Decoding the Gurus - Christopher Hitchens: Rhetoric, Religion, and Ramadan

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Our short-lived Christopher Hitchens ends in our second episode and full-length decoding of the punchy Brit. This time we are examining one of his well-known religion-themed debates, debating the question 'Is Islam a Religion of Peace?' for The 92nd Street Y, New York with the academic and writer Tariq Ramadan. This one feels like a bit of a throwback to a post-9/11 & Iraq war world. New Atheism was still a cultural force with some punch but it had also received its own fair share of body blows since its earlier days as a plucky new contender. Regardless of how you feel about that particular genre, we suggest you don a fedora, pour yourself a stiff drink, and be prepared for a heady mixture of substantive points, moralizing rhetoric, and witty retorts from both of these seasoned debaters.Also covered in the episode Andrew Huberman and whether sad women's tears have unique properties, Jordan Hall teaches everyone how to play the guitar, James Lindsay discovers the Logos... and Chris tells us all about his office fridge adventures.LinksHitchens and Ramadan debate at 92nd Street Y New YorkHuberman's TikTok video about women's tears and his related tweetsJames Lindsay's Twitter thread on demons and the LogosReddit Thread with a link to Jordan Hall's Guitar tutorialDaniel Laken's free course on psychology methodology and statistical inference

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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where a psychologist and anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh. Today we are doing a decoding. It's the afternoon, we've finished our daily tasks tasks our academic duties and we are getting some afternoon decoding done because that's the kind of guys we are hey chris i never finished my

academic tasks that's a pure pipe dream i'm just taking a break from from that so what a world you live in that way inbox zero chris inbox zero that's what you want to aspire to yeah yeah well one thing that set me off on the wrong foot this morning and i'll i'll keep it i'll keep it short you know keep it short i know you know we're a nice efficient machine not too much banter people don't like the banter people like the banter but we love the banter today i love it we have things to do today but yeah when i came into my office i inherited a small fridge from a professor who was leaving and gave me a fridge from my office. And I presume somebody at the weekend turned the power off

for an extended period of time to the floor or the building because you know what happens when you turn a fridge off, Matt, for multiple hours? It gets less cold, I think. and what do you think happens to the ice inside the fridge it's a fridge freezer i should say there's a small freezer compartment at the top what happens to the ice this is like one of those like isn't a riddle what happens to ice whenever there's no power the machine that is keeping it cold oh okay so you had a puddle on your floor is that what happened that's right but this room has carpet mat so i'm dealing

with that i didn't want to deal with that in the morning so well this is this is a great anecdote chris this is like your anecdote about nuts how you're getting into nuts except it's like the mirror of reverse like that was a happy story and this is an unhappy story they're both equally bland stories of very little interest to anyone except yourself look i didn't promise anyone excitement i see i'm purely discussing the impact on productivity hit i took this morning because of dealing with unexpected electrical issues so excuses excuses you should listen to some hooberman or something you know you need to be min maxing more you need to be enhancing your productivity you know are you touching grass are you gazing

at the sun optimizing your mornings i saw hooberman had a little tweet out promoting it. And I also saw one of these YouTube shorts or TikTok shorts or whatever they are, with him talking about a study which suggested that when men smell sad tears, very important, sad tears of women, women who have been exposed to a sad stimulus. They essentially are less horny. They read people as less attractive or whatever. And it's, I was listening to it going, what? This paper came out in science showing that humans, men in particular in this study, have a strong biological response and hormonal response to the tears of women. What they did is they had women, and in this case it was only women for whatever reason, cry and they collected their tears. Then those tears were smelled by male subjects or male subjects got what was essentially the control, which was the saline.

Men that smelled these tears that were evoked by sadness had a reduction in their testosterone levels that was significant. They also had a reduction in brain areas that were associated with sexual arousal. And then I looked up the study that he referenced, and would you be surprised to learn, Matt, it's a small sample study with a lot of outcomes only some of which you know reach significance a lot of p values hovering 0.03 0.02 0.015 and so on chris i i saw your tweet about this and i did notice that the people had reported p is less than 0.02, P is less than 0.037. Yeah, it must be just right. Because, yeah, I know.

And the other thing is Huberman still, you know, he has a cadre of defenders. I haven't spent a great deal of time with his content but i would say he's guilty of overhyping relatively weak studies and throwing in maybe like hand-waving disclaimers right but when i saw this i had somebody respond on twitter saying you know well but this paper is in science i was like and like that doesn't make the quality of the paper any better and it took me literally about one minute to discover a 2017 attempted replication of the people that he cited and i don't know if there's a different one that he was talking about but in any case it's a paper where they tried to replicate a different research team how do you think that fared? Probably not well. Failed? Yes, failed.

So, you know. You're kidding me. You're kidding me. So when men smell unhappy tears, it doesn't make them less horny. Just as horny as before. We don't know yet, Matt. The thing is we don't know because the literature is just not advanced enough on this topic yet. It's what you're saying.

Nothing can decrease men's horniness. There's like literally nothing known to science that is that's the takeaway but it's just i see people often respond and they're like why are you being mean to such and such right like somebody that they like if they say study and i want to tell them it doesn't matter who cites the study right and it doesn't matter what the topic is. The criteria for good study is the same right now. Do people apply it consistently? No, but the criteria is the same. If you have low powered studies that have multiple outcomes appear to be engaging in practices that allow for multiple researcher degrees of freedom to be exercised. They're not pre-registered. Sometimes the data isn't available or whatever. You should be skeptical of the results. That's all.

Just be skeptical. Look for independent replications. Look for how big the claim is that's being made. And then adjust your excitement accordingly. And it's, yeah, overhyping studies is really common. And it's always the same thing. So just, you know, you don't have to dislike people to know when they're overhyping studies or they're ignoring low quality signals i'm just impressed like we can go and start talking about any topic and you will somehow bend it towards your own personal wins of the week and have an opportunity to rant about open science this is this is you

look it's you brought up hooverman you brought it up. That's me. And also, the point with the open science thing, Matt, is because it doesn't matter, the topic, right? Like, I'm not an expert on ivermectin studies. But when you look at the literature, you see the same flags pop up. When you look at supplement studies, you see the same flags pop up. When you look at stereotype threat, you see the same flags pop up when you look at stereotype threat you see the same flags so just learn the methods learn the basic way to assess studies critically and a whole world will open up to you where you can look at studies and be critical about them it's an exciting

world it's called academia do some research on what happens when you drink somebody's tears it's not like you know smelling okay that's not going to do much i on what happens when you drink somebody's tears. It's not like, you know, smelling. Okay, that's not going to do much. I can see why that didn't replicate. I'd like to see some research into drinking tears, liberal tears, conservative tears. Irish tears, Australian tears, Matt's tears. Yeah, yeah, I agree.

So anyway, that's Hooperman. And actually, Matt, we have a little bit of a medley of various guru activity that we wanted to get to. And in order to introduce that, I think there's a specific clip that people need to hear. And I don't think we should give any introduction. We should just let them hear the raw audio and people can judge for themselves. Yep. No editorializing. I mean, I can go on forever. So here's a fun one. Music. I'm going to propose you learn how to play guitar, but I'm going to propose it in a way

that is going to be almost completely the opposite of almost everybody's experience of that. almost completely the opposite of almost everybody's experience of that. Take a guitar or any other kind of device and do exactly and nothing but this. Pluck one string and listen to it. Try to see how carefully you can sense the sound that it makes. The difference between the strength of the plucking and the strength of the sound, how it becomes quieter over time. Literally just do that. Then maybe, maybe, if you feel up to it, consider plucking another string and seeing if you can notice the difference between the two.

That's discernment. That is discernment in its rawest, deepest sense. And don't do anything more than that. That's humility. Don't try to rush into something. Don't try to suddenly become, be playing Freebird or whatever, Stairway to Heaven. Just learn how to listen to the sound of a single note being plucked and dying. And maybe also, if you can,

see if you can relate to that as the story of all lives. And that's the sacred. So there you go. It's actually not that hard. Yeah, that's pretty simple. That's the secret. That's how you learn guitar.

That's where we started, right? That's how you're going to learn guitar. Well, like Jordan Peterson, you know, waxing lyrical over the country rock music he heard um that you know the divine is contained in those moments and yeah i just i love there's so much to love about that clip but also at the beginning as somebody on our subreddit pointed out he says you know pick up a guitar or any other device so it's not even specific to guitars it can be any other device make two sounds with the device you know just listen to them that's amazing amazing stuff look that just stands alone it's a beautiful shining gem yes what we want to do

what we thought we'd do is you know just revisit some of our previous topics see how they're traveling see whether or not they're still dispensing wisdom. And that was Jordan Hall. That was Jordan Hall. For anybody who doesn't know, sense maker supreme, teaching you how to play guitar. So not everyone in our audience,

you can say you're a guitarist. Yep, yep. And you're a more humble person. You know how to play guitar. You've learned how to practice discernment. and what was the last thing you said something about the interconnect that's the secret that's the secret so pluck a guitar two strings and that's discernment stop that's humility you don't want to be plucking three or four trying to play like yeah and and if you can detect the difference of notes that's the

secret done lesson one finished oh god now practice your strumming yeah like jordan hall does what he does better than any other guru like he he maxes out a particular dimension of our thing whatever that is um so he's good and another person chris who has has changed this is james lindsey james lindsey he's evolved we've talked about this you know he went from being you know anti-woke new atheist new atheist yeah and then became like a twitter troll, essentially. Anti-Walk Twitter troll, yeah. Your mom type stuff. Right-wing reactionary. Christian, sovereign nations, weird sort of helper, outerer.

Yeah, Christian kind of like dancing around with Christian. He's not a Christian, but he's playing footsie with Christians. So, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, he's been good. He's clearly stared into the orb of wokeness for far too long because it's had an effect on him, Chris. And I will read out to you his most recent missive on the Twitter machine. On a suggestion earlier, I watched a lecture from a Catholic priest

who is also an exorcist. It's about demonology, your favorite topic, Chris. And it was sent to me unsurprisingly because it offers some insights into communist psychology. Now, I don't believe in demons, but I got some insights. So, the biggest thing that stuck out to me is that he claimed that demons are characterized by an absolute and intentional rejection of the assignment they have been given. And in that absolute rejection, they are damned and so work to negate what they were purposed to do i don't think there is a better definition for demonic than that having been led through self-pity to self-hate takes it upon themselves to negate the true purpose for their being which on some level they know as rebellious angels demons

would know it perfectly he also pointed out that demons influence people through their emotions and their interpretations of features of their lives. I found that accurate to the purpose of understanding communist psychology also, as I've been calling it a religion of pathos for some time now. Now, I won't read the entire thing, but one last bit, Chris. If we take the logos as the order and structure of the universe, demonology would describe willful rejection of the logos nothing could make such an invitation better than emotion that eventually turns toxic in brackets pathos turned pathological self-pity to self-hate to just hate it goes on chris it goes on but um you're really waxing lyrical and bringing in, this has, I guess, been happening for a while now.

The oldie Logos. Yeah, the Logos. It keeps cropping up, doesn't it? Lots of people are interested in the Logos. They're addicted to the Logos. Everybody's talking about the Logos. John Vervaeke, I think, also has a side interest in the Logos. It's Game B.

I think Game B, Jordan Hall as well it's probably on the logos at the weekends so yeah yeah that's cosmic mark that makes you think yeah you think i'm just sort of impressed or just curious as to the direction he's going it's this dovetailing of a kind of i don't know reactionary politics but anti-workness but also godliness like he talks about being at war with the laws of nature and nature's god or merely being derelict will reliably return bad results combined with self-pity immaturity and entitlement indulgence this leads to externalizing one's failure and thus one's locus of control. Destruction lies that way. What is even he doing? He's psychologizing.

Doesn't it end that thread with him like talking about how discipline is the answer and like training your mind to become a, like essentially as with all of them, wants to recruit people into looking up to him as the would-be instructor on how to train your mind and develop discipline in the face of modern corrupt culture it's so fucking boring matt just they're carbon copies of each other complaining about the woke mind virus and they all creamed their pants over the logos that's a baby a, but, you know, I'm just saying they have an unhealthy fascination with logos and Christian symbology and all this kind of stuff.

Like, get some new material. Like, there's all the religions. Couldn't they go into the Hindu pantheon or something? No, Christianity is the best one one even if you're an atheist yeah like it is it's self-help right he talks about you know growing a sense of mastery becoming strong and not blaming others growing into liberty talking about being under god's law provides protection if we merely accept natural law submitting to truth truth comma logos and brackets lends itself to success and peace like it's it's cosmic it's anti-woke it's it's religious demons but also

self-help i mean it's jordan peterson's got a lot it's jordan peterson it's like a knockoff peterson-esque shtick and i don't think any of them know they're consciously doing that. I mean, some of them, I guess, do. But I think, like, Lindsay's so incredibly unaware. He's so lacking in self-awareness of where his influences are that, you know, he's adopted almost entirely the opinions and views of Michael O'Fallon, right? All the anti-globalist Alex Jones type stuff. And he doesn't recognize at all that he didn't come up with those ideas, right? That he has just swallowed them from an ecosystem that was around long before James was there

and will be around long after he feeds back into the ether so it's just it is frustrating they're manifestations of the fucking egregore of annoyance they just feel like lost boys like especially james he's gliding around and sort of shifting from one sort of thing that provides some kind of meaning to the next dispensing these supposedly words extremophiles i think that partly explains along with the personality defects and and that kind of thing but like once you see people who are able to so fluidly glide across ideologies in such a relatively short space of time with little dissonance. I think it's just illustrative of the appeal of having some ideology or worldview which explains things, right,

and which gives some attention and meaning and purpose and so on. So it doesn't really matter what flavor it is. And that's the consistent factor, I think. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right i think you're right well anyway there you have it that's our two nuggets of wisdom for this week revisiting a couple of previous gurus we've learned how to play guitar identified the logos that should help people out till the next episode well yeah i think so too So let's turn our critical gaze to a figure from the past that we've discussed recently. On our last podcast with Matt Johnson, we discussed whether Hitchens was a guru, how he would fit into a modern guru ecosystem.

And we talked about a talk that we looked at of his from 10 years, 12 years ago, a good while back. It's Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan debate. Is Islam a religion of peace? So that's back in the old days of the new atheist movement at its height, I think, or at least in 2010. So Hitchens in the video is bald. So I think this was after his chemotherapy treatment and I guess towards the end of his life, but he still has a lot of him in vigor to him. And his interlocutor or the fellow debater, Tariq Ramadan, is a scholar of Islam and international relations, I think,

associated with Oxford or a professor at Oxford. At the time of this discussion, riding high in recent years, dogged by various allegations, rape allegations, pretty serious ones. So I think since 2018 or thereabouts, he's been facing multiple rape allegations in various countries. Various countries?

Yes. Well, the accusations are from people in different countries, so they're pursuing the legal system in those countries. So I don't believe the results are from people in different countries. So they're pursuing the legal system in those countries. So I don't believe the results or sentences have been arrived at or guilt has been ascribed or that kind of thing. You know, trials can tend to drag on for the legal system. But in any case, whether innocent or guilty, it's fair to say that he's being preoccupied by these events in recent years. Yeah, yeah.

And I think you mentioned, Chris, we're not going to be doing an episode about Tariq, but just out of curiosity, I think you looked at some other material from him and you noticed that he tended to kind of moderate or change his style of delivery and how forcefully he put things depending on the audience? Yeah, I think he is an interesting character and I do have some

clips from him because he's a Swiss academic with, well, you'll hear him describe his background, but he was, and maybe to some extent still is, considered a very eloquent, moderate defender of Islam and a good debater. As you might imagine, he also faced various criticism for stances that he'd take or positions. And there were fairly consistent accusations that his message diverged depending on the characteristics of the audience he was speaking to and that he could endorse stronger positions when he had the audience that would be more receptive to that he denied that and in any case yeah i think it's interesting his grandfather was involved with the founding of the muslim brotherhood i think an an influential

person and well known which is why i think as well these controversies about the rape cases came as like a big deal right so yeah but it's a bit like jumping back into the time machine you know to 10 years after september 11th but still debates around Islam and Islamic extremism still loom large. And, you know, on the converse stage, accusations of bigotry towards Muslims and Islamophobia, which still exists in the contemporary space, but I think have been a little overshadowed in recent years with perhaps the exception of trump's muslim ban notwithstanding yeah so a time capsule back to an earlier internet era yeah and i think it's helpful to go back sometimes and look at stuff that isn't so current because

with that little bit of distance it's possible to look at the kind of arguments and look at how it's handled with a bit of dispassion without it being such a hot topic. Yeah, I'm happy to go back in the time machine. Also happy to look at Hitchens, get a bit more evidence on how he puts his arguments together. I mean, I'm going to spoiler Chris, I don't think I'm going to rate him as low as james lindsey or jordan hall but that still leaves a pretty broad window for nuance that's true there's a large space a lot of headroom yeah the lindsey and jordan hall's bs line okay well so the moderator i think who kicks off the debate, they do a pretty good job in general

during this talk of moderating things. You know, there's good set times for this because it's kind of a classical debate format. And actually, I thought, although the moderator a bit later in the talk ends up, you know, kind of leaning, I think, on one particular side more. But at the beginning, she frames the two positions and I think did a pretty good job.

Like they could have just stopped the debate at this point. So here's her framing. I've found that this question, is Islam a religion of peace more than any other, is now the one on people's minds. than any other, is now the one on people's minds. But let's acknowledge that to many, the question before us tonight is either absurd or offensive. To one camp, the question is absurd because the answer is patently obvious. Just look at the headlines, they say. If 9-11 is not convincing enough, what about the suicide bombers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Spain, Pakistan, and for God's sake, even a tourist retreat like Bali? They say, what about Major Nidal Hassan, a psychiatrist in the U.S. Army,

who shot his own colleagues at point blank after he spent years studying and reflecting on his Muslim faith? Was he under the influence of psychosis or of Islam? They ask, why do honor killings seem to be a Muslim phenomenon? How could a religion of peace permit a father to order the death of his own daughter? This camp says not only is Islam not a religion of peace, it is intrinsically a religion of violence. The question is absurd. The case is closed. Yet there are others who consider the Islam and peace question

not so much absurdly obvious as utterly offensive. This camp asks, how can you condemn an entire faith, a religion followed by nearly two billion people, because of the atrocities committed by its fringe extremists. They ask why blame the faith when the terrorists are clearly driven more by political ideology than by theology. They ask why do we not apply the same judgment reserved for Islam to other religions? Why didn't the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina prompt widespread rumination on whether Serbian Orthodox Christianity is a religion of peace? When Roman Catholic priests and bishops were complicit in the genocide in Rwanda, the world did not blame Roman Catholicism.

Yeah, I agree, Chris. I thought that was an excellent introduction, and really everyone could have gone home, I think. Yeah, because there you go, you've got the two sides, you're probably going to hear them. excellent introduction and really everyone could have gone home i think um yeah yeah that was because there you go you've got the two sides you're probably going to hear them elaborated on by you know tarik or hitchens so yeah yeah that's uh but they do they do they elaborate on those positions quite a bit so who should we hear from first uh yeah so let's look at some of hitchens early points one thing that's quite impressive about hitchens and i was reminded of it when i heard this is he's very eloquent at making his arguments you know i've made the point when douglas murray or eric weinstein talks that you know they they are also good with speech right maybe douglas more than eric in terms of making

substantive points but i think with hitchens there's more precision because it actually feels very clear what he said after like you can agree or disagree but his argument is crystal clear and that's it was just so welcome because often with the clips that we hear there's a lot said and there's not much actual points made but let me play it and you you can judge whether i'm over hyping it my first point completed um the claim to govern everything from hygiene to sex and the afterlife, which contains detailed prescriptions for the good and bad versions of itself, again strikes me as somewhat totalitarian. And they're both based upon two very, very questionable and not very peaceful concepts. One is the idea of a perfect human being, the Prophet Muhammad, and the other is the idea of a perfect book, the Quran, the recitation.

Now the category perfect human primate or mammal and the category flawless book that could possibly not use any kind of change, revision, or editing, are categories that do not exist. There are no members of these categories. Therefore, any challenge to this faith is bound to lead to heresy and to schism, and does. And just as all forms of absolutism and totalitarianism, leader worship and revealed truth, unalterable text, always do because they can break, perhaps, but they cannot bend. And thus the latent potential of violence between them, among them, as well as within them, is very great. Yeah, yeah, so that's a good example, Chris.

A few points. Firstly, like contrasting hitchens with some of these other loquacious characters is instructive because it's very different right yes they both nice speakers right very mellifluous but actually hitchens is different because he is making a very precise and clear point at the same time as sounding good, right? Again, agree, disagree. It's not about that. It's about the precision and clarity of what he's saying. That is not often the case. But the other thing too, and this is getting a bit of ahead of ourselves, I guess, but I want to get your opinion about this, Chris, because like on one hand,

I agree with pretty much everything he said, right? I thought those were good points about ideologies being brittle, essentially. They can break, but they cannot bend. When you confront a totalizing ideology, which has revealed truth, which doesn't really permit flexibility or dissent, then the reaction inevitably tends to be harsh. But all the way through this debate, I was thinking, well, these are excellent points, but they apply much more broadly than just to Islam, right? This applied to essentially all the monotheist religions and other totalizing belief systems as well. So, even though I thought he was a great speaker, it was kind of slightly missing the point of the debate to me. Well, yeah, we can get to that, I think, because it does come up. But there's a clip where I think listening to this in 2023 rings a bit different than it would in 2011.

So whenever this original talk came. So listen to this one. One very important question. The only one I've got time for now. What happened to the word Christendom? Remember, there used to be such a term. It used to extend across the world, and the hope is that it would extend even further. And it was unironically used to mean those areas of human civilization, and areas yet to be civilized, of course, where the word of Jesus Christ reigned or would reign. And it's all gone.

The word is never used except historically or sarcastically now. Not quite. Not quite. I often hear people talking about if not christendom judeo-christian cultures and the values by extension the the west right the underpinnings of the west or christian values being the the core aspect you know that goes unacknowledged you need to only listen to speakers like jordan peterson or ben shapiro to or douglas murray we're just talking about douglas murray i mean yeah this is the theme um it could be presented in like a more polite version there's something

especially good about europe and european culture or it can be presented like i've i've met people online they're from the American Midwest. They're fundamentalist Christians, but their views are indistinguishable from the Taliban. When I actually had, I flamed them for that. I said basically that in so many words. They went, yes, the Taliban have got that stuff right about what women should be doing. Social conservatism. And social conservatism.

Yeah, it does exist. It is still around. And that historical stuff about oh god i'm debating i don't mean to be debating with itchins here but i just want to get this off my chest the idea that that sort of idea of you know spreading christianity into an enlarging christendom and bringing the the word of god to the heathen who need to hear it i mean that's not that long ago historically right like you don't have to go back to the crusades to find those colonialist yeah so again i'm left with even if you were to grant that okay in the 1980s or 2000s or whatever

islam might well be more like that or more aggressive or whatever at this particular historical moment then how is that anything more than happenstance yeah it seems like it seems very historically contingent to me yeah although and there's another clip it's continuing this point and it's him talking about the ottoman empire and the thing that i do appreciate about this is a kitchen's nose is history now i'm sure you can find stuff that he gets wrong over simplifies them, and so on. But again, it's just the contrast of the level of knowledge he displays here versus what we hear week in and week out,

you know, listening to the lesser gurus. But yeah, so this is him. He's got more knowledge than Jordan Hall. But the guitar, Chris, what about the guitar? I don't know if he could play the guitar. That's true. That's true. It's just, you know, even having recently listened

to Bill Maher and Dave Rubin, it's just, it's the benefit of contrast. But in any case, listen to this. There was another empire involved in that war, the Ottoman Empire, which also came to an end. It's other name was the Caliphate, the Muslim Caliphate. It went to war on the side of German and Austrian imperialism and Hungarian imperialism. And it lost not just the war, having proclaimed a worldwide jihad

against Christianity, except for German and Austrian and Hungarian Christianity, which were its allies. And it didn't just lose the war, but by 1924 had been dissolved by the Turkish leadership, by Ataturk. It lost the caliphate. And that's the only one that still has supporters. The other Christian and religious empires have all gone. But the caliphate still has fans, not just in the Muslim world, sometimes referred to by Muslims as the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, but also in what some Muslims call the Dar al-Hab, the house of war, the part of the world that isn't yet Muslim. There are caliphate clubs in London now and Berlin and elsewhere, quite important ones. And what I want to know is why that is and what we should think about it.

Now, Chris, again, I don't mean to be debating with Hitchens here because I actually generally like him, right? I'm well disposed to Hitchens, frankly. You need to apologise, he's dead, Mark. He's not going to come back from the grave and the hitch slap you. Oh, my God, that would be terrible. But my impression of the Ottoman, so he was framing like the ottoman empire as like a fundamentalist caliphate more intolerant than other empires right and whatever

more of that kind of thing and i mean i'm not an expert on this stuff but that doesn't gel with my understanding of the ottoman empire i mean broad brushstrokes because it lasted for what 700 years or something i mean it was like a multi-ethnic multi-religious sprawling massive empire for for most of that time you know yes it was islamic state but you know i thought it was understood that they was relatively tolerant towards other minorities as long as you didn't rebel and as long as you paid your taxes you might have special taxes if you weren't islamic or whatever but i didn't think it was particularly intolerant towards non-islamic citizens compared to other empires of the time i mean keep in mind we're talking from as far back as 1300 here well yeah i took his point to be there primarily that there's been a lack of interest in continuing to pursue religious worldwide empires and that the Caliphate being an exception to this because simply knowing about the Ottoman Empire

and who it was on in World War I is like enough for me. But I think... I take that point. I take that point. Like I'm sure Hitchens would have a rebuttal and would be able to support what he was saying there. I just thought the underlying argument that he was pushing there, I just didn't feel like the ottoman empire was a

particularly egregiously intolerant empire compared to other empires that were around 1400s or whatever i don't know enough about the ottoman empire to say but that is my impression too is like it's like the holy roman empire the ottoman empire which one was better? Let the historians decide because I have no freaking idea. And anything that lasts for hundreds of years is going to have a lot of bad stuff that happens under various rulers and also achievements of civilization and wonders that people can point to. So I think it will be the way that history always is where a lot of people selectively focus on a particular aspect.

But in general, I would say that there is no medieval regime that I would want to live under. I don't want to live under any of them. I don't think it was a good time to be like a secular atheist uh no i don't think secularists even existed in conceptual frameworks at that time you know i have heard i have heard that jewish people living in medieval christian europe were subject to some restrictions and even some prejudice from time to time just getting to the broader point around yes he's very erudite he makes a lot of interesting points and it's not like there's no substance to

them it's just getting back to my theme of as i listen to this debate i i like i genuinely enjoy listening to him hitchens yeah because he's he's just my kind of guy I think and just the way he talks and the way he thinks and the way all that stuff but I was kind of unconvinced by his his arguments because I just was okay Ottoman Empire not perfect okay so what anyway it's drama and much man anyway anyway look I will say one thing related to that is on occasion when i feel that people are using the upper class britishness as a means of generating audience favorability especially amongst american audiences it creates a little right i i feel douglas murray has a very well practiced what's the word I want to say? Like he's very well-practiced in this domain.

But I don't know if it's just me applying double standards. But for instance, Matt, I find this interaction charming rather than incredibly annoying when the moderator asked him to wrap up because he was going over his time. Can you wind up now yes i can um dilute i can yes uh and will um shall shall in fact yeah see i don't have your prejudice against english i don't have any prejudice about accents except for the dutch Except for the Dutch. Except for the Dutch. Well, I'm saying he overcame

my prejudice because that didn't annoy me. Those little Jeeves and Wooster style comments. That's to his credit that that is the case. You know, like we discussed with Matt Johnson,

there's rhetorical power to what Hitchens does. And there's also substantive arguments. And like all speakers, you know, his talks are kind of a mixture of this. But in terms of rhetoric, I have a couple of examples, or at least what I think are rhetoric and are worth discussing. So here's one. This is like debate style rhetoric. So here you go. Now you will say, I can hear it already being said. You may be saying it already to yourselves because the defense mechanisms kick in.

And in any case, Laurie already said it for you. And I hope Professor Ramadan won't feel the need to say it again. But if he does, fair enough. You may say, ah, that's not the real Islam. Those aren't real Muslims. Now, isn't that a fascinating objection? Is there anyone in this room, I exempt Professor Ramadan because it's his turn to speak next. Is there anyone in this room who would care to arbitrate that question? Who is to say, where is the authority that defines who is a true son of the prophet or true interpreter of his work so what you thought this was an example of empty rhetoric yeah no not empty rhetoric just good rhetoric so what i recognize from this is like if you're debating someone a useful thing to do

is to highlight a point that they're going to raise in advance and say you know you might say this but of course that's empty and wrong right so he he brings up a defense which is obviously going to be raised to the points that he's making and he in advance attempts to disarm it right but he does it even more strongly because he's like of course nobody will bring up that point because even you know their moderator has already raised it but if professor ramadan does that you know that's his choice but so it kind of is it's just i'm not saying that it it isn't just noticing it by you're noticing it by technique yeah and it's a good one like it works right because as the respond if you're like, well, I do want to just raise the point, which

you know, that you said was not valid. Like it already puts you on the defensive. And I think there is substance behind this point because like the point about who gets to designate like the person, which a a true representative of a given category it's not just that to be in regards to religious extremism or that kind of thing no it's in general one of the most common things that well those people are not category x right yeah and i and i think that's a substantive point right that's a good point like you can't just absolve yourself of oh those people aren't real christians oh those people aren't real conservatives or you. Like you can't just absolve yourself of, oh, those people aren't real Christians. Oh, those people aren't real conservatives. So you can just sort of carve

off any unpleasant or difficult, inconvenient segments of your group. I think it is fair to say that if your perspective, if your philosophy, if your ideological point of view or whatever, if people are using that to justify whatever, the Karmair Rouge is killing fields or whatever, you can't say, oh, that's not real communism. There's a better kind of communism that lives in my head that none of these examples you're citing have really captured. And yeah, so I basically agree with his point. So I didn't have an issue with that.

Yeah, I'm going to let Tariq respond to both of you on this point because I think he himself is a good debater and I have some sympathy with various arguments that he raises and some i think are veering towards like semantics and obfuscation but here's him kind of responding to that point and the larger point about the way hitchens has framed the opening of the debate as a muslim and as a believer, but as someone who is coming from within the realm of religions, it was quite clear that to put it that way was not the right question to ask. Is Islam a religion of peace or is Christianity or is Judaism or is Buddhism a religion or spirituality

of peace? Doesn't mean anything for me. It's not the right question. It's not the accurate question. Not because I think that there is a good Islam and the right Islam, and there are people who are acting in a name of Islam who are not representing what Islam is. This is not my point. I never said that, by the way. But the point for me is really to try to deal

with a phenomenon, with religion from within, and to try to understand the dynamics and to understand the trends and to understand the diversity. So just to essentialize one religion by saying it's all about war, it's all about peace, and even, you know, said by George W. Bush, doesn't mean anything for me. I like his voice. He's got a very smooth voice. What he's saying, though, isn't in terms of his form or his style. It's not as precise as Hitchens, though, is it?

It's kind of more... I don't know. I thought... Yeah, but I think it's the nature of the argument that he's making. And I did think that he slides between things at times because of that like there he said for example that it's not because he thinks there is a good islam and the right islam like no he's never said that but but as we'll see in other clips he does imply that and so like it's an inconsistency it feels like as he you know the shifts what type of argument he's going to make

but the fact that he's arguing religion is not just one thing to speak about it as a single unitary thing is like a simplifying point it's too silly it's george bush you know i i think that's a good argument right and he And he did that thing, Matt, of responding to Hitchens' attempt to, like, trap him by saying, no, I'm not so simple. I don't say that. I never said that, right? And then moves on.

So, again, that's like a kind of response. But, yeah, it's the, you know. You were just listening to this, like, enjoying the, you were a debate bow, Chris. You were just enjoying the parry and thrust of debate, weren't you? Yeah, because there's a, they're both good at it in this and i also i think like you matt you know interested in debates about religion and you know the the kind of atheist and the creationist debates

and all those kind of things so i not to mention that academically i've studied religion from the point of view of like psychology and anthropology but i do find these kind of engagements like where there's different worldviews presented and people debate them when they're done right they're interesting like even if i find some of the points made annoying or, you know, like to kind of obfuscate, I think it is good that we do this on occasion or these kind of things can be organised. Yeah, no, fair enough. Yeah, I was also sympathetic to his points, which is that he kind of rejected the premise of the debate question,

you know, is Islam a religion of peace? And I think Hitchens kind of did too. Like they both gave a nod to the fact that it was kind of a silly question yeah just too simplistic and you know i thought it was very fair what he said which is that you know islam as a global historical social phenomena is a vastly complex beast and you can't really make simplifying, flattening statements about it. Yeah. So he elaborates on this argument a little bit more. There's a couple of clips.

And I think this is a good illustration of like the Tariq's kind of response to points throughout the debate. So here's a bit more. And again, like you say, rejecting the premise, the wrong question is trying to say a religion is one thing. A better question. So this is one point which is important. But religions and all religions and Islam among all the other religions are dealing with human beings. And if you deal with human beings, you deal with violence and you deal with peace.

You deal with violence. Because human beings, by definition, have to deal with violence. They have to deal with peace. You deal with violence. Because human beings, by definition, have to deal with violence. They have to deal with aggressivity, whereas wars, and to expect from religion not to tackle the issue is just to dream of something

which is not going to happen. All the spirituality, go for Buddhism, or go for the Bhagavad Gita, you deal with violence. So this is it. Now, what is the answer coming from religions and from

trance when it comes to violence and to peace this is the right question for me do we have something which is coming and helping us to go towards peace this is for me the right question so that's that's what you highlighted that you know this happens all the time in debates again just to highlight that people change the question or you know say well actually this is a better question to address so yeah yeah and that's that's fair enough right that is actually a better question is is this particular ideological framework is it sort of nudging people in a more positive direction or a less positive direction? I mean, unlike you, Chris.

Oh, go ahead. I was going to break all the rules of our format and cut to the chase a little bit because I'm actually just curious as to what you think. Like, I was only vaguely interested in these questions about, you know, religion, good or bad, blah, blah, blah, discuss, you know. And I got a little bit impatient with this debate because i realized that like what i think about it is just that the problem with religions is all of them is that apart from being a bit of a fantasy and not connected to reality and apart from the fact that they don't really generally admit for flexibility and schism. Hitchens is right in saying that they are

brittle. The real problem is that they're like a Rorschach inkblot. Basically, anybody can peer into these sacred texts and pull anything out of it that they like. If you're a happy person and you've got good intentions, you can pull out nice life lessons for being a nice, good person. If you're an unhappy or an angry person, you can find justifications and rationalizations for pretty much anything you like. So my problem with religion generally, it's probably not too different from Hitchens,

is that people can use these myths and these fantasies to justify anything they want, but I don't see anything special about Buddhism or Christianity or Islam in this. What do you think? Matt, Tariq has got you covered. Islam is as complex as Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism and Hindus. It's a diversity of interpretations. Yes, you are right.

The Quran is for the Muslims the very word of God. But many interpretations and many ways of dealing with the books. The problem is not the book, the problem is the reader. Is the way... No, no, we have only 10 minutes. So this is why when, for example, you take a text, and you can do this with the Bible, with the Torah, the Gospels, it's always the same. Tell me the way you read, I will know what is in your mind, but not for sure what is in the text. Yeah, like I kind of agree with Ramadan there in the sense that it's all in the eye of the beholder, right? You can pull out anything you like, but I don't see that as a feature. I see it as a bug, right?

I've got a problem with that. So, yeah, I think that he's right. There's a diversity of interpretations and all religious traditions are made up of multiple sects, right, who disagree. traditions are made up of multiple sects, right, who disagree. And even within the same sect, you have people that are more moderate, more literal in their interpretations, you have different traditions, you know, it's just, and it's not any one religion that this applies to, this applies to all of them. But the interesting thing is like, his argument is that, well, you know, there's multiple interpretations. People can take what they want from it. But that's a kind of argument that rests on there being no doctrinal interpretation that

is orthodox, right? And as we know, through the history of religions worldwide, that is not what people are usually happy to argue, right? That's now in moderate, multicultural societies, often an ideal which people ascribe to, right? But historically, people died and killed each other over differing interpretations of sacred texts and very specific doctrinal points. And that still happens all across the world. And yes, there are politics and things intertwined with it. But the version of religion that Tariq is arguing for is a cosmopolitan, interpretivist, pluralistic

form. And that is a type of religion. It is not the dominant form of religion, I think, across the world. It very much depends on the country by country in geography. So I'm not saying that therefore, you know, extremists are the norm, but I think hardline interpretations, which do not accord with multiple traditions being equally valid, are the norm across religious traditions around the world. And so I think there's a little bit of, if you're arguing it's all down to interpretation, I agree. It is, because that's what people do. But religious traditions and authorities tend not to have such laissez-faire

views about how accurate their interpretations are yeah yeah yeah i mean that's kind of what i was saying which is it's like a rorschach inkblot in that if if you choose to you can peer at it in just the right way and find all positive messages and there's nothing bad here it's all it's all good stuff if you look at it a different way you can see it as a permission slip to do all kinds of bad things and you can see it as a rationalization for why you think you know women have to stay in the kitchen and do what their husband says right you know it's a choose your own adventure type scenario so i don't particularly think that's a very strong argument in favor of of any religion but so yeah i was kind of dissatisfied with both of them because

like you said chris like these two are definitely a cut above the general gurus that we cover right they're thoughtful they make good points and so on but i was still left dissatisfied because on one hand, I felt like Hitchens' entire speeches, his entire line of argument was almost like he'd taken the sort of standard pitch against religion in general, and he just applied it to Islam, right? Didn't make anything specific about Islam. And whereas, as you said, Professor Ramadan there, he kind of makes those relativist, interpretivist kind of arguments, which is, you know, essentially implying that, oh, if you've seen these bad things, then that's not really the real religion.

The real religion, I promise, is all very good. It's all very nice. So, yeah, I didn't find either stance particularly convincing. Well, before we get back to Hitchens' response to this, I'm going to highlight just a couple of rhetorically strong, I think, one-liners or techniques that Ramadan does that I thought are a nice mirror to what Hitchens is doing. And this was a good line, I think, in regards like how people treat philosophy and religion. I don't like all these intellectuals and philosophers and even journalists. They are very keen on understanding the complexity of philosophies and the simplicity of religions.

That's not right. That's a prepared line. Definitely, right? The complexities of philosophies and the simplicities of religion. And actually, again, Matt, Tariq echoing you, he raised the point about the Ottoman Empire and, you know, the kind of interpreting history in such simplistic manners and empires existing in all the places and times. Let us also understand the fundamentals and then come to some of the translation, the historical experiences.

Because as much as you can speak about September 11, you can speak about the 16th century under the Ottoman Empire, which was a great civilization with a diversity of Christians and Jews and even non-believers working and living together. We are always speaking about Indalusia. But we can prove everything with history

if we don't get a sense of what are the principles we are talking about. Yeah, I mean, I basically agree with him there. I mean, again, I stand to be corrected by listeners who are better informed about history than me. Hitchens might correct you. He might. Maybe you've got a clip. But, you know, in France and stuff in this period, they were waging crusades against other Christians in France.

I forget what they were called. Huguenots? Huguenots, maybe. I forget the name. There was another one in the south of France anyway. Yeah, like awful crusadesades like awful ethnic cleansing whatever you want to call it out of some crazy doctrinal difference about the mystery of the trinity or some bullshit now i don't know i'm sure the ottoman empire is guilty of all kinds of nasty

stuff like every empire is but i think they were generally happy to let it was a pretty cosmopolitan empire like he's right there's a lot of different groups all these different cultures different religions living in it and generally if you paid your taxes you didn't revolt um you obeyed the the governors or whatever then they generally let the different cultural groups you know get along with their own little particular beliefs so it may well have been a bad empire whatever that means but i don't think it was particularly sort of ideologically puritanical at least to the extent to which some of the christian kingdoms and empires were during the same time period from 1300 to whatever

1800 something like that well there's one more clip again again, of Tariq expounding on this point, Matt. So you're signed up for him. You need to be there. You and Tariq out for dinner discussing the Ottoman Empire. Here we go. You cannot deny the fact that through history, Muslims in many situations, in many historical situations, were dealing with this diversity. situation. We're dealing with this diversity, and we learn from the Middle Ages, and we learn from the Ottoman Empire that Muslims are able to deal with diversity and take from the Jewish tradition. Maimonides was speaking Arabic better than me. He was a Jew, and he was an intellectual,

and he was a theologian, and he was dealing with respectful people. So all these Muslims were wrong Muslims because they don't they didn't understand that the final religion should not listen to the first monotheistic tradition? That's not true. You can't introduce this in such a way. It's too simplistic to represent what a religion is and what a history and a historical experience is. is and what a history and a historical experience is. So there we go. And I think another thing that illustrates the kind of rhetorical force of Tariq is whenever he's talking, kind of condensing that point about, you know, that for him, Islam is about humans.

That's the problem is humans and the religion is a path to the answer. I wouldn't say Islam is a religion of peace. I say Islam is a religion for human beings. It deals with peace and it deals with violence and it helps the people to go from violence towards peace. It's a way towards peace, but it's not a peaceful reality because we are not peaceful beings. We are all in tension just to get that inner peace in us and this is the starting point of the islamic philosophy of human being is really to start with your own self look at your heart and tell me if you are at peace or you were at peace yeah see to me that that seems like double talk like i had a weird reaction to this video because

um like i basically agree with Hitchens, right? Hitchens doesn't like religions in general, full stop. And I'm basically with him there. I don't like any of them. And I didn't really like Ramadan's arguments sort of in defense of Islam, just saying that you can't blame religions for anything. It's just if there's something bad going on, it's because people have got bad things going on in their hearts.

And so I'm like, it's like, well, maybe. But does the ideological framework help with people being more tolerant, help with engaging in pluralism and cosmopolitanism and things like that? I mean, I don't really see much evidence that it does. But at the same time, I just didn't feel like Hitchens put his best foot forward in terms of arguing that there's something specifically wrong with Islam that isn't attributable to historical happenstance, historical contingency. Well, let's see.

So one thing that he does, Matt, is when Hitchensens is responding to tarik's outline there or tarik's arguments there he highlights that he changed the question at the start so he says this well i also don't think that the motion if that's what it is chosen for this evening is a particularly good one but i knew about it as long as professor ramadan, and I did at least agree to speak to him, in spite of that reservation. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. You know, I admire the craft.

I admire the art. Hitchens is good at it, and I think he's better at it than Tariq Ramadan. Yeah. So I think this is him responding to the point, but also using that rhetorical part that we've highlighted multiple times now. So this is him talking a little bit about, you know, the reader being the issue. Now, you're right. I was surprised to find myself saying,

Professor, when you say that the problem is not the book, but the reader. In the case of the Quran, that is certainly true of me. It's true probably of every book I've ever read, that there are difficulties I have with it or capacities I don't have with which to approach it or understand it. But if I'm reading the Koran, I certainly say, well, I can't tell whether this book is the word of God or not. I can only doubt that there is such a thing. But I can hope that this was a bad day for God. Can't I? And I can hope to live in a country where I can say that and get applause. Yes, and even mirth. And don't think that isn't a precious thing.

Yeah, yeah, that is him at his most arch and quite effectively so. I mean, you know, you can look at any of these holy texts and find all kinds of extremely unpleasant injunctions that is a little bit difficult to paper over with platitudes about it you know just need to approach it in the right kind of way it really is all about love and you know he makes a good point too they're about tolerance which is that they're having this debate i presume in the uk somewhere where you can make fun of the bible and you can say that the quran is full of nonsense and you can make these jokes and so on,

you can't do those things in a lecture theater in Iran, right? Yeah. And I've got two clips that speak to that, but there's one that's very specifically on that point, but this one comes just before it. And I think it's good as well well because it's like when he began that last clip i played by saying you know you're right i i find myself surprised to say professor right like that kind of nice aside he does it again here and hitchens i think one of the things that he's very good at is putting moral force behind his arguments like he argues passionately and you can see that he thinks that things are unjust right or wrong and that he will infuse his argument with that sentiment not in a kind of demagogue way but more in the way that like isn't this wrong like

can't we all agree that this is wrong? And he does this quite neatly, I think, here. I don't like the idea of a paradise reward for martyrs. Don't like it. It's not me, somehow. Don't like the account. Don't like the early accounts of village squabbles with the local Jews who've taken a look at the new claimant to be the Messiah and decided

about him what they decided about the previous claimant. He's no good. He's not up to snuff. Do you think the Jews are ever going to be forgiven for that, by the way? For rejecting two in a row? I don't think so. Yeah, I agree with you. He is rhetorically very forceful because it's backed up by you know a fair bit of substance but still chris i return to my original criticism at the beginning which is that you know all of his points apply equally well to every religion right well well how about this one then matt i'm allowed to stand here and say this and there are many parts of europe i couldn't do that anymore or i'd have to be very careful in who I'd invite for the audience. I couldn't do it easily on the air, couldn't do it easily in print, couldn't do it

easily in public, couldn't do it on certain campuses, couldn't do it with certain publishing houses. Now all of this has been done to us by the wrong Muslims. Well, let's get together then, isolate who these wrong Muslims are, who've imposed a culture of violence-backed censorship upon us, and let's get rid of them and have an honest discussion about the text and the reader. So he, you know, and he does this as well when he expands on the issue the issue of fatwas and salmon rushday his argument and others have made it as well is that burning the bible may get you protested and various editorials written about you you're not going to be invited to dinner by the pope but burning the quran if gains attention put your life at risk and that's a difference right or is it not that like do you think too

much is made of that no no i think that's that's a fair point i mean he's on relatively strong ground there when he's sort of arguing from those liberal sort of principles how can you say any kind of philosophy or ideology is one of peace when violence is endorsed for people that disrespect it look i basically agree with both of them in that both of them said that it was a silly question because while i agree with that i think that's true i just it's hard to say that all of that is not a reflection of historical contingency right that there are different times and different places where disrespecting the bible would have got you burnt at the stake right so we're saying that islam's not a religion of peace right now and christianity is right now but you know then it could be

different in 50 years or 100 years and then are you really talking about the religions then or to get back to my other point are they both just these rorschach inkblots where cultures can take from them whatever they like well i think hitchens sidesteps a little bit because you know later in the talk he does highlight whenever people are saying like isn't this a critique of religions in general he's like yes i wrote a book yeah that says all religions are the problem so he would agree about that you notice that but do you notice christine he never conceded that point really you know what i mean he didn't say i don't think islam is a religion of peace i don't think any religion is religion of peace like he didn't say i don't think islam is a religion of peace i don't think any religion

is religion of peace like he didn't actually say that in the debate because it would have gone against his rhetorical line right i thought he did concede that in the discussion part but i felt like he kind of you know made the point like didn't you listen to the opening part where i i said that any any ideology which requires people to believe that it has the whole truth and you know that it relies on supernatural claims to having the word of god is a problem for a liberal society do jewish christian or other religions have a greater claim on being religions of peace than Islam? I mean, is your beef really with Islam, or is it with all religion? Well, I'm sorry the comrade from Yale tuned in so late.

I mean, late enough to miss the first four or five minutes of my ten-minute introduction, if you'll. Devoted to a close exegesis of Professor McCulloch's realization that Christianity had out-genocided and out-wared and out-crusaded itself. Finally, by 1914. If you care to pick up, I think you might be able to, and I'll sign it if you will, pick it up. My book, God is Not Great, you will find a discussion of the warrants for slavery, murder, genocide, and land theft that occur in the books of Moses,

and that are an ineffaceable offense to any civilized person, and the reason why so many Jews are secular, at least one of the reasons. So again, I could go on, but I really feel I don't need to. So I took that to be saying that. But isn't there an issue, Matt, that like you highlighted, you know, there's a historical argument premiered, and there's plenty of examples that can be given from all traditions, actually, with very few exclusions, including Buddhism. I mean, I think in 2023, it's less hard for people to imagine Buddhist fundamentalism, but it shouldn't be hard for anybody that reads history. You know, the Sri Lankan civil war showed what Buddhist nationalism looks like and the events

in Myanmar illustrate what like violent nationalism in a Buddhist flavor looks like. I was thinking of Sri Lanka as well. Like I've told you before, I was there at the end of the troubles and saw some of the after effects of it. And yeah, it shouldn't be hard. Like the lesson that I took from all of this stuff, as well as having a passing acquaintance with modern history and the kinds of things that have been done. You can take your pick. You could take Western colonialism and making money from rubber in Africa. You could take the terrible things that have been done in the name of communism or whatever. You name it, people have the capacity to use any kind of ideological framework to justify doing whatever the hell they want, whether it's in

Sri Lanka or Myanmar or Africa or Eastern Europe or Asia, wherever. So, you know, I just find it difficult to have any particular, I mean, my problem is with those ideological frameworks that people can use to justify what they do. It's hard to point the finger at any one of them in particular because while it might be true that one particular ideological framework might have been particularly at fault at this point in time, just pick a different time. Go to a different century or a different part of the world and you can find examples that point the finger somewhere else.

Yeah, and I think that is a valid argument that people should bear in mind when they're making you know totalizing claims about specific traditions however i do think that you could argue that you know what matters most to people alive now is the situation now and And I think the case that Hitchens and others are making is that historical contingencies are what they are, but in the world that we live in now, the religions are not equally likely to murder you for profaning their prophets. And so the reach for historical examples which i'm also prone to do as well is seen as you know obfuscating that reality that there is a difference in the relative prevalence of like movements yeah and i agree with that point if you sort of if you restrict the question to being okay in this particular world this particular timeline and this historical contingency our world like right here right now then i would accept that

but it's a kind of a weak point to make like like to take a different example chris we can point to say the west or america now and look at where political violence, political extremism is coming from, conspiracy theories, you name it. And at the moment, I'd be pointing my finger squarely at the right wing, right? At that side of politics. Now, that hasn't always been the case. Yeah. And there's nothing inherently attributable to conservatism, I think, that lends itself to violence more so than radical progressivism at a different point in time at a different place you could point all of the political violence and stuff in the other direction so you know i definitely concede that point it's just it becomes a much much weaker point when it all depends on the historical contingency. Right. I have some clips that might speak to this point.

Tell me, Egypt is ruled by Islam. Is it Islam which is used there? Mubarak is a secular president, isn't it? Syria is a Muslim leader or is a secular president, isn't it? Syria is a Muslim leader or is a secular state. All the main societies where the government used this, because you know what happened,

is it's easier to use the people to tell them against the West, you can demonstrate, but not against the government, which is an autocratic government. So it's not religion. It's political instrumentalization of popular emotions against the West just to make it a religious issue. You cannot just avoid talking about political instrumentalization of countries where there is no democracy and this country are not islamist countries they are secular autocratic

countries yeah chris i mean i'm glad you played that because i think that's an excellent point right where let's take syria for example that's part of the world i know you have an interested in the the bathists in rule there and the same is true of saddam Hussein's Iraq right and you've got these autocratic evil frankly regimes which have a political ideology that is secular right at the same time the same world you've got another regime in a place like Iran doing terrible things to women at the moment using religion as a framework, right, as a justifying framework for what they do. And this is just my own personal opinions now, not so much a critique of Hitchens or anything like that.

It's just, I mean, the takeaway I have from all of this stuff as well as history is that these bad things, history is that these bad things, these bad regimes, Hitchens' point of view, the anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, repressive regimes, they can use all kinds of rationalizations for what they do. And I don't like religion. I'm an atheist, basically on Hitchens' team here. But I also have to acknowledge is that people can use all kinds of justifications for the stuff they want to do and I feel like it's like historical economic and political contingency that's the main driving force for it and the ideological frameworks yes they don't help like it's not good that there are these pre-packaged frameworks you can pull out of the draw there to justify things they're a bad thing but are they the driving force for these bad things i i think not i have hitchens response to i'm inserting

myself into this debate i apologize chris i apologize response to matt i can't possibly disagree with you of course there's a great deal of opportunism and demagogy and i'm certain hypocrisy as well. And in fact, I have, I will say that I've heard you and seen you saying that before and I agree. I don't think I would classify a country that hauls the Christian leader of its minority onto the TV to say, no, it's not possible. It could have been any. Exactly the same. Political instrumentalization. No, to give... Exactly the same. Political instrumentalization.

No, to give you a truth of the matter. It's instrumentalization. No, I would not. Nor would I describe the Alawite regime. It's an Alawite sectarian regime, not a secular one, that is funded by Tehran and is the funder of the murder gang Hezbollah, a secular either. No. Don't insult me.

Not that it really hurts me that much. I don't feel humiliated or anything so sorry matt he's arguing with your characterization of it being secular so so how do you respond mr bryan i mean look yes as well as being bathurst they're also members of the alawite sect or whatever. But Chris, I mean, you tell me, do you think that like Islam is the driving force behind autocracy and repression in Syria? Or is it just straightforward politics, you know, dictators doing what dictators do? No, I take the point that there's plenty of drivers towards autocratic tendencies and religious

devotion is only, or religious fundamentalism is only one such driver that you can use. I think the Assad regime is primarily about keeping the Assad family in power and then autocratic control. So whatever they can use to those ends are what matters and i think that applies in in a lot of context like yeah like chris i mean just take another example like take russia at the moment right putin is you know recently been leaning towards this kind of orthodox christian moralizing rationale for a lot of stuff that he does but is it the driving factor no it's just another convenient thing to drape himself in that's that's how i

see things anyway yeah but in those cases i think the counter argument and i it comes up a little bit towards the end of the bm is partly because the moderator raises the issue about the relative human rights and treatment of gay people and and so on in islamic countries right and tariq's response to this point is to say the following. What is happening now in Muslim-majority countries is really, before just looking at some dimensions of the rights of women within or the rights of homosexuals, for example, is really to look at the situation in the whole society and the way it's progressing. Now we have the great majority of the Arab countries. They are under dictatorships. There

is no freedom. Religious or secular society, this is the same for all. So if you look at this and you are expecting from within an evolution in this society, forget about it. Look now at what is happening in Turkey. Turkey is changing, moving towards something which is a more democratic system. And you see within that are rights and discussion and critical discussion that are possible. So I would say that you cannot essentialize history and say the Muslims cannot do this. It's evolving and it's changing and it depends where you can have this kind of discussion. And the first, because there are priorities, the first is really to go towards democratization and transparency in the Muslim majority countries. And if you go to Indonesia,

even though we are far from a perfect system, you have much more discussion in Indonesia today about the principles, the critical reading of the text than you have in, you in Indonesia today about the principles, the critical reading of the text than you have in, you know, Arab countries. Yeah. So that case there, you have, again, the kind of focus on that there's plenty of Islamic majority countries and they're diverse, right? They are not all the autocratic regimes in the middle east you have turkey and you have indonesia and they are forging different paths right and there are more moderate elements within them which is true though i think again that this defense would be made differently

today because you know turkey is not noted in recent history for its democratic reforms right if there's more a concerning autocratic turn relying on islamist rhetoric right and also with indonesia the turn has not been towards a more pluralistic multicultural form of islam but a a more hardline interpretation has been emerging and you know you had the mayor of jakarta being jailed for blaspheming against the quran and so on so like there is some issue here that the moderate examples look a lot less moderate in 2023 than they do in 2010 that's true i was i was in istanbul a few years ago chris and i i spent a lot of time there was a there was a student who was there at the conference too um like a graduate student who was lovely guy and took me around and we spent a few days chatting and talking and he he spoke in some depth about the the turn turkey has been taking

and the same is true of indonesia i mean what do you think though i mean all of this though is like a face vase kind of illusion you want to say rorschach but you've said i'm gonna use a different psychological you know the figure ground uh illusion there i mean this is true this is undoubtedly true of turkey and indonesia indonesia but i mean to what degree is is religion actually the driving force there i mean isn't it like yes there are anti-democratic authoritarian tendencies a lot of concerning things i totally agree that religion can be you know moralizing precepts can be used as a as a political cudgel and a way of enforcing control and for that reason i'm against it as i've said many times i don't like any of them but to what degree is this

reflective of the fact that this isn't happening in christian countries like nominally christian countries like the united kingdom i was going to say united states but that's maybe a bad example of the fact that this isn't happening in Christian countries, like nominally Christian countries, like the United Kingdom, I was going to say United States, but that's maybe a bad example. Let's say Germany, right? To the extent that this kind of thing isn't happening in those places, doesn't it reflect the fact that these are very wealthy, high, you know, very stable, you know, healthy functioning democracies. And in places like russia which is nominally christian and in other countries which are of different religions i mean like do you think it's religion that's having the wrong religion or simply having a religion that's the driving force here or is it something else so in general i think it's wrong to treat religion as if it's some separate sphere which cannot be invoked as a dominant driving force there's

plenty of people that are primarily motivated by you know religious devotion i think uganda's recent anti-gay bill that passed or various predominantly christian countries in Africa as well, or the fact that Ireland had not allowed abortions until relatively recently, those cannot be explained except with some reference to specific religious doctrines. And it could be otherwise if the doctrines were different now if you're solely focused on singly not a specific religion as the one that has the only real problems with this no i think that's wrong because i i think you can find fundamentalist stripes in all religions and that you tend to find that countries where more fundamentalist hardline forms of a religion have come to power, there's a predictable tendency. So the part I agree with is that you can find these trends in all religions and throughout history, it depends on where

they're most dominant. And that, like you say say secularizing tendencies across the globe to some extent counter act that were regardless of you know the society that you're in and there's historical contingency so the bit that i agree with hitchens and others on is that even the to a certain extent that there is a tendency for people to want to carve out religion into the metaphorical space or the secondary concern for people where it's really about politics and it's really about other factors. But I think that is, in some respect, an artifact of the fact that we are secular and that we imagine that religion is not this driving emotion. that religion is not this driving emotion but i think if you go back even 50 years in ireland religion is a hugely influential thing on people's lives and society so i i think it's a little bit of failure of imagination of western secularized people to imagine that religion still has such a

dominating effect over a large part of the world yeah i may have given the wrong impressions finally like i definitely agree with you that religion like any ideological framework does have an influence like ideas do matter and um to give a personal example there i had colleagues and very good friends that i worked with in japan who were from iran and one fellow in particular like a lovely guy there was one day he mentioned to me somewhat pretty casually actually that all homosexuals were child molesters and probably should be killed and I was quite shocked and I took him up on this and we spoke it he was quite embarrassed right because he didn't realize that i i had gay people in my family he was kind of embarrassed and like to give you a sense of what i mean here like there's nothing

about his personality that was filled with hate or intolerance or anything like that he's like a gentle normal person i'm sure he's in favor of of more democracy more liberalism all that stuff he had some ideas sort of injected into his head from the place that he grew up in and stuff that had been taken for granted as a belief system from where he was from that you know was kind of shocking to whatever western sensibilities so you know that was an idea? An idea that he had absorbed and it wasn't like a fault of his personality. It wasn't a fault of anything really, apart from the ideas that were floating around in the place where he happened to be born. He wasn't even particularly religious. So, yeah, look, I agree with you there. I just just i think in terms of the debate there i mean like

i said i'm kind of conflicted because on one hand i am on board with hitchens basically atheistic stance right which is that and i'm not in favor of ramadan's position there which is i don't think religion is particularly helpful i've certainly never needed it as a help in my life to be a better person. And I don't think it would make me a better person. And you can point at a lot of things where all religions actually pushes people in a bad direction. And as we talked about, and I think both of these debaters agree, is that it can function as, and I'm going to say it again,

a Rorschach inkblot where people can use it as a justification and, you know, they can interpret the holy text in any way they like and they can use it as a justification for whatever they like. And as it turns out, historically, it turns out to be a justification for reactionary, oppressive, ultra conservative points of view and that's you know so it's just that when when you look at bad things that have happened in the world in one place or another i have to admit that in terms of the causal agency i i don't know that religion is that special like you know you can see other political ideological frameworks that are just as brittle just as authoritarian just as intolerant that work perfectly well to to justify people to do what it is that they want i think there's a good exchange that speaks to this and it's a thing that both you and i know this so we definitely want to touch on that so this is from earlier in the the speech Hitchens, when he's outlining again his kind

of issue about, you know, totalizing claims. Islam makes very large claims for itself, very large claims indeed. It claims to be the last and final religion, the last and final revelation. When you see bumper stickers, everyone says you can't reduce major things to a bumper sticker. It's not my idea to have bumper stickers saying Islam is the solution. It's a well-known slogan actually of parties associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. They say Islam is the solution for everything. It takes care of all your life and the one to come. Sexuality, political economy, banking, diet, relations with other religions, everything. It's a total solution.

What is creepy about the word total? I hope I don't have to tell an audience like this. It's the first five letters of the word totalitarian. It's absolute. It's absolute. It's all-inclusive. It's unanswerable. And oddly, for a religion that makes such large claims, notice another thing about Islam, it doesn't particularly like having these claims questioned or scrutinized. In other words,

as there are justices, there is with religions, an inverse relationship between the claims they make and the evidence they can produce for them. So you had that point, Matt, about the totalitarianism starts with total and totalizing starts with total. Wasn't that what he was saying? That total solution, right? The word total is in totalitarianism. And as we've pointed multiple times, Islam is not alone in making claims that it is the path to truth and that its holy text is the word of God, right? That just puts it in company with pretty much all our monotheistic faiths.

And all religions are not shy from claiming that they have access to privileged truth. So Tariq highlights the issue of this quite effectively, I think. First, you know, when you said the first remark, say, okay, you know what, total, these are the first letters of totalitarianism, because Islam is a comprehensive religion, by the way, exactly like Judaism and Christianity. I never met a rabbi, a Christian, telling me, you are with God on Saturday and with the devil on Monday. What is that? But in Islam, it's as if it's all together. It's a very simplistic way of dealing with Islam.

It's a comprehensive religion, but there are way of dealing with islam it's a comprehensive religion but there are rights of god and rights of people and you have to differentiate and it's very old yeah i mean that's kind of the debate in a nutshell right like like kitchens is making a bunch of broadsides that apply perfectly well to every religion and professor ramadan is is saying well it's not just islam well yeah but he so the reason i played this apart from just making sure we cover it is also because where he goes after that and i you know people talk about the hitch slap right where he had these good one-liners we've seen a couple examples of them in this talk. I think Ramadan delivers his own pretty good slap here. And I will note, Matt, it's because he knows about his debate opponent,

something which our gurus would be well advised to heed from or to learn from. Islam is this total mean totalitarian. What's that? Auto, these are the first letters of autocratic. It's not an argument. It's not serious. And as I said, yes, it's, we are talking

about reading. And by the way, it's for all the texts. It's the same for the Marxists. You know quite well about the Marxist tradition. And you know what some Marxists did with the text? It means that everything that Marx wrote was bad? No.

Once again, it's a serious matter here. Yeah, I appreciate it. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. So you have to know that Hitchens in an earlier life was quite hardcore Marxist. So that was a pretty good dig, right? Yeah.

And he's kind of making the point that we've been making throughout our commentary here. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem, isn't it? Like when you're relying on rhetorical flourishes. That's why I said, chris at the beginning i was i just i don't know i came away from this a little bit frustrated like you i appreciate the fact that these two people are intelligent they are making substantive points it's a cut above the kind of public discourse we're seeing on youtube and stuff these days but at the same time it was

just frustrating because they were kind of talking past each other right with the oh it's still a performative debate like and they're good at it i enjoyed aspects of the debate but i also found it like frustrating to listen to at various points because i i did think it veered i think a lot of it was rhetorical in nature. But as we talked with Matt Johnson, I think with Hitchens, and I also think with Ramadan, there's substance behind the rhetoric. And that makes a difference because they allow... I don't like the obfuscation. I don't like the slippage in the arguments.

There still is a core disagreement right and there still are substantive arguments being treated back and forth um but this is why i think chris i think like you have a a greater appreciation for public debate in general than i do and i think for me the reason is these two could could keep batting away at each other making some good hit slaps and and so on giving some good one-liners and and sounding very good but like fundamentally what was going on was hitchens was making a bunch of points against religion and totalizing beliefs as systems in general all right tariq ramadan counted with yes you know you can use any ideological framework to justify good and bad things people have done religions are complex institutions yeah but but people have done bad things with with any belief system that you've

got even stuff like communism that's not even a religion and depends on what was frustrating to me is that that never really got a response right like it didn't build from there like there was no synthesis right kitchens never really addressed it are you dying for the omega you have enough of what is it that the gmb people are always talking about or the thesis and the anti-faces and what we need matt is synthesis so yes you're on the board with that more gmb with this debate that's that's my critique yeah you gmb bastard no yeah i i mean i knew what i was gonna get and i got it's the thing. I've heard a million debates about this and I've heard pretty much all the arguments that the people want to make.

So this is just another flavor of it. So I just appreciate it for what it is. And I don't think there ever will be any of these kind of things where somebody admits defeat or that says this point is valid and i'm rejigging my position and and so i just got what i expected that's the thing and it sounds like you got what you expected too but what but you should expect more chris you should expect more because because well you know i do appreciate it i i think it's generally a positive thing for these guys to be debating with each other and and so on i mean they don't really get anywhere though do they i mean it's really a fundamental problem i have with the debate format which is that hitchens could could have conceded those points and then move to another

position that would have been more interesting but he never did right and vice versa yes i was about to say that right neither of them would concede anything because they're in a debate right and you don't concede anything in the debate you're trying to win it well that's not fair entirely because i think they do at times concede it's just that they're kind of conceding points in order to land a counter blow as to why they're still right. And that's how people usually concede arguments in my experience in academia as well. Like there are rare exceptions. That's not how I roll, mate.

That's not how I roll. I'm like on a different level, mate. I follow the Amiga principle. The evidence comes and you completely shift. But yeah, I don't know. I think that in lots of these cases, there isn't a position where they can arrive at an agreement because there's fundamental differences in values and there's distrust of each other. There's the view, I think think tarik would believe that hitchens

is a bigot and and other people too you know would regard hitchens as bigoted and vice versa with tarik there are people that would allege that he is hiding much stronger fundamentalist positions and and running what's that thing? Interference. Yeah, running interference for an agenda which is much more nefarious. And so, you know, like the chance of them shaking hands and this is the best of what you can get is them meeting together in a room, agreeing to disagree and treating jibes.

Like that's, I'm sorry, Matt, you know you know imagine no religion it's easy if you try it is it is easy they should all agree it's all stupid we should all just go and have a beer oh no you and john lennon that's that's i shouldn't say that yeah so there's one more exchange before we we round the corner towards the end of things but i i like no i don't think it's fair to say i like this exchange but i think it's a good example of the moral force that i talked about earlier with hitchens and when people are presenting arguments in such a way that they they allege that their opponent is supporting something terrible now hitchens does it as well in this talk by them tarik when he's talking about

ideologies and how they can be used for good and bad he's talking about you know the war in iraq and he says this we all have to do something which is out of humility to check our people. Because with the best means, you can promote the bad or the worst attitude. In the name of human rights, we want to kill people. In the name of human rights, we can promote and support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where so many innocent people have been killed. And I said it from the very beginning, never forget that the blood of an Avrani

or Iraqi innocent man or woman is as valuable as the blood of an American innocent man and woman. No discussion about this. So the best ideology in the name of human rights, in the name of democracy, could be used by people to promote the worst. So let us be humble instead of criticizing one religion and one ideology to know that in our universe of reference, you will find people using our texts, our values, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad sometimes for peace and sometimes for

war what did you think of that chris i thought it was pretty forceful i mean we were citing communism as an example of an ideology like a secular ideology that can be used to justify all kinds of bad things and you know you can pretty easily make an argument that these nice things like liberalism and globalism and so on. Yeah, I mean, you only have to look at colonialism, right? At least a portion of that was justified by civilizing the people of the non-Western world, right? Removing barbarism, right?

And bringing the light of Christianityianity to the benign but not just christianity like rationality and science and education and all of these things yeah oh yeah yeah yeah and and you know as he highlights as well it's not like the iraq war was one that occurred without any recourse to ideology. They actually have another exchange where Hitchens is arguing that, you know, people weren't going into battle in Iraq in the name of Christ. No one was ever summoned to vote for the war in Iraq in the name of God. And the president's own church, as well as every other Christian church that I know of, was opposed to the war, for whatever little difference that might make. None to me.

was opposed to the war, for whatever little difference that might make. None to me. And Tariq responds saying, well, like, did you listen to the speeches by George Bush? Because I had plenty of reverence to God and so on in those speeches. But once again, once again, you can just refer to the constitution and you will have Muslims just referring to text and avoiding the practical consequences, and sometimes the policies that are promoted in one country. And remember that the previous president, George W. Bush, was talking when going not for the same reasons as you, or not from the same same source because you were supporting the war in Iraq, but he was doing it in the name of God. So the constitution here is not preventing someone from within to speak in the name of God, even if he's supporting exactly the same thing that in the name of the peace that

you are promoting, you were for the war in Iraq. I think he has a point that can be made there. So yes, the point that under the best ideals, people can justify the worst atrocities is certainly true. And that is also the case in like communist regimes, right? Like the goal of communism as opposed to fascism. Whereas fascism, at least, you know, they're both utopian visions, but the fascist one does have

the kind of uber man at the top and and exclusion of the well no maybe this as i say it it comes uh the exclusion of people suppressive forces and communist state supply as well but i'm what i all i want to mean is like the communist ideal of a utopia where everybody is well provisioned and there are no divisions between people by artificial structures it's a you know a utopian beautiful vision i don't know does fascism have at the end of the day uh similarly yeah beautiful vision well doesn't it rest on the bodies at the exclusion of like anybody not belonging to a particular ethnic or national ideal yeah i think they do have a utopian vision by their lights which just involves people of a particular ethnicity

living a pastoral dream yeah some fascist philosophers not all fascists maybe there's a weird fascist philosophy that doesn't rest on ethno-nationalism but anyway my point is not to promote fascism or capitalism no no no no you wouldn't I'm purely saying that people often view whatever ideology they are supporting, even if it's engaged in the worst atrocities, to be ultimately on the side of good. Maybe the atrocities are necessary to arrive at the golden vision on the hill, or maybe the enemies are just that inhuman that they deserve to be treated that way. But yeah, that point is, I think, well made and hard to argue against. However, Hitchens does argue back, and I think he also makes good points. So here's his response. Now, Professor, don't, I'll say this as mildly as I can, don't, you may not be aware that you were, and I don't want to increase the area of unexpected offense taking that's been so hugely broadened by the sensitivities of a religion that has the answer to everything.

But I'll just say I don't greatly care to be told, as if I didn't know, that an Iraqi life is as precious as an American one. And as someone who's visited Iraq quite a lot, I had the occasion to think about it a good deal. I wonder if you could mention anything the United States has done in Iraq that is remotely as criminal, as sadistic, and as violent as the blowing up of the mosque of the Golden Dome in Samarra. One of the holiest sites in the Muslim world, callously blown up by Sunni forces in alliance with forces who, perhaps I'd agree with them for once on this, were fascistic Ba'athists. Probably they got the weapons and that high explosive from them. That makes it worse, surely. Intending to start and successfully, in fact, initiating a civil war in which countless thousands of people have been killed.

Religious processions have been fired upon, funerals have been fired upon, Qurans, without number, of course, been incinerated, much more importantly, children, old people, and civilians. Now, where is, I just wonder, you must be able to quote it to me, where is the Sunni fatwa against this conduct? Where is it? Where is the authoritative statement of moral outrage in the silly world saying this is not acceptable behavior for followers of the prophet?

I missed it. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't much like to be suggested that he doesn't know that Iraqi lives have the same value as American lives. No value as american no no no um hitchens is not somebody who would take that kind of thing lying down yeah well you know let's we should just leave that i mean if you and i we don't want to get into deconstructing the pros and cons and

who's to blame for civilian deaths and so on in places like iraq and afghanistan yeah no i'm just imagining the reddit threads chris i'm imagining the reddit threads and look i think the point that you can make without concern about reddit threads is that what hitchens wants to highlight there and and what tarik wants to highlight in his is that people are selective in what they're concerned about right where their moral outrage lies and now tariq wants to highlight about the violence and death that was caused by the iraq and afghanistan wars and in hitchens case he wants to point to the ongoing civil wars and violence that are not related to America or the invasion. And they're both making points which are correct, right?

There has been violence, there has been murder in both occasions, but both of them want to focus on the other aspect and not emphasize that. But I think one point is that it didn't necessarily be the case that there's no actual answer or there's no position which is better supported in an argument right there can be but the chance that it will be arrived at via this format is very unlikely right because essentially you're just gesturing towards you know atrocities right or or deaths of civilians and unless you go into some i don't know some accounting right or something and even then it won't make a difference to the views so it's yeah it's just a matter of the clashing

perspectives yeah i think that's that's well put that's why i just absolutely hesitate to make any kind of take here like making some recourse to some sort of utilitarian thing in terms of deaths and injuries i mean you could cite the nuclear bombs that were dropped on japan you can cite the carpet bombing of dresden or tokyo these were actions taken for good reasons, if you want to say, like not religious ones, certainly, and politically, arguably good reasons. But they were still very, very bad things. And when you look at the incidents in Iraq, you can put a tally on civilian deaths that was instigated by the American interventions, you know, like directly as a course, as a function of not just American, but Western generally, Australia was involved too, interventions,

deaths from airstrikes, for instance, but also a much higher death toll from the various sectarian conflicts that arose afterwards. And then you start getting into a game of trying to point the figure and attribute things and like you said it's people focus on the atrocities i suppose that support their arguments and yeah i i don't have a take to make yeah so i mean you know even when you look at like world war ii where there's kind of a general agreed upon view about who the goodies and the baddies were in that war but when you look at the firebombing of germany or japan or the second dropping of a nuclear bomb or why nuclear bombs were not dropped on non-inhabited areas why not drop it on nanfuji to make a point yeah that's that's Yeah, that's my little historical bug there.

Yeah, but there just are terrible atrocities. Even in a war where there is a much broader agreement about who's in the right and who's in the wrong overall. And yeah, it's just to underline that point that the reality is always complicated and bloody. And there's always examples to be cited to kind of support whatever interpretation you want to take. But I will say that I think, Tariq, it's kind of a different point when they're talking about 9-11 and the response to it. And Hitchens is complaining about there not being enough pushback about Hamas's manifesto,

or whatever it is that mentions the obliteration of Israel, and so on. I repeat my question. Who has the authority to issue fatwas? Is it Sheikh Karadawi, who you sometimes very much express the respect for, who on Al Jazeera gives advice on all kinds of things, some of the minocuous sexual matters and so forth, doctrinal rulings, sometimes upon the legitimacy or otherwise of suicide bombing, if directed at Israelis, not just Jews, of course, but I know we draw the distinction.

On the other hand, Hamas, which does the suicide bombing, doesn't draw the distinction. y gwahaniaeth. Ar y llaw, mae Hamas, sy'n gwneud y llaw ar-lein, ddim yn gwneud y gwahaniaeth. Os na allwn ni wneud cwestiwn o ffattwa ar Hamas, os ydw i'n ddyn, os nad yw un ohonynt yn gwneud hynny ac yn gwneud hynny, y byddai rhywun yn gallu dweud, nid ydym yn meddwl y byddai Hamas ar ei wefan a'i gwefan y gweithredu o'r protocollau o'r mabwysedd o Zion. of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Christian fascist fabrication that is one of the warrants for the Nazi exterminationist solution. I mean, surely that's a question

for the UN Anti-Racism Committee on a spare day. Or, or since that spare day never seems to come, for some Muslim authority to say, no brothers, don't do that. It doesn't come. It doesn't happen. Look on the website. It's still there. But Ramadan makes a point saying that Hitchin says, where are the voices condemning violence in the Muslim world? And Tariq says...

Yes, I acknowledge the fact that there is a crisis of authority in Islam. But, please, don't tell me today that you didn't hear the Muslim voices around the world criticizing and saying this is unacceptable to kill the people in the streets in New York, and the condemnation was widespread by the scholars. If you don't hear, of course, there's, you know, not less than 12 councils of Muslim scholars around the world, from Amman to Istanbul to Paris, Dublin, were condemning this. It's as if they don't speak, because at the end, when the people are calling to kill for killing, they

are heard. But when people are condemning what is done in the name of the religion, it's as if they don't speak. It doesn't make the headlines. But I'm telling you that some scholars did it and said it, and I was one of them, if you like or not. So I think that's a valid point, right? There were people condemning the violence after 9-11. I would imagine that there are condemnations of the sectarian violence in the Muslim world by various Muslim leaders, including in some of the more like fundamentalist sects, I would imagine as well. But there's a kind of little neat way, I think, that Tariq puts it. And he's talking about himself at this point, but I think it's a good argument on this. And you know what is very interesting in the whole discussion? When the people like

what I'm saying, say, you know what? What he's saying is good, but he's alone. Minority. It's open, but he's alone. But when the people don't like what i say say you know why he has huge followers yeah yeah so i think you can still address you know which views are are predominant within a society or not right like the ones that are less popular more popular but i but i think he is correct that schrodinger's figure where people can either say they're just like a fringe figure or well they're very influential and have a a big following yeah it's a tricky one isn't it like on one hand i don't think it's um a good argument to just carve off extremists or people who do bad things in the name of the ideology that you favor and say, oh, no, they don't belong to us.

We take no responsibility for them. On the other hand, it's still very much the case that 99.9% of people of any persuasion don't commit any violence in the name of the thing that they subscribe to. I mean, it's very much analogous to the silly thing that's on Twitter at the moment, which is once again, surprise, surprise, Chris, racial politics in the United States has raised its ugly head again. And I'm not tweeting at the moment. I just look at it occasionally sometimes and then turn it off for disgust. But there's these debates about crime, right? And various inflammatory tweets about white on black crime and black on white crime, whatever, vice versa. And these arguments about statistics and so on, they kind of obscure the facts that have been rightly pointed out

by the various people that 99.9% of people don't murder anyone, don't commit any crime. And so when you talk about these categories, whether it's black people, people islamic people christian people it is meaningful to take account of the fact that you are talking when you're talking about extremist acts of violence or crime or or something extreme then you are talking about a tiny percentage of any population yeah so i think that's good to keep in mind but there are also there are arguments about the little sam harris ringing in my ear is about the or dawkins maybe as well about you know the role of moderates in supporting the more extremist sects. But you can also see it as the role of moderates

in diluting the power of the more hardline movements in a religion. So, yeah, I do think there's a tendency to fixate on extremes. But there's also the issue that it's the people at the extremes who tend to do the violent acts or, you know, be responsible for the rhetoric that accompanies phenomenon in the United States. Now, I'm sure, you know, like half of America voted for Donald Trump, maybe half of them have MAGA-esque sympathies. You know, not all of them are rushing out to storm the Congress or to, you know, do extreme things. But at the the same time the ideology that they subscribe to kind of gives a permission slip to unbalanced people that want to engage in these things so i basically don't know yeah so you engage in which things well things like storming the capital

building or the all right yeah yeah yeah yeah so I mean, the reason I was just asking for clarity is in regards, like, there's that concept of stochastic terrorism, right, which is spoken about quite a lot now. And I have no problem with that term. I do think there's a risk that people over apply it anytime that there's strong rhetoric that they don't like. However, the risk is real, but I wish people applied it consistently because I think exactly what you're saying that like people can easily understand if they're left wing, they can easily understand the issue with people promoting like derogatory hatred towards immigrants talking about how they're infesting society talking about how we need to protect our borders and our women

from these people that are coming in and how you don't actually need to be saying pick up your gun and go and kill people for that kind of rhetoric to have an effect when people go into mosques and murder muslims or shoot you know what immigrants and border areas or whatever that it it has an impact that ideology has an impact even if you yourself are you know a figure doing that and then saying now of course we don't want anyone to kill anyone right yeah i'm just saying mexicans are rapists i'm just i'm not saying you should yeah they're not sending their best people right but i do wish that people would apply that consistently because in the same regard if you have an ideology which talks about a kind of clash of civilizations and a religion which is true, whereas all those are

a threat to the religion and that there is the particular word of God which you are promoting, right? And there are various interpretations of religions where you can be warriors for the faith and be rewarded for that, right? There's Buddhist concepts, there's Islamic concepts, there's Christian concepts about being warriors for your religion. And now they can be interpreted metaphorically, but the point is, if you have that rhetoric, if you have rhetoric about martyrs being rewarded for doing their service for the religion and whatnot.

In the same way, it can be used to justify isolated acts or it can be used by extremists in a way to justify extreme interpretation. So yeah, I just want stochastic terrorism to be a concept which is applied consistently whenever people are concerned about it i'm not saying all all ideologies are equally capable of motivating violence i'm just saying that like it's notable that you know the people that are more concerned about islamist stochastic terrorism are the kind that aren't worried about right-wing stochastic terrorism and vice versa. And vice versa, probably. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm saying the same thing.

Like, I agree with you about those, and I agree with Hitchens, I suppose, with those concerns about Islamic ideology providing that permission slip. I just look at the right-wing in Israel or look at contemporary Russia and ask whether or not you can see some religious ideological justification for similar kinds of things. And, you know, you can. And I guess I just, my frustration with Hitchens in this interview, which is I feel like he's on solid ground speaking to the thing that he truly cares about, right? Which is that he hates all religions, right? he truly cares about right which is that he hates all religions right and he's in this debate talking about islam in particular and i just didn't feel like he made a convincing argument that there was something special about islam that couldn't be attributed to particular historical geographic and economic contingencies of the modern world so i think we've spent enough time on hitchens and

ramadan and their back and forth debates and whatnot maybe there's one quote that we can end on which is a maybe a nice call where they agree. Let me just see. Did they do that? Something nice and conciliatory, Chris. Let's draw a line under this. You know, we've had this blast from the past. Nobody wants to talk about this stuff anymore. Yeah, I don't know if that's true,

but I'm not sure that I can find a note that is appropriately conciliatory, but I can at least find Hitchens talking about the fact that they seem to both agree on the importance of pluralism and tolerance, and now Hitchens uses it to get a dig in, but nonetheless, here we are. Now, you would do better, I think, Professor, if you identified yourself as a member of a very small and critical and endangered minority, someone who really is against all this, and will say so,

and will also decry the fact that the religion itself can't seem to throw it off. But you seem to have that a little bit both ways. Now, I'm going to have to stop you so we can get to... Yes, so then my closing statement is this. If you want diversity, as much as the professor does, as much as I'm sure many people here do, religious diversity, cultural diversity, what you need for it is this. You need a secular state with a godless constitution like this one.

Mic drop. Yeah, well, I think, you know, I could side up on that, like, I don't want to live under a theocracy, be it Jonathan Pajot's Christian theocracy

or an Islamist theocracy. They're all theocracies. None of them are appealing to me. Or an Irish Catholic theocracy, for that matter, Eloise. So yes, there we agree. Secularism, at least in terms of the government structure is good seems to be it's good yeah it's doing all right yeah politically politically i'm in favor of debonair cosmopolitans you know knocking back a whiskey or not it's fine if you don't want to drink but have you if you want to live under a religious theocracy i have no issue with that i just don't want to be there with you. You can go live at the religious theocracy and I will stay in a secular democracy. So horses for courses, horses for courses.

But yeah. Yeah, fair enough. That's an excellent take, Chris. Well, that's a good thing to end on. Yeah, for a secular person to hold. But anyway, what we should do, Chris, I mean, we inserted ourselves into this debate. We couldn't resist.

Our old new atheist stripes reared their ugly hackles and we got involved. But what are your thoughts about Hitchens more generally? Is he a guru? Does he make the gurometer go ping? What's the deal? Yeah, see, I think he is a traditional secular guru in the sense of somebody offering a worldview and having revolutionary theories that he promotes a charismatic

personality attracts followers and whatnot but he was at his peak before the social media age, before the, you know, the online ecosystems had properly fully developed, I think. And as a result of that, it's hard to say how he would have turned out overall, because, you know, when he died, essentially, although he had a following and, you know know was a kind of iconic figure in in various regards he's very much you know a traditional media pundit type but what would hitchens be like how do you live till now with twitter in in covid with jordan peterson and and the intellectual dark web and and so on i can't quite imagine it And I can see it going the way that he becomes completely a secular guru of the toxic variety, or that indeed, he doesn't at all. And he remains much

more aloof and critical of that whole ecosystem. I can't say where he would land but in this material i will say that i think it's a good illustration of how eloquent he was how rhetorically forceful he was and also how there was substance behind his his positions but that he did take his positions often to a particularly strong position or polemical point of view. And as a result, nuance is sometimes lost. And I think he doesn't always address the responses right. So he has 100% got a very strong polemical position that he's arguing for. And I think there's perfectly legitimate for people to raise critical questions about it. And I think sometimes the rhetorical power masked the strength of which his conclusion was entirely demonstrated.

Yeah. Yeah, I sign off on that. I actually, I kind of agree with Matt Goodwin in a way in that I think he wouldn't have gone the route. Matt Johnson? Sorry. Are you coming out as a conservative nationalist? No, no, no, no, no. Cut, cut, cut. Matt Johnson. Sorry, Matt. matt in that i i give hitchens the benefit of the doubt i i think he was too iconoclastic i think he was too independent i think he was too willing to disappoint people he was too confident in his

ability to talk people around like he wouldn't have gone the route of the kind of gurus that we cover that's just my guess in terms of his more about his personality than anything else when i look at the gromitum and i get a sense of the things that they do i completely agree with you that i i think he's a a secular guru in the non-dejorative sense like you said predominantly as someone who is about putting together a forceful argument and he's not like us like you and i like oh this but on the other hand this but you know this that the other you know very wishy-washy that's not the kind of thing that builds yourself a reputation as a spokesperson for this kind of muscular atheistic liberalism that garnered him so many fans but you know if you look at the garometer and you see the the things we've got down there

like that the narcissist maybe a little bit of narcissism but you know the the grievance mongering the pseudo profound bullshit the conspiracies all that stuff anti-establishment he really didn't show those qualities yeah he was a polemicist from a bygone age i guess i'm probably a little bit glad that i didn't find out what his tweets would look like it's probably for the best yes well me me too so you know but then again it could have ended up like Dawkins yeah you know I know that I know Dawkins has tweeted so many mental bad things like you know he was he is somebody that was promoting Jamessey not so long ago but he is also somebody who tweets about like his honeypots being stolen at the airport and that one about the homeless person with the sign saying need money for bitches and or some dog 69ing that he's seen in the street or like the whole it just

the moral of the story for him seems to be not a political one or an ideological... It's just basic cutting. The moral of the story for him seems to be not a political one or an ideological one. It's just that we should take our social media keys away from us. You know, they should just be... As we get older. As we get older. At 65 or whatever, you know, you retire. You're locked out.

You hand over your Twitter account. That's it. You're gone. Your reputation is intact. That's how it should be well that's let's see if we live by those rules we're still both on twitter for now so um just barely well not just barely yeah that's true that was hitchens that was hitchens we will next be looking at elizur utudkowsky. Isn't that right? I believe he's the next on our list, the AI guru.

So this was a, we veered off the track because the opportunity to speak to a Hitchens expert came up. But we'll be back on the straight and narrow next time with very much a contemporary guru in the shape of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yep. Are the machines coming to kill us? Yes, according to Yudkowsky. Are they?

Indeed. So, Matt, I'm afraid I don't have reviews teed up for today. So we're going to uncharacteristically be efficient in ending the podcast. But we are going to get Patreon shoutouts. I haven't forgot about that. But no reviews to tell you, no feedback, exciting, negative or positive otherwise. So you'll just have to imagine them in your mind and just you know in your mind palace just imagine the the fancy prayers and the condemning words and that'll have

to suffice yep sounds good all right shout out our lovely patrons and um and i'll go and cook dinner okay so patrons matt benefits that's what that're doing. Benefits, things that benefit them. We're shouting them out. We're friends with benefits. That's how we think about our patrons. It is. So conspiracy hypothesizers, that's where we like to start. And what a bevy of conspiracy hypothesizers we have this week.

of conspiracy hypothesizers we have this week. We have L. McKinnon, James Tucker, Goodwin Langford, DJ, Carmel L., Liam, Slammo, David McLaurin, Uti Varden, Taylor Serring, Lisa Edelston, Brent Fisheckhead, Aaron Cullen, Kat, Palmer Neal, Nick, Liam Bruce, Paul Murphy, Jordan Horton, Matthias Mieter, Tyler Saban, Joop Gisk, Ben Ruben Cervantes, and the policy lass on Brian Brin.

Oh, the policy lass. I know her. Fantastic. And did I hear some Norwegian names there, Chris? Did I hear some Norwegian names?, Chris? Did I hear some Norwegian names? Yeah. This is great. We're getting some of that lovely, lovely oil money that they're all entitled to.

Yeah. Thank you. As we learned last time. Thank you, Norway. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like

someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. So will so you will so next mart revolutionary geniuses revolutionary geniuses we have a few who are they have their names Wysant, John Gonsalves, Paul Stockman, Seth, Dan Perry, Sean Veltman, Trenton Knurr, Garrett Monroe, Christine Flinders, and Max. That is our revolutionary geniuses for this week. Fantastic. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over

the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. It will never cease to amaze that those kinds of reactions can occur, right? And seemingly, no dissonance created, but but that's that's why we love them i want to make a commitment here i think we should find a new brett weinstein clip and play it the beginning of next episode okay i need some more brett in my life all right i can deliver that

well i'll do that for you so galaxy brain gurus much like brett we have several of those and the fact that they contribute so much is stunning it's stunning so uh in that illustrious group we have christian bill not that one probably christian paul sharon mandir the real ericWeinstein, TheRealOne. Oh, good. TheRealOne, yes, he's contributing. Peter, PGClean, 4Rsuf, 4Rsuf,

either one of those, JediMishap, and DerekVarn. All Galaxy Wing top shelf yep yep

top shelf figures aged 16 years or more yeah here we are you're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard

and you're so polite and hey wait a minute am I an expert I kind of am yeah I don't trust people at all no yeah no we don't we don't that's your reward that's what you get that's what you get for you it was a month but you would you know you get live streams might you get access to the coding academia you get all the things too yeah you get the warm rosy glow of

knowing that you're contributing to something deeply important something that could change the world something that's right because the be it between hitchens and ramadan from 12 years ago or whatever it's very important it's very urgent it's very it's telly this moment it's off this moment um so so yeah well hopefully you know that we sometimes go back into the archive of the guru world that's what we have been able to hitchens had to be done at some point we are not these podcasters that just chase around like the current news of the day you know the current hot topic in a bid to get more clout no we're motivated that's right so coming up ai and elizur yudikovsky will ai destroy us all matt and chris we're gonna sort it out yeah andrew huberman and he said so

yeah uh i don't know if we can lay claim to that but you know whatever it's all rhetoric you can identify it now, so just accept that. But, well, it's been a pleasure, Matt. I look forward to editing this with you for many weeks to come. What are you talking about? It's 2 hours and 41 minutes of pure gold. No editing required. You've exactly specified that,

so people will now know exactly how much we've cut out. But all right. All right. Well, I will see you next time. Yes, we will. Watch out for the distributed idea suppression complex and the gated institutional narrative. Smash for it, Matt.

Smash for it. I am. I am. I'm ducking and weaving. They're coming at me from all directions. I won't let them get me. I'm fine. I'm good.

That's all we can ask for. All right. See you all next time. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you.