Conversation between Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson - Waking Up Podcast #67

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Welcome to the waking of 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 upon cast about four.
So episodes back entitled What is True podcast number 62 and that, to the disappointment of everyone, was, ah, fairly brutal slogs 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 they say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll on line 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.
Uh, I'm 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 proposition is true.
And I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy.
But it seemed to me that we got stuck at a point that wasn't very interesting.
And many of our listeners I 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 young in 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're doomed to talk past one another.
But we ran a ah 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 answer that pole.
So it was a considerable number of people.
I decided we should give our people what most of them claim to want.
And, um, 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, uh, 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 differing a pissed apologies 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 I hope so, too.
That seems right.
I mean, you place the 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 on outstanding exponents 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 1st 1 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 listen 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 that 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, hopefully we get bogged down.
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 provocative, 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 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 have heard a few of the things you've said on this topic, but I'll just let you invent yourself a new however it strikes you.
What is the relationship, in your view between science and religion?
Well, I think the religious systems are descriptions of how people onto air.
And I think that the way that I think that those arose in a quasi evolutionary manner and so imagine.
Imagine the dominance hierarchy, structure of a chimpanzee troupe or a wolf pack.
Okay, so we'll we'll use 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 they there's Ah, 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 truth or the or the pack.
And there's an implicit recognition off the value of each individual within that that true or pack such that.
For example, if two wolves square off in a dominance dispute course, they puff themselves up to make to make themselves look large, and they growl at each other, and they engage in ferociously threatening displays and generally speaking, the wolf that that has the lowest threshold for anxiety activation will capitulate first, generally without much more than the pose of a fight and roll over and expose his neck.
And then the dominant wolves will not deigned to tear it out.
Basically, And you could think of the wolves acting out what you would describe Proposition Lee as respect for each individual's value and then in the Champ Troops, Franz DWells.
Research has indicated, for example, that if the dominant turkey is only based on brute force and the chimp out, the talk 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, 3/4 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 truth that's based on a tyranny is unstable.
What the wall indicated was that the chip troops to 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 troupe.
So the dominance isn't power so much as as it might, as you might think of as good politics.
So there's an emergent ethic that, and I truly believe it's emergent ethic.
That's very similar to what PJ 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, you know, the common ancestor we have with chimpanzees.
We already started to act out this ethic.
It was coated in our procedures to speak technically because we have a procedural memory.
And then as we develop cortical e, we watched 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 PJ's notion that Children, when they first come together, toe 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 asked 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.
10 speaking.
It's only 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 is very, very, very deeply biologically predicated.
Where's 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 Ah, can I tell you just a two minute star?
Sure.
So Okay, so one time I was at the hockey rink with my son and he was playing.
He was young, he was about 12.
They were playing his championship game in this Little league that they have.
And, uh, my son was 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 He was ah, 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 Starr's team lost.
And so then the kids went off the ice, and then 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 rafting had being, how 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 or parenting that I never seen now, So there's there that there's a moral of that story, So his kid was very good at playing Harkey, but he wasn't very good at being a good player.
And so, you know, he 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 tryingto win.
But but imagine it this way.
Imagine that human beings that the goal of human life isn't toe 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 Plato 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 that you keep get invite getting invited to games.
Now, if you think of each game as ah as, ah 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 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 is 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 Arkad Temple 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 on Lee 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 literature, throat while throughout recorded history.
The oldest story we have, which is the new model ish from Mesopotamia, is a a story about Marduk, who's the culture hero and also the the highest guard in the message.
Damian Pantheon.
He confronts the Dragon of Chaos, cuts her into pieces and makes the world.
In fact, one of his names was Nam.
I can't remember the name unfortunate, but it meant he who creates ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Ty Amount, 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, of 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, Sam, think about it this way.
Okay, again, you could tell me what you what you think about this So we know that roughly speaking, that human females made across and up dominance hierarchies.
Where's chimpanzee females are non selective maters.
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 an up dominance hierarchy.
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 man 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 Fino type 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 fine places of agreement and disagreement for clarity's 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 howto live in this world, which is our police nominal starting point.
First, there's the description of how we got here right in.
This captures all of evolutionary psychology and much of what you just began to say about selection pressures with respect to dominance, hierarchies.
And do you know 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 FINA type or the possibility of group selection pressure.
More religious tribes have a way of organizing themselves in a more durable way than than less religious tribes, and therefore we have.
There's something in our evolutionary history that has selected for religiosity, say a no 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.
So 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 as important for this conversation.
For really, for anything that I've written about the relationship between morality and science or fax 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 could make much Darwinian sense of.
And yet you can have the most committed adherents of any faith tending toward a life of celibacy.
At the very least, promiscuity is taboo and most religious traditions.
I'm not taking a position that that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm just saying that this is where evolution is no longer relevant to a discussion of how people should live.
And as I think, I said in a blogger 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 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 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 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 a ce faras I I you 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 Kay's 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.
That one is to disseminate yourself as widely as possible and let the offspring liver 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 may be taken to its extreme in human beings, and so we're tilting 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 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 d'oh you obviously can.
And as you point out our sexual morality and are commitment to monogamy, all of that is amenable to being interpreted in evolutionary terms.
No doubt those stories are valid and 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, tow, 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, I 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 time spans than that.
So I'm starting from the presupposition that the most permanent things are the most riel, 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 shape?
Human evolutionary history.
And I mean way back.
I mean 350 million years back before trees before flowers back when we shared um, when we shared a common ancestor with crustaceans.
And so one of the most permanent features of the biological landscape is the existence of the dominant Harkin 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 Archies, 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 being 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 faras 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 choosy bottlenecks.
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 tour are interchangeable, and out of them arises meaning So the idea behind the Taoist simple 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 and negative culture positive, the negative and nature positive and negative, and we haven't outgrown.
Not in the least.
It's exactly the same problem.
It's always bean 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 stories can't be, cannot be transcended.
And they cannot be, um, ignored.
They pop up of their own accord.
I mean, look, I give you an example.
One question.
Jordan, how is any of that religious?
Though I 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 of 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 gonna 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 chick sent a highly 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 time's flow.
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 further in your capacity to thrive and and move forward.
The 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 schizophrenics, where the underlying mechanisms that produce the sense of meaning actually go a straight.
And that's especially the case, saying with paranoid schizophrenia.
But you see, that's That's partly why I think I developed a viewpoint that similar to yours with regards to the necessity of stating the truth or atleast 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, no neural.
Psychologically speaking, I think that you pathologize 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 you're 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 look, at least not to engage in deceit.
Because otherwise you will do exactly what you said and pathologize yourself.
And then while 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?
I mean, you could have a belief system or B 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 Bean 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 embody 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 that and you see that ideas also deeply rooted in in religious mythology.
So, for example, the finger of Horace, who's the Egyptian eye and who's also a Faulcon.
Now Horace is an eye and a Faulcon because falcons concede 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 Horace, who's ah, uh, 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 Set, who later became Satan in the developmental pathway of this set of ideas.
And Horace, who lived in truth, so to speak, 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 your ah, what would you call more culture hero type of person than what you're doing is updating archaic and blind representations of the proper moral pathway forward, which to never be encapsulated completely in a set of rules?
See, that's partly why that's partly wife, 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 motive being by only acting out rules because rules the same rules are applicable in every situation.
I mean, I could tell you the Christian story in a way that you might find interesting in about 10 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 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, as though there's a validity to the whole picture.
When you talk that way that I 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 confined to 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 they're never going to get anywhere worth going right.
So a modern example of that is something like Isis or the Taliban.
But there's the ancient examples or, you know, older examples that are in some cases even easier to understand because we have no affinity for them.
So do you know the Dobel people?
The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote about them?
I wrote about him for a few pages in my book, The Moral Landscape.
Yeah, I read about them in your book, Actually, yes.
Oh, 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 hot house version of radical confusion, which you wouldn't believe would be possible, but for the fact that some anthropologists 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 that 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 with zero sum, so that if one man succeeded in growing more vegetables than his neighbor, his success, his surplus 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 neighbors crops.
So to have a good harvest was a crime, by everyone's estimation, even the person who was the 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 the ancient imperative of dominance hierarchies.
You know, you could give some sympathetic and stroll 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 dough 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.
Sam and his family, you know that, but yes, so again you could connect it to some kind of story that makes sense.
He'd go to Greek mythology and Shakespeare and and spin a yarn about it.
But clearly this underlying belief in magic was one.
It's almost certainly not true, but two.
It was creating a truly toxic moral environment for these people.
And so I just put that out.
There is an example of something that one would never want to spend a lot of time trying to justify this worldview.
Bye.
Referenced stories, Ancient or otherwise?
Yeah, well, I mean, there's actually a technical solution to the problem that you're opposing.
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 Meal and and his his, uh, his colleague chrome crone back basically addressed that back in the 19 fifties with a very solid piece of method logical work that every psychologist either does er 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 Young, mostly tragically enough by the postmodernists.
Of course, you don't believe in any sort of overarching narrative and who have their own form of dog, unlike 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 neuro psychological account on account of the fundamental neuro psychological processes that enable us to make sense out of the world, primarily relying on the work done early work done by the Russian neuro psychologists Loria and so cool off in Vinogradova, who did a lot of early work on the orienting reflex and they hit the campus.
That was then sort of combined with modern cybernetic theory by Jeffrey Gray, who was hands izing student and Jeffrey Grays.
Work has had tremendous impact over the last, especially over the last 10 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 1,503,000 references.
And Jeffrey 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 neuro psychological function that actually lays extraordinarily nicely on top of the archetypal um, 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 to wall do.
Um, mythology.
I wanted to make sure that it was in keeping with the F ecological, um data, as well as the broader literature on evolutionary psychology and biology.
And so when I say that there's these patterns that exists that you can extract out of our mythology, I'm saying that knowing full well that you confined concordance for the process is described by those are contempt stories in atleast four different scientific disciplines simultaneously and according to crime, 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 wanna 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 mutes 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 why 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 that 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.
We'll see 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 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 your infant.
But today, this primitive 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 bye 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 union 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.
Bullshit.
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 Alastair Crowley and L.
A fast levy and all the You know, the history of her medicine is, um and you could open, you know, manly Palmer halls the secret teachings of all ages 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 the the utility of moving forward on the scientific front.
I mean, I consider myself a scientist, 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 wouldn't 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.
Me one of the things that I thought about after our last discussion, because I went and did some investigation into definitions of truth on some serious investigation so that I was more prepared the next time that we talked.
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 faxes.
Here's a sentence for you and perhaps you could tell me what you make of it.
There is great truth revealed in Dostie, Husky, Tolstoy and Shakespeare.
Do you agree without 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 why we got stuck on the issue of truth.
You see, I would say that those stories there's more truth in Dostie s keys 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 it 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 Matt imaginations there.
I think it's a wide variety of fax 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 in so far 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, no rules that make it interesting.
The sweet spot, at least 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 Dostoyevsky and told story and Shakespeare for her.
They'll do 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 our contemporary religious.
The thing about religion for me again, 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 air true specifically otherworldly things.
The survival of the conscious mind after death or the rial existence of invisible agents which you can propitiate or fail to propitiate and who 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 relaxed 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 gonna take a specific example from what you said and address that you were talking about the propitiate shin of supernatural beings.
Okay, so on, 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 wanna send it up first so can enable our types from a classical religious interpretation standpoint.
And there you