent actually and the unknown which
is the black paisley or serpent and the
two ER are interchangeable and out of
them arises meaning so the idea behind
the Taoist symbol is that you should
have one foot in what you know and one
foot in you in what you don't know and
that's the place where information flow
is maximized and that's the same thing
as occupying the position of the hero
who confronts the unknown and generates
new information and those those
evolutionary realities remain absolutely
unchanged the idea that every place you
go there's something you know and an
interpretive framework that you bring to
bear so there's a cultural element and
everywhere you go or are there's
something that transcends that knowledge
that you have to deal with and
everywhere you go you're there and so
that's the so the three basic archetypal
characters of Mythology are the
individual positive a negative culture
positive and negative and nature
positive and negative and we haven't
outgrown that in the least it's exactly
the same problem it's always being and
as far as I can tell it's exactly the
same set of problems that always will be
and that's partly why these archetypal
can't be cannot be transcended and they
cannot be ignored they pop up of their
own accord
I mean look give you an example one
question you Norden how is any of that
religious though I understand how you
know thinking of the individual versus
the cosmos gives us a kind of narrative
structure right you have your
protagonist and you have all the things
that can happen to him or not and all
the things that he can want or not and
it's very easy to conceive of any human
life or the life of a whole civilization
in terms of stories like that but how
does this bring religion into the
picture okay well I'm going to approach
that from two perspectives the first
perspective I presume is one that you
might find interesting given your your
interest in spirituality
so it's certainly capable for people to
experience deeply a sense of meaning no
csikszentmihalyi talked about that is
flow which i think is a rather trivial
way of dealing with it but at least it's
one that people can directly understand
but I would say you can understand when
you're doing something meaningful
because you're deeply engaged in it and
you also have a sense in some sense of
standing outside of time because you
don't times flow and it also feels
worthwhile and that the sacrifices that
you have made to enable yourself to do
that were justified and so I would say
because the ultimate domains of reality
are in fact chaos and order or known and
unknown that when you straddle those two
properly and maximize information flow
you feel in a deep sense of intrinsic
meaning and that's the output of the
entire structure of your consciousness
telling you that you're in the right
place at the right time with regards to
furthering your capacity to thrive and
and move forward a question here Jordan
wouldn't you grant that there are
pathological experiences of meaning
meaning that is actually based on a
misconception or divorced from the truth
which can be no less intoxicating to the
person who's finding something
meaningful Sam I I think that's a great
question
I mean one of the things that really
really disturbed me when I was first
working out these ideas was exactly that
question because like I've read an awful
lot about extraordinarily pathological
people you know serial killers and
people who are malevolent right to their
core and that's exactly the question I
asked because you know with serial
killers for example especially the
sexual predator types they seem to have
to live on the edge of their pathology
in order to continue to be rewarded by
it you know they have to keep extending
their pathology into the unknown to keep
getting that rush and then of course
there's the situation with schizophrenic
sware the underlying mechanisms that
produce the sense of meaning actually go
astray and that's especially the case
say with paranoid schizophrenia but you
see that's that's partly why I think I
developed a viewpoint that's similar to
yours with regards to the necessity of
stating the truth or at least attempting
very hard not to say what you believe to
be false because as far as I can tell at
least under most circumstances that that
meaning orienting system which is
actually the extended orienting reflex
technically speaking neural
psychologically speaking I think that
you pathologized the underlying
mechanisms if you speak deceitfully
because you build you build pathological
micro machines so to speak into the
architecture of your physiology and then
your underlying the underlying systems
much more fundamental say limbic systems
for the sake of for lack of a better
term they start producing pathological
output and take you down extraordinarily
dangerous roads so if you're going to
let your intrinsic sense of meaning
serve as a guide through life then you
have to ally yourself with the
commitment to speak the truth or not at
least not to engage in
deceit because otherwise you will do
exactly what you said and pathologize
yourself and then well and then all hell
will break loose in your life and in the
life of others and you could be
rigorously honest but still mistaken
right um you could have a belief system
or be raised in a culture that has a
belief system that is completely
illogical or out of touch with reality
and you could not know it the dishonesty
doesn't have to be local to your own
brain you could just be confused right
well I think this is partly why I was
more insistent than I should have been
in our last discussion about a
particular idea about truth I mean
because I would say there's the truth
that's associated with being in
possession of a set of accurate facts
but there's a more enacted truth or
embodied truth which is the consistent
attempt to go beyond what you know and
so that would be the necessity of living
in humility or in ignorance and so that
what you're doing when you're discussing
with someone or when you're acting in
the world is not so much attempting to
prove that what you already know is
completely right and correct but
attempting to understand very carefully
where you're in error and learning
everything you can to correct back and
you see that idea is also deeply rooted
in in religious mythology so for example
the figure of Horus who's the Egyptian
eye and who's also a falcon now Horus is
an eye and a falcon because Falcons can
see better than any other animal
including human beings even though we
can see very well and he's an eye
because the eye with the open iris
signifies paying attention and Horus
who's a messianic figure in some sense
for the ancient Egyptians had his eyes
open to the corruption of the state
which was symbolized by a deity named
Seth Seth who later became Satan in the
developmental pathway of this set of
ideas and Horus who lived in truth so
does
was able to keep his eyes open and
understand the corrupt nature of his
society and his uncle his uncle was Seth
and to put that right again and so
there's the there's the idea that lived
truth can rescue you from pathological
untruth and that might be moral or
factual if you're a scientist and
operating in a truthful manner you
update archaic archaic
empirical representations if you're a
what would you call more culture hero
type of person then what you're doing is
updating archaic and blind
representations of the proper moral
pathway forward which can never be
encapsulated completely in a set of
rules see that's partly why that's
partly why for example in in in the line
of Christian thought Moses couldn't
reach the promised land because his
morality was bounded by rules and it's
not possible to reach the proper mode of
being by only acting out rules because
rules are the same rules aren't
applicable in every situation I mean I
could tell you the Christian story in a
way that you might find interesting in
about ten minutes if you if you would
like me to do that and let's hold off on
Christianity I want to get there because
I know that's the the system of thinking
you find most interesting in this area
and so I would like to talk about that
okay my issue is that it seems to me
that this kind of language game of you
talking about ancient stories and the
way in which they seem to cash out some
of the pre scientific intuitions and
moral norms of any group of people and
so there's a validity to the whole
picture when you talk that way that I
just see that that's kind of
unconstrained by anything I think you
can do that with anything with any
system of beliefs you can find two
people which from my point of view are
living in some form of radical error
which is to say that virtually
everything they think is true almost
certainly isn't and the way they're
treating one another is terrible on the
basis of those misconceptions and there
never going to get anywhere worth going
right so a modern example of that is
something like Isis or the Taliban but
there's some ancient examples or you
know older examples that are in some
cases even easier to understand because
we have no affinity for them so did you
know that the dough boo people the
anthropologists Ruth Benedict wrote
about them I wrote about him for a few
pages in my book the moral landscape
yeah I read in your book actually yeah
so for listeners who didn't read the
book or can't remember I'm the dough boo
get my vote for perhaps the most
tragically confused people who have ever
lived and this is just kind of a
hothouse version of radical confusion
which you wouldn't believe would be
possible but for the fact that some
anthropologist wrote about it but so
this was a culture that was completely
obsessed with malicious sorcery and
their primary interest every person's
primary interest was to cast spells on
other members of the tribe in an attempt
to sicken or kill them in the hopes of
magically stealing their possessions and
especially their crops it was like a
continuous magical war of all against
all in this way and and they believed
that magic had to be consciously applied
to everything they literally thought
that gravity had to be supplemented by
magic so that if you didn't cast the
right spells your vegetables would just
rise out of the ground and disappear and
they thought every interaction of this
sort and every outcome for people was
zero-sum so that if one man succeeded in
growing more vegetables than his
neighbor his success his surplus of
vegetables must have been stolen from
one of his neighbors through sorcery
even the farmer who got lucky in this
way with a surplus would have believed
that he succeeded for this reason that
he actually magically stole his
neighbor's crops so to have a good
harvest was a crime by everyone's
estimation even the person who was a
lucky harvester and it seems to me that
you could play this same game with the
dough boom you could talk about
archetypes you could talk about whatever
stories ancient or otherwise that they
were using to justify this this view of
life you could
find some evolutionary way of kind of
threading the needle of how what they
were doing was response to the ancient
imperative of dominance hierarchies you
know you could give some sympathetic
control of the whole enterprise in terms
of myth and archetype and meaning but
clearly this was like a kind of strange
basin of Attraction that you'd be very
lucky never to have found as a tribe or
as a culture and we're very lucky not to
be stuck in some similar place there
there's another detail here which is
especially horrible because the DOE boo
felt that magic became more powerful the
closer you were to somebody so that the
people who were closest to them in life
their spouses or their children were the
people who are most likely to destroy
them with their magical powers well
that's actually true salmon ever had
family you know that but yeah so again
you you could you could connect it to
some kind of story that makes sense you
could go to Greek mythology and and
Shakespeare and spin a yarn about it but
clearly this underlying belief in magic
was one it's almost certainly not true
but - it was creating a truly toxic
moral environment for these people and
so yeah I just put that out there as an
example of something that one would
never want to spend a lot of time trying
to justify this worldview by reference
to stories ancient or otherwise yeah
well I mean there's actually a technical
solution to the problem that you're
posing I mean part of the problem is how
do you know if what you're looking at is
a genuine thing or an artifact of your
imagination and you know that Paul me
land and his his uh his colleague Kronk
cronbach basically addressed that back
in the 1950s with a very solid piece of
methodological work that every
psychologist either does or should know
about
they were the inventors of the multi
trade multi-method construct validation
process which is a pretty awful jumble
of words but basically it means
something like in order to specify
whether or not something
exists you have used multiple methods to
detect it and that their reports should
Co very positively and so of course we
do exactly that with our five senses you
know just because you can see something
doesn't mean it's there but if you can
see it and hear it well you're a little
bit more certain when I wrote my book
maps of meaning
I was very acutely aware of that and
it's certainly criticism that has been
leveled against people like Carl Jung
mostly tragically enough by the post
modernists of course who don't believe
in any sort of overarching narrative and
who have their own form of Dogen like
pathology distributed well widely among
them so what I did was refused to take a
presupposition as acceptable unless I
could find its manifestation at at least
four levels of evidence simultaneously
so for example in my book I start out
with a neuropsychological account an
account of the fundamental
neuropsychological processes that enable
us to make sense out of the world
primarily relying on the work done early
work done by the Russian
neuropsychologists Luria and so cloth
and vinegar dova who did a lot of early
work on the orienting reflex in the
hippocampus that was then sort of
combined with modern cybernetic theory
by Geoffrey Gray who was hands izing
student and Geoffrey Gray's work has had
tremendous impact over the last
especially over the last ten years in
psychology in general he wrote his book
in 1982 but it was a very very difficult
book I think it had must have had
between 1,500 and 3,000 references and
Geoffrey Gray was exactly the sort of
person who would have read every single
one of them and he outlined a cybernetic
information processing model of human
neuropsychological function that
actually lays extraordinarily nicely on
top of the archetypal world that I that
I've been working on outlining and I
also wanted to ensure that it was in
keeping with the kind of observational
animal studies that people like Jane
Goodall and friends do all do
ethology
wanted to make sure that it was in
keeping with the ethological data as
well as the broader literature on
evolutionary psychology and biology and
so when I say that there's these
patterns that exist that you can extract
out of out of Mythology I'm saying that
knowing full well that you can find
concordance for the processes described
by those archetypal stories in at least
four different scientific disciplines
simultaneously and according to cron
back and meals methodology that's the
most effective possible way of
validating a construct when when it
might be susceptible to the kind of
contamination by imagination that you're
referring to I don't know what to make
of that claim generically I think I
think we should talk about your view of
Christianity at some point soon to see
if we can talk about specifics but I
just want to take a generic starting
point which for me is more accessible
and I think more illuminating it
certainly describes the divide between
science and religion that resonates with
me and I think it connects nicely to the
way you were describing kind of our
primal circumstance of being an
individual or a tribe standing in the
face of mute and often hostile nature
and trying to figure out what's going on
and how to live within it I think that
really is the primal circumstance this
is what I think of religion as you know
as a kind of failed science as a kind of
first attempt to tell a story about
what's going on it gives us some power
over it but it's a bad attempt because
we didn't develop any kind of
methodology at that point to
differentiate fact from fiction
take the case that every parent will be
familiar with of standing helplessly
over your sick child wondering what's
wrong let's say your child throws up and
has a fever and you don't know what's
wrong with him or her and this is
obviously one of the more the more
ancient moments for any person and
there's a you know obvious evolutionary
reasons why we would be concerned about
this and so this is quite Darwinian to
care what's happening to your infant but
today this
of uncertainty and helplessness and fear
is bracketed by a basic understanding of
the processes in the world that can
affect a human body and there's
obviously enough to worry about there to
drive almost any parent crazy but one
thing that is no longer on the menu is
the evil eye when your child gets sick
no part of your mind if you're saying is
now devoted to the question of whether
or not you should go burn your neighbor
as a witch because she might have cast a
malicious glance at your child right but
as you know that was not always so and
in fact in Africa people are still
murdering their neighbors for the crime
of witchcraft
so the problem from my point of view is
twofold one is that we know that there's
a path forward to rule out things like
witchcraft and the evil eye and that
this path is science and rationality
generally but the other problem is that
you could still play this game by resort
to ancient stories and finding some
connection between those stories and
evolution you could play a game of
dignifying a belief in magic in this
case you know the evil eye specifically
along Jungian lines or archetypal lines
or something you could be sympathetic
with this picture but my point is what
would be the point of that given the
obvious harms that we no longer need
commit based on disavowing this ancient
ignorance why would one spend any time
at all trying to make sense of
admittedly ancient concern about
sympathetic magic right sympathetic
magic is dangerous that's
basically all I think we need to know
about it now and yet you could spend a
lifetime you could be reading not only
young but you know sketchier people like
Aleister Crowley and Elif ass Levy and
all that you know
the history of hermeticism and you could
open you know Manley Palmer halls the
secret teachings of all ages and and
just get deep into that stuff the
tradition of Western magic right seems
to me to be almost by definition a
colossal waste of time
and actually unnecessary to preserve
anything that we care about at this
moment in history okay well I don't
think that we have to have an argument
about the you the the utility of moving
forward on the scientific front I mean I
consider myself a scientist and and I
don't I don't feel that it's necessary
to justify to the audience that's likely
to be listening to this the utility of
the scientific approach I would say that
that the there are there's great purpose
in looking at these ancient stories in
the same way Sam as there's great
purpose and utility in reading fiction
so and I don't mean that in a derogatory
manner
I mean one of the things that I thought
about after our last discussion because
I went and did some investigation into
definitions of truth and some serious
investigation so that I was more
prepared the next time that we talk but
one of the questions that I wanted to
ask you for example given your emphasis
on the on truth as embedded in facts and
also the ability of moral truth to
reveal itself from a set of facts is
here's a sentence for you and perhaps
you can tell me what you make of it
there is great truth revealed in
Dostoyevsky Tolstoy and Shakespeare do
you agree with out or disagree because
there's no fact in any of that and
there's certainly no scientific data now
do you think that that that those great
works of literature which are I would
say more or less universally regarded as
valuable do they
how would you this is where we'd why we
got stuck on the issue of truth you see
I would say that those stories there's
more truth in Dostoyevsky's fiction than
there is in a single person's life I
don't know if I would go quite that far
but yes I will totally agree with you
that there's a lot of truth in fiction I
don't think that's at all why we got
bogged down in our previous discussion
about truth
how would you characterize that truthful
because it's certainly not factual by by
any stretch of the imagination it's it's
a different sort of truth let me stretch
our imaginations there I think is a wide
variety of
that are at the very least illustrated
in fiction the reason why fiction is
compelling to us is that it does map on
credibly to our experience of the world
or what we can imagine to be valid human
experiences yeah precisely if it were
radically strange which is to say if it
all seemed preposterous that's the
definition of an unsuccessful work of
fiction insofar as certain kinds of
fiction push those boundaries and
certain kinds of you know magical
realism or science fiction which begins
to seem basically like tennis without
the net where there's just no there are
no rules that make it interesting the
sweet spot at least in in my mind for
fiction is something has enough
verisimilitude to be credible and yet
it's a heightened reality which makes it
much more interesting than just finding
out what happened to an ordinary person
on an ordinary day right okay so that
let's let's take that idea of heightened
reality because I could make imagine
that this is the case imagine that I
took Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and
Shakespeare for her Nell Dean for the
time being and I distilled out what made
them great fiction and I extracted a
work of meta fiction from them that
would be artists the thing about
religion for me again I I know there are
people who would dispute this I just
don't find this these claims credible
religion becomes religion for me when
you begin to assert that certain things
are true specifically other worldly
things the survival of the conscious
mind after death or the real existence
of invisible agents which you can
propitiatory propitiate and who have
their eye on you right they care how you
live they care whether you masturbate
they care whether you pray to them and
in what terms you do and if you get any
of that stuff wrong you will suffer for
it you are in relationship to these
things there are some people who who
have
relax their standards of commitment to
revealed religion so much that they
don't really answer to that description
but most religious people most of the
time certainly most Christians and
Muslims believe otherworldly and
supernatural and superstitious things
which are I would argue in direct
contradiction to reasonable things they
might believe about how the cosmos works
okay okay so I'm going to take a
specific example from what you said and
address it you were talking about the
propitiation of supernatural beings okay
so I'm I'm going to if you don't mind
tell you the story of Cain and Abel in a
way that you probably haven't heard it
it's only a paragraph long this story
and I want to set it up first so can
enable our types from a classical
religious interpretation standpoint and
there that you might think about them as
foreshadowing the emergence of the idea
of Christ and Satan so they're the
they're the idea of the hostile brothers
and that that idea pops up in fiction
all the time it's a it's a constant it's
an archetype it's man against his soul
say or man against his darker nature
that's the basic plot idea so now Cain
and Abel in in Genesis are actually the
first to actual human beings because God
or Adam and Eve are made by God so
somehow they're not exactly human play
alone with me for a minute I know this
isn't literally true Sam so I'm not
trying to claim that it is but Cain and
Abel are the first two human beings that
are born into the world instead of
paradise and Cain is a an agriculturist
and Abel is a shepherd and of course
that Shepherd theme echoes much later in
through Christianity and also in the
story of King David
partly because if you are going to be a
shepherd back then man you were one
tough dude because you had slingshots
and sticks and the reliance after your
sheep so you know you weren't little boy
blew in pastoral Victorian England you
were one tough character so to be a
shepherd was no joke
anyways Cain and Abel are making their
way through life and Cain is having a
very rough time things aren't going his
way at all whereas Abel everything goes
his way all the women loved him his
flocks increased he's he's successful
and the story also intimates that not
only is he successful but everyone likes
him and understands why he's successful
whereas Cain is kind of bitter and
nothing he ever does works out and so
they both make sacrifices to go on and
I'll tell you Sam when I started to
understand what the discovery of
sacrifice meant it just about blew me
out of my room because I realized that
in the discovery of sacrifice in the
acting out of sacrifice we had
information pertaining to the earliest
human discovery that you could let
something of value go in the present and
reap a reward in the future which is a
staggering realization it's actually the
discoverer of the future discovery of
the future now people had to act these
things out and then represent them in
stories before they could understand
them psychologically so Cain and Abel
make sacrifices and the idea is that to
keep yahwah happy the patriarchal spirit
happy you have to sacrifice something of
true value it has to be a real genuine
sacrifice or you or you won't reap the
future rewards and what and everyone
knows what that means them because I ask
my students all the time what their
parents sacrificed to send them to
university and they all understand that
perfectly well and what's happened is
their parents have made a bargain with
the present which is that they will
forgo certain kinds of gratification so
that they or even their children can
reap a reward they're making a bargain
with the structure of reality now that
was personified or anthropomorphize
depending on which terminology want to
use early when people were still sorting
starting to work these things out but
that didn't destroy the essential
validity of the idea now the story goes
Abel's sacrifices were valid the story
implies that although it's a bit
ambivalent you never know if Cain is
doing a bad job
sacrificing or if yahwah's just being a
son-of-a-bitch and torturing them which
of course is a classic problem
existentially because you don't know in
your life when you fail if it's because
you've been doing things wrong and not
making them correct sacrifices so to
speak or that fate is just treating you
harshly and unjustly but the story
intimates that claim is making errors in
his sacrifices whatever things don't go
well for Cain and Abel continues to to
flourish so Cain is very unhappy with
this and one day he decides to have it
out with the creator of being which you
know is a pretty ballsy thing to do
let's say and so he goes and has a chat
with God and I've got this description
of their conversation from looking at
multiple translations of the original
text and he basically confronts yahwah
and he says you know what kind of stupid
universe have you put together here this
being that you've created is
fundamentally flawed I'm out there
breaking myself and half trying to make
everything work and nothing ever works
out for me and then there's that damn
Abel who he doesn't he hardly has to
lift a finger and you know women flock
to him and his camels increase it's like
it's unjust it's unjust and and
inappropriate and you should be called
to task for it and so that's the eternal
story of people complaining about the
fundamental tragedy and evil of being so
it's a pretty good argument so God says
to kick hey and he says look you know
that's a pretty good argument but here's
how I look at it you're like a man who's
inside a house and at the door of the
house there's this predatory cat that
sexually aroused and it's it's sin it's
missing the mark because that's what sin
means it means to miss the bullseye and
you have invited it into your house this
corruption and sin you've invited it
into your house voluntarily so that it
can have its way with you sexually so
that and you you've intertwined yourself
with it creatively and brought something
horrible forth and you're suffering
there therefore can be laid at your feet
and you have no reason to call me on the
structure of my creation and so of
course that's the last thing that Kane
wants to hear because he doesn't want to
understand that he's at fault for making
the wrong sacrifices so he trots on out
of there and the story says that his
countenance Falls and that he's wrought
which is to say almost nothing at all
and he decides that he's going to serve
God a good one and wander off and
destroy his ideal God's ideal but also
Cain's own ideals so he kills his
brother and leaves him dead and that's
the story of mankind and that it's worse
Sam because what happens after that is
that Cain gives rise to descendants and
in his first or so generation of
descendants if you bother or annoy them
they kill seven of you not one and if
you bother his descendants descendants
they kill 49 of you not seven and then
his ultimate descendant or one of his
ultimate descendants is tubal-cain
and tubal Cain historically speaking or
or traditionally speaking is the first
person who makes weapons of war and so
the idea there is that the deceit and
jealousy and resentment of the
individual propagates through society
until war emerges and then the next
story is the flood I've got two
reactions to this Jordan one is that
obviously you some stories are
interesting and are written for a reason
and those reasons are interesting and
I've already granted you that in fiction
there can be a lot of truth in fiction a
lot of human truth which is distilled
there and one of his virtues is that
when you read somebody like Dostoevsky
or Tolstoy or Shakespeare you can run an
emulation other people's lived
experience you can essentially live
other lives that are that you would
never live personally and learn the
lessons of of those lives though you're
never going to murder some old woman in
her flat you can watch Raskolnikov do it
and experience a plausible
psychological arc that follows from that
so I'm not discounting the value of
stories at all but it seems to me that
what you're doing is overlooking in your
discussion of Cain and Abel and the the
archetype of propitiating a God you are
overlooking the obvious ground truth and
its consequences here and then telling a
story which is fairly unconstrained by
any rules the obvious ground truth for
me is people thought they were in
relationship to a deity who could become
angry and who had to be propitiated and
this led to some very direct and
appalling consequences for millennia the
most extreme being human sacrifice from
which we graduated to animal sacrifice
at least in the judeo-christian
tradition and human sacrifice was real
and it's virtually a cultural universal
and yes so there's some archetypal story
you can tell about it but it was perhaps
the most barbarous symptom of human
ignorance about the weather about
disease about good and bad luck about
agriculture about everything that we
have ever given rise to and we are quite
happy to have outgrown it and whenever
we find a culture that is practicing
something like human sacrifice based on
its a notion of propitiating invisible
deities we see these people as
dangerously confused and any child born
into the company of such adults is an
unlucky one who has to be rescued now
right I'm in the year is 2017 as you
were talking I was reminded of something
I wrote in the end of faith my first
book in an EndNote that was kind of
pitched to the Joseph Campbell use of
Mythology of which you are showing some
affinity even though his name hasn't
come up and I just want to read this to
you because this is I believe this
counterpoint to this way of talking
about mythology and stories and
archetypes is still valid place is still
what I think
I went into a bookstore I walked into
the cookbook section of a Barnes & Noble
and with my eyes closed just ran my hand
down the Shelf and grabbed a book and
opened it at random and looked at the
first recipe I saw in the book turned
out to be a book called a taste of
Hawaii new cooking from the crossroads
of the Pacific so here is what I wrote
in this end note in the end of faith and
therein I discovered it as yet
uncelebrated mystical treatise while it
appears to be a recipe for walk seared
fish and shrimp cakes with ogo tomato
relish
we need only studies list of ingredients
to know that we were in the presence of
an unrivaled spiritual intelligence then
I list the ingredients right says one
snapper fillet cubed 3 teaspoons of
chopped scallions salt and freshly
ground pepper is a long list of
ingredient and then I go through with a
a mystical interpretation of this recipe
now I'll just give you a few sentences
to give you a sense of it sounds like
you're getting dangerously close to
paranoid schizophrenic thinking that's
the thing I mean this is obviously crazy
because I know how I did this but this
is as valid sounding or so I would argue
as most of what is produced in this
genre so when I say the snapper fillet
of course is the individual himself you
and I a wash in the sea of existence and
here we find it cubed which is to say
that our situation must be remedied in
all three dimensions of body mind and
spirit
they have three teaspoons of chopped
scallions this further partakes of the
cubic symmetry suggesting that that
which we need add to each level of our
bean by way of antidote comes likewise
in equal proportions the import of the
passage is clear the body mind and
spirit need to be tended with the same
care salt and freshly ground black
pepper well here we have the perennial
invocation of opposites the white and
black aspects of our nature both good
and evil must be understood if we would
fulfill the recipe of spiritual life
nothing after all can be excluded from
the human experience this seems to be a
tantric text
what is more salt and pepper come to us
in the form of grains which is to say
that the good and bad qualities are born
at the tiniest actions and thus we're
not in good or evil in general but only
by virtue of innumerable moments which
color the stream of our being by force
of repetition then this
- of cayenne pepper clearly a being of
such robust color and flavored signifies
the spiritual influence of an
enlightened adept I go on and on and
this is all because it's meant
to be I mean again this is a
random text that I'm giving a
highfalutin spiritual interpretation of
but my point is you can do this with
anything and religions have been doing
this for millennia with specific books
which even by the merits of fiction for
the most part and there's some
exceptions here I'll grant you that
there's some bits of the Bible that
stand comparison with the rest of world
literature but much of it doesn't right
most of these books are profoundly
mediocre the Quran is as mediocre a book
as I've ever seen on any subject I'll
grant that maybe the Arabic is beautiful
I don't read Arabic but the content of
the book isn't and this is true of most
religious writing and the fact that most
people most of the time have found
profound meaning in much of this work is
not proof otherwise and again if you
found me a culture that was doing what I
just did to a recipe in a cookbook the
fact that they had gone generation after
generation enamored of that
interpretation wouldn't prove anything
that's the problem I'm having here yeah
well that's good I mean what you wrote
is very funny too
and and you know it's very much
reminiscent of New Age thinking I would
say what's the problem with New Age
thinking that in your view well I don't
think it's constrained and exactly in
the manner that you said I mean I
mentioned that what I've been trying to
do while working my way through the murk
let's say look if you're analyzing
scientific literature you have to
separate the wheat from the chaff and
like 95% of it is chaff unless it's
social psychology in which case 99% of
it is chaff but it's chaff there's a lot
of it you have to be discriminating in
your interpretation in the scientific
literature just as another and it in
other literary domains and it's
certainly the case that we aren't as
good at distinguishing what constitutes
quality in the fictional domain from
what constitutes outright falsehood and
and delusion let's say anyway is the
example of paranoid
it's Renia very specifically there
because paranoids who tend to be among
the more intelligent people who are
cursed with schizophrenia take a set of
axioms and then weave a compelling story
that's logically coherent if you grant
the validity of the axioms and so the
kind of murk that you're describing and
I think that that characterizes in
particular New Age thinking is is an
ever-present danger not so much of
religious thinking though Sam it's a
it's an ever-present danger of human
imaginative Ness
you know we can produce representations
of the world that grip onto the world in
many ways but then we have to subject
them to intense criticism and that's why
for example we both share a belief that
the last thing we want to do in our
society has put any restrictions
whatsoever on the human right to
criticise religious presuppositions I
think that's an absolute catastrophe and
I'm certainly not claiming for a second
that every possible religious
interpretation is correct and that's
that's clearly no more than every
possible work of fiction is of quality
but the quality issue really is a
stickler because it's very as we as
we've already discussed it's it's
sufficiently evident that there's such a
thing as great literature to be somewhat
self-evident that there's truth embedded
in that even though we don't precisely
know how to define it you know now the
post modernists would take an opposed
view to that they would say well there's
no truth in literature whatsoever it's
all a matter of interpretation which is
and it can in some sense to the
objection that you're raising and that's
all that I have to say that's a profound
objection
but I don't I believe that it throws the
baby out with the bathwater so so what
I've been trying to do is discriminate
my way through the the wealth of past
wisdom that has been bequeathed to us
and to find patterns and then to verify
them using other techniques now some of
the techniques are you know you can you
can also debate what constitutes an
acceptable methodological technique but
one of their are existential techniques
as well and I think you rely on them to
some degree when you're talking about
the necessity of speaking the truth
because I would say I've put what I've
learned from the analysis I've conducted
into action in my in my own life which
has changed dramatically as a
consequence and only for the better in
the life of my family about which I
could say the same thing about the
teaching that I've done to my students
and I've been regarded for 30 years as
teaching courses at good universities
that have been regarded by a vast
majority of the students is absolutely
life transforming and so and there is a
massive hunger it's almost it's almost
insatiable for more sophisticated
understanding of these archetypal
stories now you know you talked about
human sacrifice and I would say well
obviously that was a catastrophic and
barbaric epoch in human developmental
history and who would want to go back to
that but I would say what we've done to
that is not so much invalidated as
supplanted with a psychological
understanding in that we can sacrifice
what we hold dear that's holding us back
and move forward into the future or or
you could say on an even even more
superordinate sense it's reasonable for
a person to sacrifice themselves to what
they hold as the highest value and
that's an idea that's built
extraordinarily deeply into the
substructure of Christianity hmm and
it's very much what you're in my opinion
when you tell people that they should
abandon let's say they're impulsive
desires and they're instrumental
longings and do nothing but tell the
truth in some sense
from my perspective what you're telling
them is to give up their selfish
individual being and sacrifice
themselves to the truth to me that like
I truly believe that that's the central
message of Christianity it's the central
message of the prophetic tradition in
Judaism as well because the people who
spoke truth to power in the Old
Testament were generally very unpopular
for doing so so I know it's a problem
separating the wheat from the chaff and
I think you did a great job of
satirizing that in what you wrote but
that doesn't help us solve the problem
of the fact that there is value in great
fiction I don't view that as a problem I
think it's obvious that there's there's
value in it but it's not the value of
telling you how the cosmos works or what
is likely to happen in the future right
it's a different kind of value it's not
a surrogate for a scientific theory
about anything right that's what
religion does with it well that I would
say that fine I've got no disagreement
with you there the thing about the
fundamentalist say the Christian
fundamentalists who insist upon a
literal understanding of the biblical
stories is that they don't know what
literal means and actually they're
they're better scientists in some sense
than the scientists themselves because
the scientists would never say that the
stories in Genesis are scientific but
the fundamentalists implicitly assuming
that only scientific fact can be true
attempt constantly to force these
stories into a scientific framework
where they do not belong right but again
the because the stories are believed to
be we're talking specifically about the
the judeo-christian tradition because
they're believed to be revealed truth
right and these are not stories written
by human beings these are the Word of
God in some form these are not held to
be stories these are held to be records
of things that have actually happened so
they're history books
on one level and when they talk about
what will happen when they're obviously
given to prophecy they are an indication
of what will
and if you believe God is talking to you
and that's where the whole thing becomes
so pathological from an intellectual
point of view I agree with you this is
partly why I've spent so much time
studying Nietzsche I mean in the in the
late 1900s nature basically diagnosed
Christianity he said that it had
produced a tremendous longing for the
truth which was then used against the
dogmatic elements of Christianity which
it destroyed but some of its I would say
some of it is is intense philosophical
confusion it's like there's a kind of
let's call it wisdom in fiction if we
don't want to call it truth because you
know obviously calling it truth brings
up that's the fact issue let's call it
wisdom the wisdom is clearly there but
to consider it as a representation of
the factual world is not only a mistake
but also a dangerous mistake and it's a
self-defeating mistake you know it's
partly why the fundamentalists who
insist upon the equivalence of the
stories in Genesis and scientific theory
do their own Creed a tremendous
disservice and they're they're bound to
lose because the Bible as science is
weak and science as science is strong
and so there's no there's no hope there
for people who are trying to push
fundamentalist Christian stories as
literally true so we can agree on that
what I'm trying to do well I would say
what I'm trying to do with mythological
language is I'm trying to raise my
father out of the belly of the beast out
of the belly of the whale in the depths
of the ocean because there's there's
living truth in our traditions obscured
as that is by human ignorance and and
inability to conceive even that doesn't
mean that it can be left behind it can't
be it has to be brought forward and
updated and give a new sight which by
the way is exactly what happens in the
Egyptian stories because Horus the I of
attention goes down into the underworld
and rescues the god of tradition Osiris
and gives him sight and that's exactly
what I'm trying to do and I think I've
been successful at it and so
yes the interpretation problem is a
major one but that's something that be
devil's everything absolutely everything
the other issue here though is that
there's a this is another thing that
puts religion in general in an uneasy
relationship with science there's a
radical provincialism entailed
in endorsing any specific religion so
for instance if Christianity is right in
any sense well then all other religions
are wrong when you look at what
Christianity entails so at a minimum it
suggests that Jesus was the Messiah
right so the Jews are wrong Jesus was
divine and resurrected so the Muslims
are wrong there's only one God so the
Hindus are wrong right so even if you
want to relax the literalism there
you're still sending some fairly sharp
elbows toward the other religions yeah
well well look this is this is again I
think to give the devil his due this is
exactly the point that post modernists
like Derrida have put out have put
forward and very powerfully you know
they say well look if you accept a value
system as paramount then you invalidate
all other value systems and you exclude
everyone who isn't succeeding in that
value system and their answer is well
we'll just dissolve all the value
systems well that's a completely insane
answer because you can't even focus on
an object in the absence of a value
system technically speaking because
you're always focusing on things of
value right and so the fact that the
conflict that you describe is an
emergent consequence of value systems is
a terrible problem and we don't know how
to solve it although I think the
solution paradoxically enough is
actually embedded to some degree in
Christianity and the reason for that is
because Christianity makes the group's
subordinate to the individual and it
also hypothesizes that the highest moral
virtue that a person should uphold is
that of the truth and that the truth
speaks chaos into order in the most
beneficial possible way and that that's
the fundamental ethical duty but why
make
this a matter of allegiance to
Christianity why not just take what is
useful in any tradition you just
mentioned Nietzsche right so you found
some of his work useful there's no
tradition of allegiance to Nietzsche you
don't you don't have to worry about
whether or not you are sufficiently
Nietzschean in order to use his wisdom
you just take from him insofar as it's
useful why not do the same thing with
Christianity why waste any time
wondering whether or not you are a
Christian or telling people that you are
or not why not get out of the religion
business and use everything that is
useful in human culture however it comes
to you in a way that's nondenominational
well if that could be achieved that
would be absolutely wonderful I I would
say the first problem with that is that
or the historical problem with that is
that the kind of truth that have emerged
out of this lengthy mythological process
this lengthy imaginative mythological
process were first encapsulated inside
the stories and the images they weren't
articulated philosophical or
psychological truths of the kind that
we're speaking about look you can you
can think about this like the
relationship between Dostoyevsky and
Nietzsche so Dostoevsky and Nietzsche
were very similar in many ways
philosophically but Dostoyevsky wasn't a
philosopher he was a storyteller
implicit in his stories was Nietzsche
and philosophy even though paradoxically
enough Dostoevsky was a Christian the
storytellers get there before the
philosophers and you know you're saying
now that the Philosopher's have got
there maybe we don't have to pledge
allegiance to a canonical version of the
story and that could be the case in fact
you see partly Nietzsche criticized
Christianity for all the reasons that
you just criticize Christianity or any
other creed Deven in a devastating
manner although he was also
extraordinarily grateful to Christianity
because he believed it had disciplined
the European mind
and that that period of discipline was
necessary a period where everything was
interpreted under the rubric of a single
interpretation because that taught
concentration but nature said well now
we're beyond that and we're going to
have to become gods of our own accord in
order to withstand the consequences and
then of course that turned out to be
very problematic for reasons that need
to also prophesy
because he said that the West would
degenerate both into nihilism and into
totalitarianism and that millions of
people would die as a consequence of the
death of God and that's Dostoyevsky
prophesied exactly the same thing in the
devil's and it's exactly what happened
and I don't believe that we can get past
the Scylla and Charybdis of nihilism and
totalitarianism without going back to
the past to find what it has to offer us
to bring it forward in an articulated
manner and of course that's precisely
why I think the discussion that I'm
having with you is important because I
think that's what we're doing right but
there are two ways of going back to the
past you exemplify both of them you are
going back talking about people like
Nietzsche right and you can throw the
rest of philosophy and world literature
into that bin but then it sounds like
you are also tempted to go back in what
appears to be a different category of
effort which is the religious one which
is your holding to one side certain
arguably fiction writers and
philosophers as being something other
than fiction writers and philosophers
and treating certain texts as something
other than mere products of the human
mind and you have a lot of company right
this is what every religious person does
but why not treat Jesus the same way you
would treat Socrates well that's that's
a good start I think that Socrates and
Jesus had an awful lot in common but the
thing about Socrates is that he's
primarily a historical figure whereas
Christ may have been a historical figure
I think that the simplest assumption is
that someone of that description existed
but he's also a mythological character
and the mythology is unbelievably deep
and what it is in some sense is it is
the human imaginations attempt to
construct a representation of the
perfect man and so Christ is the perfect
man now you may say well you don't know
what that means you can say that Jesus
was the perfect man hold it hold it self
I didn't say that I didn't say I said
that Christ is the perfect man that it's
different because I'm speaking out the
mythological level is that whatever
human beings can imagine as perfect and
in terms of the manner in which an
individual could conduct himself that's
what Christ represents I'm not claiming
for a moment that that manifested itself
in history that's a different claim and
we can talk about that claim too but I
would say it didn't even manifest itself
in the Bible if you're going to write a
story about the perfect man a fiction of
the perfect man you wouldn't write it
the way the New Testament is written and
you would get Jesus to do things that he
didn't do and not do things that he did
do and he would say things that he
didn't say he can get a lot more perfect
than what you see and in Matthew Mark
Luke and John okay so let me let me tell
you why
briefly why that story is archetypal
perfect okay so so here's the reason
it's because as has been agreed upon by
the sages of the ages let's say the
fundamental reality of life is suffering
and and finitude and you can layer on
top of that from an existential
perspective malevolence and injustice
and that's the law of human beings and
so here is an archetypal story the most
perfect innocent sinless person possible
is betrayed by his friends
his countrymen
and the foreigners simultaneously for no
crime whatsoever in the most torturous
possible way and also abandoned by the
creator of being himself and he accepts
that all voluntarily you see the reason
it's an archetypal story is because you
can't get beyond that you see it hits a
limit it's it's the limit of tragedy and
so that's where the perfection lies now
the issue is well what does that mean
and here's what it means we can go
incremental ii here because i don't even
buy that it's the limit of tragedy but
first of all the thing is anchored to a
belief in human sacrifice this is what
is so weird about christianity from my
point of view is that if this is not a
religion that disavows human sacrifice
this is a religion that claims that
human sacrifice is real and important
but there was only one that was in fact
necessary and effective and that is the
sacrifice of jesus well that's the
protestant in the catholic
interpretation it's not so clear with
the orthodox christians they don't
really they buy that version of
christianity that's more the stress is
more each individual's moral obligation
to do the same thing i don't know enough
about orthodox believed to dispute that
but most Western Christians have
unacknowledged at the core of their
belief system this assertion of the
validity of human sacrifice right which
is insanity
well it isn't insanity 7 if you think
about sacrifice in the way that we
talked about it earlier that's not the
way it's thought about even in the Bible
he had to die for our sins right he is
the scapegoat he is the only effective
scapegoat and he's a hero he's perfect
in your terms because he took this on
voluntarily
I mean to go back to what you were just
saying this is not the ultimate tragedy
because he did take it on voluntarily
it's more tragic if someone really gets
screwed by the cosmos oh yes you're
right about that but the part the fact
that he took it on voluntarily is
actually the part of this story that
involves the transcendence of the
tragedy
because the story there and this is a
very old story it's far older than
Christianity the story is that the best
way to to transcend the bitterness of
life is to accept it completely hmm
including including betrayal at the
hands of your friends including betrayal
at the hands of your countrymen and the
foreigners too to allow that to be
acceptable to take it on voluntarily and
not to be bitter about it like Cain
because you get murderous when you're
bitter so I can go with you there but
now if that is what you find compelling
in this story I could just offer for
your examination another example another
story another tradition which in its
details is basically irreconcilable with
Christianity but it's also well
subscribed it's the Buddha and Buddhism
right the Buddha is another example of
the perfect man he does give you a
similar rationale to the one you just
gave for radical acceptance of the
vicissitudes of life and yet he's far
more articulate I'm here now we're
talking about the historical Buddha who
predated Jesus by five centuries but who
seems to have said much more that is
psychologically perspicacious and he
talks exactly on that point about the
nature of acceptance
what psychologically is accomplished
when you do accept your experience
moment a moment and the barriers to
doing that and the way in which you
should structure life so as to be able
to do that more and more moment by
moment and he presented a methodology of
meditation that is even today almost
perfectly designed if you're going to
talk about the oldest tradition of
Buddhism the tera vaada it's almost
perfectly designed for export into a
secular context so you can take whole
sections of the Pali Canon and if you
just filter out some of the needless
repetition and some of the phraseology
that treats the Buddha like the perfect
world conquering hero who Buddhists
believe him to be and you just look at
what is being said is almost a perfectly
secular recipe for training your mind in
essentially a course
of growth toward the kind of acceptance
you are talking about again I'm not
urging you to be a Buddhist I'm just
saying this is an example that is
non-christian that does much of what you
are claiming Christianity
well I perhaps uniquely does it invites
a non mythological relationship to it
well only if you strip the mythology
away from it and I think actually that
you make a mistake with food that a
person makes a mistake with Buddhism if
they do that you see because there's
also a longing for religious experience
that's part of the human soul and for
example that's why people smoke
marijuana and why they take psychedelic
drugs and why they meditate but again I
would argue and this is what I argue in
my book waking up you can have the most
esoteric experiences that are
classically interpreted as religious or
mystical or spiritual without believing
anything on insufficient evidence and
certainly without structuring your your
interpretation of these experiences
along classically religious dogmatic
lines or even Joseph Campbell in
mythological lines you can essentially
be a scientist of introspection and you
can use drugs to do that you can use new
technologies to do that you can use
ancient techniques of meditation to do
that you could even do something which
is seems to partake of delusional
thinking to do that and just notice the
outcome I mean their practices like in
Tibetan Buddhism there's something
called deity practice where you imagine
yourself to be a deity or a bodhisattva
and the practice of imagining yourself
to be that is not the same thing as
becoming delusional and thinking you are
that that's exactly the same thing as
the mystical imitation of Christ it's
exactly the same idea so you could do
that with Christ you could do it with
Batman you could say to someone who's
shy and who doesn't like to go to
parties because they just don't like
each subsequent encounter with a
stranger that they where they have to
overcome their shyness and their
inability to make small talk and all the
rest so shyness is a psychological
problem that virtually everyone has to
some degree or another and perhaps one
way to overcome it is to walk into a
party just trying on the idea
that you are Batman right that you're
Bruce Wayne right you have this all of
these secret abilities or you're Jason
Bourne or some powerful character who
you got it that's exactly it it's
capable of great things but we know as a
total fiction so now does that have any
psychological consequence and if so why
I think there's no question it can have
a psychological consequence and can be
useful to do that but the crucial thing
there is that you can play with those
kind of schema without deluding yourself
like if at any point in that adventure
someone tapped you on the shoulder and
said but do you really think you're
Batman you would say no now the problem
is when you meet the guy who really
thinks he's Batman that's where you're
you cross over into dangerously divisive
and unsupported ideas about the nature
of reality and religion is really the
only game in town when you want to
dignify those ideas generation after
generation and protect them from
criticism that's why the scientific
attitude of speaking honestly about
facts keeps smashing into religion
uniquely it doesn't smash into fiction
doesn't smash into Dostoevsky it smashes
into Jesus right because of what most
people are doing with Jesus yes well
okay so right look no arguments there
but let me let me offer you a
elaboration of your idea so let's say a
kid wants to be Batman well that's right
because that's why he's reading the
comics and that's why he's going to the
billion dollar Marvel movies but or DC
movies that portray these superheroes
out on the screen it's because the kid
is acting them out in imagination is
trying on an ideal so let's say well
maybe you start with a pro wrestler
because you're you know you're not that
conceptually sophisticated and then
maybe you move to Batman and then maybe
move from Batman to Thor in the Marvel
cartoons and there you're in the you're
in the domain of quasi deities and then
maybe you get a little bit more
sophisticated than that and you try on
Jesus or Buddha and then you ask
yourself well what would happen to the
world if you tried those on completely
and that's the real question that that's
where the historical element and the
mythological element meet and there's
obviously a hierarchy of rank among
individuals and some people have a much
more positive impact on the world
through their actions than others and
there's a there's there's some
hypothetical ultimate limit to that if
you are the best person you could
possibly be in every possible way
just exactly how much good could you
bring into the world and at what point
would you be a bodhisattva have
something Buddhists ask themselves all
the time when would you an incarnation
of Christ something that isn't just
mythological or imaginative or
delusional it's impartial because if the
ideal recedes as you approach it but
there's a reality underneath this which
is that better people are better and
worse people are worse and there's
archetypal limits to both of those so
these are these are very complicated
things they're not there they're fiction
in a sense but I would think about the
more as metafiction they're there what
happens when you distill fiction into
what's ever centrally true about fiction
and it's really really true well I would
grant you and again this is the topic of
my book waking up that there are
possibilities on the positive end of
human psychology that very few people
actual eyes for any significant amount
of time and people glimpse them in their
best moments in life they have peak
experiences whether on drugs or you know
after some crisis or they've been
fasting or they have moments where they
feel as good as they have ever felt they
feel as in touch as they ever will with
just the sheer profundity of slamming
into the present moment and finding it
totally captivating and worthy of their
attention they're not looking elsewhere
for anything they have become identical
to the feeling of being and found it to
be in some basic sense perfect now that
that's available to us as human beings
and there's not much of a scientific
story to tell about it at the moment
it's not arrived
by understanding more about the universe
scientifically so it is in some sense
orthogonal to all of science but right
my point is that it doesn't require
delusion either it doesn't require
belief in anything on insufficient
evidence it doesn't require that we
believe certain books were revealed by
the creator of the universe and others
weren't you can get rid of 90% of what
people are doing
in the name of religion and spirituality
and mysticism and still find this
project captivating the 10% that you
retain perhaps is when you hear these
stories about people like Buddha and
Jesus and all of the people who have
made heroic efforts to be like them
historically the Christian
contemplatives and and Buddhist monks
and all the rest you can find in the
biographies and pseudo biographies of
these people some evidence that
transforming the human mind is possible
and you can find that evidence in your
own life if you have the right
experiences and you can see that human
consciousness is perturb a bowl and
plastic and you need not be who you were
yesterday and so when you're talking
about becoming your best self or
becoming more and more like the best
selves that have ever existed or you
talked about transcending the self
itself as an illusion right all of this
stuff is worth thinking about and paying
attention to and there is a there there
I'm not doubting that for a second what
I'm insisting upon however is that we
need never step off the razor's edge of
real honesty and conceptual integrity
even for a moment in order to walk in
that direction and that's as you said
most New Agers see no problem in
indulging any kind of happy talk about
the significance of crystals or whatever
it is they're connected to and that's
where it becomes startlingly
unscientific and that's where someone
like Deepak Chopra and I can't agree
about how to talk about things because
the moment we start he hits me with you
know you close your eyes and you feel at
one with the universe that proves that
you preceded the Big Bang your
consciousness was there before the Big
Bang
now of course it proves nothing of the
kind that's where he becomes a pseudo
scientist and so what I'm arguing for is
that we just remain attentive to honest
talk about what we know about reality
even while we have deep experiences and
seek them out by whatever means and
again I will grant you that there are
means that would amount to a kind of
internal costume party where you can
think in terms of myth if you said to me
Sam I want you to think of the rest of
your day in terms of the hero archetype
what are you doing today to slay the
dragon and bring back that hoarded
wealth to your community that's a
pattern of thought that I have no
question could have some utility right
well that's what we were doing today Sam
right but again the crucial bit is that
in doing that I'm not making claims to
knowledge about the ethereal existence
of archetypes there's no you know
Akashic record or collective unconscious
I'm not making claims of that kind at
all in order to find this way of
thinking useful and I'm not aligning
myself with any provincial tradition of
myth making ie a religion and claiming
that my religion is better than others
which is you know as we see every time
we open the newspaper a divisive game
that we have to figure out some way of
unravelling right we do and your
emphasis on clear-headed thinking I mean
this is part of the reason why I wanted
to talk to you I mean certainly one of
the things that you demonstrated the
first time we talked was your capacity
for clear-headed thinking I mean you're
you're crazily incisive and
laser-focused and you know those are
extraordinarily useful attributes and
that's partly why I thought it would be
so useful for us to have a conversation
I'm an advocate of critical thinking we
have to get this right but having said
that the abandonment of all value
structures which is say the post
modernist perspective isn't a way
forward because it leads to it leads to
a situation where people are going to be
unconsciously possessed by far more
foolish ideas than they left behind them
you're certainly not getting that in me
I'm not advocating that we have
and in value structures to the contrary
the value that we should have in hand
perhaps before any other is the one you
referenced earlier which is honesty
every level because it's the only thing
when you're talking about honest speech
it's the only thing that allows us to
course-correct collectively it's the
only yes if you're going to lie to me
then you are denying me your view of
reality and insofar as you have a view
that can be useful to me we're now
playing a game that is not at all
optimized for course-correction and so
as a society we need to be and this is
where your defense of free speech comes
in and has been so useful we have to be
committed to defending free speech
however in politic or unpopular or even
wrong because defending that is the only
barrier to in the limit violence because
the only way we can influence one
another short of physical violence is
through speech through communicating
ideas and the moment you say certain
ideas can't be communicated you create a
circumstance where people have no
alternative but to go hands on you but
again I'm not there's nothing in me that
is echoing a postmodern relinquishment
of a sense that there are right and
wrong answers to the contrary I
understand that and I'm certainly not
assuming that you are in nap camp or
that you think that way is quite clear
to me that you don't Sam I'm getting
tired I I got it to just say one more
thing sure if that's okay with you well
it has to do with this course-correction
idea so I'm going to perhaps leave you
with another archetypal idea that you
can chew on if you want so there's an
idea that's paramount in Christianity
which is a Creed I understand better
than most mostly as a consequence of my
educational history but the idea there's
a very weird idea in that and that is
that at the beginning of time God spoke
order out of chaos the chaos was like a
potential and that it was the act of
speaking truthfully that brought forth
the proper kind of order and that was
the paradisal order that Adam and Eve
inhabited
there's this deep idea lurking in there
that was drawn from many sources that
the spoken truth is what transforms
chaotic potential into habitable order
and then weirdly enough what happened
with that idea over the period of about
3,000 years as Christianity emerged from
Judaism was that by the time
Christianity emerged there was an
insistence that Christ was the word that
God used at the beginning of time to
extract habitable order from chaos and
so the idea there it's one of the most
brilliant ideas of mankind is that by
speaking the truth you face the chaos of
potential and bring forth the most
benevolent possible type of order
combined with that course correction
that you're describing and I think
that's the central idea of the West now
you can find that idea echoed in other
areas like in Buddhism for example and
in other religions for that matter but I
believe that it reached its highest
imagistic development at least as far as
I can tell in the West and that's also
why we have societies that are
predicated on the sacredness so to speak
of the spoken truth yeah the question of
why we value the spoken truth to the
degree that we do is an interesting one
I think it's largely it it is as much to
do with a reaction against Western
religion by science and philosophy as it
does with anything that came from
Western religion but I think it you know
it is something that is unraveling in
the strangest of places now so it's
insofar as you and I can make common
cause in defending the necessity of
protecting free speech across the board
however unpopular I think practically
speaking that's an extraordinarily
useful thing to do yes well that's the
best way at the moment that we can slay
our respective dragons well listen
Jordan it's a pleasure to talk to you a
second time I hope people found
something a value in it you would never
imagine we disagreed as much as we did
the first time around if you only heard
this second conversation
well sometimes it's sometimes some some
stupid persistence is useful and you
know I think the rabbit hole we went
down was an interesting one even though
it was painful and perhaps look it was
productive because it got us to the
second conversation and hooray for that
and like if you if you feel inclined at
some point to speak in the future with
me
we'll see how people respond to this but
you know I found the conversation very
useful and hooray for that yeah well
listen so I will invite people to
respond yet again as I did the first
time and I think you and I both pay
attention to Twitter at least I pay
attention to Twitter really exclusively
in terms of social media so yeah me too
pretty much Twitter is a good place to
make noise at us we have these kinds of
conversations for you guys this as I
said the first time around this you
Jordan were my most requested guest by a
factor of I don't know what but it was
remarkable how many people wanted us to
talk so we have now done it a second
time and listen it's a pleasure and I
wish you the best of luck with your
entanglements with crazy bureaucracies
and everything else you're doing because
you're you were on the front lines of a
certain kind of culture war and it can't
be easy I know it must be stressful and
I just wish you the best with all of it
thanks Sam much appreciated and good
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