Making Sense with Sam Harris - #161 — Rise & Fall

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Jared Diamond about the rise and fall of civilizations. They discuss political polarization, disparities in civilizational progress, the prospect that there may be biological differences between populations, the precariousness of democracy in the US, the lack of a strong political center, immigration policy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, not much housekeeping here today. I've spent much less time on social media of late.

So much less time, in fact, that I really can't actually judge whether what I've seen there this week just reflects an especially contentious week, or whether I have changed in my sense of what is the expected ambient level of hostility and lunacy on Twitter. It has seemed completely crazy every time I've checked back in over there. Honestly, I just reread the Unabomber's Manifesto for the first time since it was originally published, as you might recall under threat of further maiming and murder, and it is a slightly crazy document. You can certainly hear Kaczynski grinding his teeth in the background more or less throughout, but the truth is it is better reasoned and modulated than half of what I see on Twitter. And this is from people with blue check marks by their names and large followings. So I don't know what it means to be able to honestly say that half the people

on Twitter seem less hinged than a man who was sending bombs in the mail. But it does seem that we're performing an experiment on ourselves, the consequences of which are as yet undetermined. Anyway, I'm very happy to have withdrawn to the degree that I have. It feels far more sane. One of the things that happened this week is Coleman Hughes, who's been a guest on this podcast, the preternaturally mature undergraduate, still undergraduate, from Columbia University studying philosophy, Coleman testified in Congress on the topic of whether it would make sense to pay reparations for slavery. And he argued against paying reparations. I'm not actually sure I agree with him, though he was perfectly rational in his remarks.

And I'll be going on his podcast in a few weeks, I think, and we'll probably talk about this. I'm actually quite open-minded on whether or not reparations make sense. Some of you might recall that Hitch argued in a formal debate in favor of reparations. It's a genuinely difficult question, so at a minimum I can say I'm quite open to arguments from both sides here. Anyway, to watch Coleman's testimony and to have heard the hissing and booing in the gallery, to see the faces of some of the people sitting behind him reacting to his arguments, and then to see the aftermath, to the degree that I did, on social media, where at least one person with a blue checkmark, an HBO writer,

called him a coon without apparent repercussions from among her fans. We have to find some way to correct course here. Which brings me to today's podcast. Today I'm very happy to have finally connected with Jared Diamond in person. Jared is a professor of geography at UCLA. He's the author, quite famously, of the books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, and his newest book is Upheaval, Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. He has won many awards, including a MacArthur grant and a Pulitzer Prize. He's a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and an all-around fascinating man. In this conversation, we focus on the themes that

Jared has focused on in the books I just mentioned, which really are about the rise and fall of civilization. We discuss political polarization in our own time. We talk about disparities in civilizational progress, why it is that Europeans, for the most part, seem to have dominated the globe. We talk about the precariousness of democracy in the U.S. at the moment, the fact that we lack a strong political center, talk about immigration policy, and as always, if you find conversations of this sort valuable, you can support the podcast by subscribing through my website at samharris.org. I left the bonus questions in this episode, but I have bonus questions from many other podcasts that will soon be

rolled out as subscriber-only content there. Anyway, without further delay, I bring you Jared Diamond. I am here with Jared Diamond. Jared, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Thank you for coming. I've been, as many of my listeners will be, I've been an admirer of your work for many years. This is not your first book, but the first book I read of yours was Guns, Germs, and Steel. And I want to talk about really three of your books that seem to form a kind of unified picture of how civilizations arise and thrive and fail. So I'm thinking of guns, germs, and steel collapse and the new one, upheaval.

And I will focus on the new one because it has special relevance to the moment, both from a publishing point of view and just from a, you know, what is happening in our own country point of view. But thank you for doing this. And it's a great pleasure to do this with you in person. Gladly. I'm happy to discuss these subjects with you, which I guess interest you just as they interest me. So you, like many people who I admire, you have taken an unconventional route into focusing on what you focus on. You were a physiologist at first for quite some time and now are functioning more in the mode of a historian,

although you have a formal appointment in the geography department at UCLA. How do you think of the way in which you have respected or failed to respect the traditional boundaries between disciplines and what you've focused on? It's not something that I think I'm consciously about. It's just that I'm interested in lots of things. And already as a child, I was interested in lots of things. In high school, I expected that I was going to become a physician like my father. And so I figured that I would be doing science for the rest of my life. Therefore, in high school, I would use the time to do things other than science. So in high school, I took Latin and Greek, and I had wonderful history courses.

In college, again being pre-med, expecting to do it for the rest of my life, I took the minimum number of required science courses. I've never taken a biology course other than introductory biology. That's hilarious. I majored in biochemical sciences, but I never took a course in biochemistry. Instead, I took courses in all sorts of possible things. I took courses in astronomy, intensive Russian, music composition for professional musicians, oral epic poetry. I was interested in all these things. I then decided not to go to medical school at the last minute. Instead, I went and took a PhD, did graduate study in physiology, became one of the world's

three experts on the gallbladder. And I was hired by UCLA Medical School as a promising gallbladder expert. That sounds like a backhanded compliment in some way. The gallbladder is not an organ that we think a lot about. That's right. The gallbladder does not play a lead in the world of thinking. The reason I studied it is that the gallbladder is a model. It works. It uses the same mechanisms that the kidney and intestine use, but it's easier to study. So I got a lot of mileage out of the gallbladder.

I taught kidney physiology and intestinal physiology, liver physiology to medical students until 2002. But then two things triggered my shift out of gallbladders. One was the birth of our twin sons in 1987. And at that point, I realized that their future was not going to depend upon gallbladders, but their future was going to depend on the state of the world. Not even their own gallbladders, but their future was going to depend upon the state of the world. Not even their own gallbladders. Not even their own, because you can do without a gallbladder. And the other thing was, totally unexpectedly in 1985, being awarded one of these MacArthur

Foundation fellowships, which you would think would thrill me. So I got a phone call, totally unexpected, because you don't know you'd get nominated, totally unexpected, saying, this know you're nominated, totally unexpected saying, this is Ken Hope from the MacArthur Foundation. You've been awarded a fellowship and we'll give you no strings for five years and we'll give you any questions. And I was stunned. And then I went into a depression for a week. It's the only, really the only lasting depression in my adult life. The reason was that the award in effect told me, Jared, we expect things of you. And I was saying to myself,

but you've been wasting your time on gallbladders. What are you going to do about it? So it was those two things, the MacArthur Award and the Birth of My Sons that induced me to switch in 1987. Gradually, my interest in, I enjoyed doing physiology, but my interest in it decreased. And as time went on, I wanted to switch from physiology to geography. But university appointments are not a portable appointment where you can go around and find some department that will take you. Instead, my appointment was as a gallbladder physiologist. It took a lot of negotiations to get me transferred from the physiology department to the geography department, where I've been since 2002. What did you get the MacArthur Award for? Someone must have recognized

that your work held wider promise than Focus on the gallbladder. How did that happen? I had already, at the time I got the MacArthur Award, I had a parallel career in ecology and evolution because I had been a birdwatcher from age seven onwards. And so immediately after I got my PhD, in the year or two after I got my PhD, at the time, I didn't know what the significance of it all was, but I immediately began looking for another field, a parallel field. I seriously considered a career in conducting, music conducting. I seriously considered getting into pre-Columbian pottery, but those didn't take. And instead, I went to New Guinea. It was love at first sight. And I've been studying New Guinea birds ever since. So for the MacArthur Award, my work on New Guinea birds, I'm sure it was that and not my gallbladder work that contributed to the MacArthur Award. Right. Well, you are a true polymath. Really, I got to think that at a certain point, we will age out of being polymaths because

there was a time with knowledge doubling every three to five years, it becomes harder and harder to even pretend to know much about so many things. But it seems to me that you really have managed it as your books attest. What's the significance of your scientific background in how you approach writing history? That's interesting. It's not something that I thought of consciously, but the fact is that my approach to history is always comparative history. Most historians do single case studies. So a historian will write a book about 19th century Germany or 17th century France. I've never done that. It's that all of my historical studies, they're comparative.

I compare different countries or different societies. That's something that I learned right at the beginning of my gallbladder career when I went to Cambridge, England to do my graduate study, my mentor was a great physiologist who was studying iron transport in muscles. And the way he did it, he was looking at the effect of potassium on sodium efflux and muscles. He did it beautifully elegant. He had two test tubes and he had two pieces of the same muscle in two different tubes. One tube had potassium and the other tube had no potassium.

So he compared pieces of the same muscle. Then when I went to New Guinea and began studying New Guinea birds, in order to study the effect of species number one on species number two, in New Guinea it's not considered nice or permissible or legal to go around exterminating species number one on one mountain in order to see what that does to species two. I had to find different mountains where one mountain, for whatever reason, lacked species one naturally.

And then I compared it with another mountain that had species number one. So my approach has always been a comparative approach. And then when I got to history, I realized that with history, the comparative approach forces you to, poses questions that you would never think of otherwise. An example that I think of is that I love reading books about the American Civil War, like so many people. And all these fat books on the American Civil War, they'll devote six pages to second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. But at the end of an 800-page book, they haven't discussed one of the most salient things of the American Civil War, which is that at the end of

the war, the victors did not kill the losers. Instead, at the end of the American Civil War, only one person was executed, and that was the commandant of Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp. Whereas at the end of the Spanish Civil War, the victors killed a million of the losers. And at the end of the Finnish Civil War, the victors began to kill losers at a rate higher than any modern genocide rate until Rwanda. If you compare civil wars, you're then struck by this thing that's crying out for explanation with the American Civil War. But if you don't do comparisons, the question doesn't arise. So with comparative studies, naturally, with a 500-page book, I can't devote

the whole book to 19th century Germany. I have to divide the book among seven countries. But questions arise and you can answer questions through comparison. So that's my approach to history. Yeah, and it's really, it's thrilling to read. So again, I want to talk about three of your books, but I guess I want to frame the conversation with what seems to be the charged political moment, especially as we notice it in our own country, the US and in Western Europe. And I don't know how much time you spend on social media. I think probably none. Yeah.

I don't know how to turn them off. This is, if there's no other variable that accounts for your basic sanity, it's really that. But it does seem like, and this is a concern you raise throughout your latest book, Upheaval, which is what we're witnessing is a persistent and growing failure of political compromise and our ability to resolve our differences civilly,

to converge on answers to global problems that break us out of partisan gridlock. And this is something that increasingly worries us, and I think we're right to be worried. And we're going to talk about it as we get into upheaval, but I'm just wondering just how you view the current moment and how much of that was informing your writing of your latest book? The current moment, meaning right now or this year or since 2016, no effect because I began the... People often ask me, Jared, did you start your book within November 2016? It took longer than that, yeah. No, I began the book in 2013. I didn't foresee 2016.

It happened that the book was doubly at the right moment, not only because 2016 exacerbated the breakdown of political compromise in the US, but also Brexit. Brexit began after I started the book. And I'm just back from, what, 10 days in the UK. I was shocked being in the UK. I've lived in the UK for five years. And I had thought that the United States had the most imminent problems, but no, Brexit is going to... Brexit threatens big problems for Britain

before what's happening in the US will cause big problems in the US. Brexit risks the falling apart of the UK, secession of Scotland, and even secession of Northern Ireland. Yeah, yeah. And there's also just such a breakdown of civility that is shocking to me. And it's so cavalier. I mean, so perhaps you've noticed this, if you... It's hard to know what one notices if one isn't on Twitter these days, but I don't know how widely reported this has been. But there's been this seeming epidemic of people throwing milkshakes at politicians they don't like in the UK, especially. And I look at this through two lenses. One is just kind of my personal understanding of, as a semi-public figure and a controversial one, what my security concerns

are and what it means to have someone come up to you in public and hit you with a milkshake, even though in this case you have bodyguards around, what that is actually, whether the perpetrators know it or not, is a mock assassination. What it is is demonstrating that I can get this close to you, no matter whether you're Bill Gates or whoever you are, you've spent millions of dollars a year on your personal security, and yet right now I can throw whatever I want in your face, right? And it advertises that to the entire world, which includes people who may in fact want to assassinate people. So there's that kind of narrow security concern, which many people are unaware of. And when I voiced this on social

media, many people found it risible, like, well, it's just a milkshake. It's not a mock assassination. But the security implications are graver than people realize because what it does is just advertises persistent vulnerability, no matter how much you spend on security. But more important than that, it's a breakdown of civility such that there are very few stops past a milkshake between where we are now and actual political violence. If you can no longer resolve your differences with a political figure whose views you detest through conversation or debate or criticism,

and you have mainstream journalists advocating for the public humiliation of people by throwing milkshake such that they no longer feel secure in their persons, it's alarming. I mean, again, there are very few places to stop where we can arrest our slide into actual political violence. I was wondering how you view civility itself and an ability to let words suffice as a break on our baser natures collectively.

Well, it's not only politicians. I don't know whether you noticed as you came in here that the entrance to my house now has a metal wall around it with spikes at the top. And Marie and I put those up about a decade ago at a time when some angry anthropologist launched a series of four lawsuits against me. Sorry to laugh, but given my run-ins with anthropologists, the angry anthropologist is a fixture in my imagination that I can easily summon. Most anthropologists are normal, decent human beings. Yeah, let's leave it at that.

But there are a small number of very angry anthropologists, more so in anthropology than in other fields. And consequences for me are the putting up of spikes on my fence and getting bodyguards. There were two broad-shouldered gentlemen in black suits who accompanied me to a lecture that I gave at an unnamed nearby university because an angry anthropologist called up my host and began by saying, do you believe in academic freedom? And then the angry anthropologist proceeded to say that he intended to attempt to disrupt my lecture.

So we had the two gentlemen with broad black shoulders. It's something that I'm constantly aware of. I've not been physically attacked, but I certainly have been on the receiving end of a lot of vile verbiage. Yeah. Yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit. So let's start with Guns, Germs, and Steel. What was the thesis of that book, and what was controversial about it? The question of the book, before we get to the thesis, the question of the book is,

why has history turned out differently for people of different continents? Why is it that you and I are sitting here speaking English in land of Native Americans where the language 500 years ago was Chumash? Why did it turn out that way? Why is it not the case that Chumash is the language spoken in London? Or why is it that, say, Bantu languages are not spoken in Australia? Why did history turn out that way? Why did history turn out with Eurasian people expanding, and particularly within Eurasia, European people? So that's the question.

And the subtext of that, obviously, is that we're not just interested in who speaks which language. We're talking about why did certain civilizations thrive so fully that they could conquer and dominate others, and you have massive disparities in wealth, in technological sophistication, and all the rest. Exactly. The way that my friends in New Guinea put it, they talk about cargo. Cargo is the New Guinea term for all of the good stuff, for metal, technology, writing, schools, medicine. And the way New Guineans put it to me is, why did you white people develop all the cargo while we black people had none? New Guineans posed the question explicitly. The question was posed to me by a New Guinean in 1972.

It was a great question. I babbled out something, but as soon as I said it, I knew that my answer was wrong. Why is it that these really smart people in New Guinea, why is it that we Europeans, I who can't find my way around the New Guinea forest without being guided, and I need a child to lead me by the hand so I won't fall off a cliff, why is it that New Guineans didn't conquer the world? The thesis of guns, germs, and steel, when I ask professors of biochemistry in the United States this question, why did Europeans conquer the world? A typical answer that I'll get is, well, I hate to say it,

this isn't politically correct, but higher IQ and more brains than Judeo-Christian work ethic. But all you have to do is work in New Guinea one day, and you see that it's not that Europeans have better brains than New Guineans. There was some other explanation. So Guinea one day, and you see that it's not that Europeans have better brains than New Guineans. There was some other explanation. So Guns, Germs, and Steel, in fact, interpreted, and the explanation is now widely accepted by people concerned with these things. Guns, Germs, and Steel interpreted the different rates of development of people on different

continents in terms of the wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, because everybody was hunter-gatherers everywhere in the world until 11,000 years ago. With the beginnings of agriculture, you got population explosion, food surpluses, surpluses that could feed inventors, kings, scribes, but only a tiny fraction of wild plant and animal species are suitable for domestication. And you can satisfy yourself just by taking a walk this weekend in the Santa Monica Mountains and seeing what there is out there that's suitable for domestication, like nothing,

trying to domesticate a skunk or a deer. So the people living in the areas with wild plant and animal species, the Fertile Crescent, China, Mexico, with ones who got the head start on developing the cargo. Yeah. So I remember from that book, there's an arresting image of just how implausible it would be to try to saddle a rhino and ride it into battle. And apparently a zebra is not much easier to domesticate. I was on the animal management committee of the Los Angeles Zoo, and I was astonished to learn there that the zoo animal that each year kills or cripples more keepers,

zookeepers in the United States than any other, is not tigers, but it's zebras. Because zebras have the nasty habit, well, two things. They have the nasty habit of biting, and they don't let go until you're dead. The other thing is- Seriously? Wow. I've never heard that. They have a really vicious kick. The kick is useful to them because when they're being chased by a lion and the lion is ready for the next one, the zebra kicks out and smashes the jaw of the lion. So zebras have not been domesticated.

There are people that then point out to me that Lord Rothschild got some zebras that pulled his cart in London. Yes, you can occasionally get zebras to pull carts, but they've never been domesticated. Whereas horses and donkeys have been domesticated. So you paint a picture of really sheer, unearned geographic disparities in luck. Completely unearned geographic disparities. Where that upsets angry anthropologists is twofold. First of all, to discuss why Europeans expanded over the world means that you are Eurocentric and racist. It's not nice to pose the question. But the fact is everybody can see that Europeans

rather than Aboriginal Australians or Africans conquer the world, and it cries out for explanation. The fact that historians and archaeologists hadn't provided an answer to the question, that forces people to fall back on the obvious racial explanation. You can see that people have different faces, and maybe that means that they have different brains. So to pose the question means that you're bad because you're racist and you're eccentric. And then also to answer the question in terms of

geography means geographic determinism, which is another dirty word. Geographic determinism seems to imply that the human spirit counts for nothing. Well, the human spirit counts for something within limits, but if you would like to stand at the North Pole in January in a t-shirt and shorts and look to the human spirit to allow you to stand there, lots of luck for the human spirit to allow you to stand there. You're going to need a lot of it. Lots of luck for the human spirit. Geography has big effects. And in some cases, the big effects are dominant, like standing the North Pole in a t-shirt,

but also in developing agriculture. If you don't have domesticable species around there, you're not going to develop agriculture. And without agriculture, you don't develop metal tools and and you don't develop writing, and you don't develop kings. So what has been the most persuasive argument against this thesis? Has there been anything? None whatsoever. There is no- Oh, to be able to say that, that's great. No, the fact is there is no counter explanation. Occasionally, I recall one archaeologist who said there are cultural reasons why Aboriginal Australians never developed agriculture.

Well, for heaven's sakes, there are, what, 184 different tribes in Aboriginal Australia, and they're different from each other. But Australia has no domesticable plant or animal species other than macadamia nuts, but you can't found a civilization based on macadamia nuts. So there is no alternative explanation. Right. Yeah, I'm totally persuaded of your thesis. I guess it also seems plausible to me that there are other contributing factors, which arguably are of the sort raised that are even less politically correct than yours, which is any groups of people who are isolated enough so as to express biological and cultural variation are going to differ in some factors that are relevant to their differential success as groups, right? So

whether it's biology and or culture, it's almost certainly both to some degree. There will be differences in the mean level of expression of certain skills, which could lead to differential success given the environments that select for it, right? So it seems to me to be environments that select for it, right? So, I mean, it seems to me to be an unsustainable and a fundamentally unnecessary political commitment to say that we know in advance that there are no differences between groups that are biologically mediated. I mean, we know there are cultural differences that are irrelevant. I mean, it's just that is as obvious as the nose on anyone's face. But the idea that there could be biological differences that have implications for the success of whole groups of people, it seems to me that we can't rule that out. And there's no

reason to rule that out once we know that our political commitment is such that we want all of these unearned differences in luck to be canceled insofar as that increasingly becomes possible. We want everyone to be able to thrive in whatever way they want to thrive, such that it's compatible with the thriving of other people. That has to be the punchline for how we build a viable global civilization. But the idea that, I mean, this is just to express the fear as clearly as possible. It seems, and this is, I'm sure, anthropologists by the thousands would line up in defense of this

notion, that the idea that if we tested Fijians for the top 100 traits we care about in human beings, quantitative intelligence being one, but we could add a sense of humor and everything else we love about people, whatever those 100 traits are, and we tested Norwegians on those same traits, people feel like we are approaching some ethical or political emergency if we don't conclude in advance that all of those mean values must be the same. Or if there's any difference between them, genetics can't have anything to do with it, right? Even though we know that so much about ourselves is largely governed by what we are physically, that is genetically. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on that topic.

All of what you say about expectations, it's all true. People differ in eye color around the world, and people differ in hair color, red, yellow, brown, black, et cetera. So why shouldn't they also differ in quantitative ability or in predisposition to verbalize in certain ways? Why shouldn't they differ in predisposition to tonal versus non-tonal languages. Theoretically, that's a possibility. The problem is that despite a lot of effort by a lot of people to establish differences in, say, cognitive skills, differences at a population level have not been established.

Instead, there are obvious massive cultural effects on cognitive skills. But my experience in New Guinea, it doesn't take much time with New Guineans, with traditional New Guineans, to realize that these are smart people. And yes, there are differences among New Guineans, but on the average, my experience with New Guineans right from the first year has been that they are more curious and they're more inventive, more prone to look for possibilities to use something. They just strike me as more alert than Europeans. Right.

Now, the reasons for this- Well, then maybe there's an invidious comparison to draw between New Guineans and Europeans for certain types of inventiveness. I'm just saying that we don't... What I'm increasingly worried about, and you're talking to someone who's still dealing with the aftermath of having had Charles Murray on the podcast and dealt with the whole legacy of his publicity problems, really, in the end. And it just seems to me that we can close the loop on the political and ethical concern without knowing what we're going to find over the next century of studying human biology,

human genetics, its contribution to everything we care about. We know that we're living in a circumstance where each of us personally and all of us collectively have inherited the world as we find it. You know, you didn't pick your ancestors and therefore you didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the society into which you were born. And whatever tools you have to make the most of this situation, you didn't earn any of them, right? You can't account for yourself. And yet what we notice the world over, both within our society, how many homeless people did I pass on the way to your house to conduct this interview?

I know that but for a few changes in my neurophysiology or just in my history as a person, opportunities I didn't get or didn't take advantage of, I would be one of those people who's now sleeping on the sidewalk tonight. So we know that we want to mitigate those disparities. And we know that being good people and building good societies is predicated on our commitment to mitigating those disparities. And yet I find myself surrounded by people, and again, they seem disproportionately to be anthropologists or social scientists, who feel that even to broach the topic that I just broached to you is a sign of some covert interest in, you know, white supremacy or some insane political doctrine that has gotten people

by the millions killed. I mean, these are the kinds of political experiences we're about to talk about. I just think we have to pull back from this brink where we feel like we can't, again, I wasn't even expecting to bring this up to you, but given your academic bona fides, it seems worth doing. This is where the precariousness of our situation intellectually was first forced upon me. I remember in 2014 when it was found that Homo sapien DNA had been commingled with Neanderthal DNA to the tune of 2.7% or 3%. Basically, everyone on earth, with the exception of people who have just all of their ancestors in Africa, is part Neanderthal. And so I remember

going out on social media that day and quite sanctimoniously saying, attention all racists, you were right. Whites are special. We're part Neanderthal. Blacks are just human. you were right. Whites are special. We're part Neanderthal. Blacks are just human, right? You know, it took me about five seconds after sending that tweet to understand what if it had gone the other way? What if the only people on earth who were part Neanderthal were people of African, direct African descent? That would have been a life-deranging, probably life-destroying discovery for the geneticists who had the misfortune to make it, or for any journalist who had the temerity to even talk about it, right? It just would have been so awful for reasons that we have to perform an exorcism on.

We can't politically be vulnerable to just the data coming in. The data will be whatever they are, right? And who cares who's part Neanderthal in the end? But I feel that we, as a community of public intellectuals, for lack of a better word, are truly vulnerable to what is a kind of moral panic around the politics of discussing human difference? If the studies were available, the answers are likely to be unpowerable to people who least expect the outcome of the studies. example that I encountered was that a friend introduced me to a prospective donor to support my research. And the prospective donor was a wealthy industrialist. And then the friend made the horrible mistake of talking about my New Guinea work and then saying to a friend in front of the prospective donor, Jared, didn't you say that New Guineans strike you as more intelligent than Europeans?

And at which point the perspective donor flipped out and said, what has any New Guinean ever done for world civilization? Well, if you don't have metal tools, your capacity to possibilities of doing stuff for world civilization are limited. The fact is that those who invented agriculture longest ago, 11,000 years ago, the major causes of death in Eurasian societies for the last many millennia have been epidemic infectious diseases, which means that the strongest natural selection is for overcoming resisting smallpox and measles,

and that depends upon ABO blood groups, and da-da-da-da-da. It's a major cause of death. Whereas in New Guinea, the major causes of death are starvation, fighting with other New Guineans, figuring out how to survive a frost or a famine, there's strong selection for intelligence rather than epidemic diseases because the population wasn't large enough for epidemic diseases. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the studies that you're thinking of end up showing that New Guineans have not only more social skills developed culturally, but that they were genetically

selected for a superior cognitive ability. But there are a lot of people who won't like that conclusion. Right. And I would also imagine that there's been a fair amount of selection pressure for intergroup violence, outgroup violence. Yeah. In basically any society that doesn't have a central government, what central governments can declare war and kill 100,000 people in 10 seconds, yes. But what central governments can also do is end wars. Whereas in societies without centralized governments, you can't end wars. You can reach a temporary peace or an agreement to halt the hostilities, but then a batch of hotheads from your group will go attack another group. You can't restrain the hotheads. So the

fact is, and again, anthropologists don't like to recognize the fact, but there's massive evidence that the percent of people who die violent deaths per year in traditional tribal societies without centralized government is considerably higher than in state societies. Yeah, well, that's a happy point that our mutual friend Steve Pinker has made to the consternation of many that civilization, as horrible as recent or even distant wars were, again, even adding World War I and World War II to the ledger, what we see is a precipitous decline in the risk that you are going to die at the hands of another person as civilization has progressed.

Right. And Steve has drawn on studies by anthropologists and archaeologists who've surveyed dozens and maybe hundreds of societies around the world, traditional societies. You can come up with a couple of traditional societies with low rates of violence, but the great majority have rates of violence, rates of violent deaths, percentages per year of violent deaths in excess of the worst of the worst, in excess of Poland in the 20th century. Yeah. So, okay, we're on our way to your recent book, but let's touch on collapse.

What was the thesis of that book? Thesis of collapse is that in the past, societies have often... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at Thank you. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.