Making Sense with Sam Harris - #165 — Journey into Wokeness

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Caitlin Flanagan about her work as a writer. They discuss controversies on social media, the contradictions within feminism, media bias, #MeToo, the new norms of sexuality, the wokeness of academia, affirmative action, college admissions, HR departments, sexual harassment, 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. Okay, well, a major housekeeping seems to be in order, but it is big enough that I think I will do it separately. So this housekeeping will be brief. I just want to say a few things about the app. We are finally releasing the groups feature. I know I promised that a few weeks back. That's rolling out this week with the new update, and we'll go kind of week by week with progressively larger cohorts

of the subscribers. So if you don't get it immediately, that's what's happening. You will eventually get it. We just don't want to break anything. So anyway, groups are coming. And in lieu of housekeeping, I wanted to present a lesson that was recently released on the app. And this lesson is titled Space, Time, and Attention. So enjoy that, and then I'll be back with today's guest. I'd like you to consider what is real in this moment. That is, what actually exists, and what of the things that exist actually matter, and what makes things matter.

We tend to think of reality in terms of space, and of things in space. We think of people and places that matter to us. We accumulate possessions, things in drawers and closets that we care about or once cared about. We move from room to room in our homes into spaces that we maintain for different purposes. So the sense of what is there for us in each moment is bound up with this sense of space. And we have digital lives that take place in virtual spaces. And we can now see distant places on earth in real time without having to travel. We can communicate with people who are elsewhere, but they are real to us by reference to their being in space. And if you believe that

God exists, well then the question becomes where? The reality of anything seems to entail its existence in space. And it's because abstract quantities like numbers violate this principle that their existence becomes so hard to think about. In what sense does the number seven exist? That becomes philosophically interesting and even inscrutable because existence is so bound up with our sense of space. And time hovers over all of this like a ghost. In one sense, it's another abstraction based on the reality of change. All things that exist seem to change, and one thing causes or cancels another. It's based on these changes that we form a picture of time. Now, we can get closer to the truth by importing time into our thinking about things.

We can think in terms of processes rather than things. We can turn nouns into verbs. You as a person are not really a thing. You're a process. You're a stream of actions and experiences. And your moment-to-moment engagement with the world of things and ideas changes you. You acquire new skills and opinions and desires and concerns. You're not precisely who you were yesterday, and you don't exactly know who you'll be tomorrow. And look at what matters to

you. Your relationships. A relationship isn't a thing. It's built upon experiences with another person. And a career isn't a thing. And your health isn't a thing. Everything you experience is made of moments in time. But the real significance of time is not what happens on the calendar or on the clock, but in our minds. The true source of profundity is attention. That is the cash value of time. We all know what it's like to guard our time, but then to squander it by not paying attention to that which would have made the time we guarded valuable. It's always amusing to see a group of

people who've decided to be together for whatever reason. Perhaps they're having lunch in a restaurant, but most or even all of them are buried in their phones. The real coincidence of space and time that is meaningful is attention. Think of some possession or place that you love, some quantity of space that gives you pleasure. Perhaps it's a work of art you have on your wall, or a piece of jewelry, or a place in nature, a beach or a mountain. Perhaps there's a restaurant or bookstore that you'd be sad to know you would never see again. Let's say you maintain this connection to this object or place for the rest of your life. What is its real significance? to this object or place for the rest of your life? What is its real significance? How is it possible to grasp it and take pleasure in it? How can it matter to you? All of this is a play of attention.

This object or place exists for you and matters to the degree that it captures your attention, precisely to that degree. You like to look at it, or hold it, or think about it. The real pleasure isn't in the object. It's in your mind. It's a matter of what it feels like to give this thing your attention. And this is where meditation reveals its real power. True profundity is to be found not in guarding space or even time. The real profundity is being able to use attention in a way that is truly rewarding. You're only as free as your attention is. If you're lost in thought, even in a holy place, on a holy day, or in formal meditation, or on your honeymoon, or at a child's birthday party, or at work, you might as well be anywhere,

because for that moment you are well and truly lost. If, on the other hand, you're recognizing the nature of consciousness, it also doesn't matter where you are or what time it is, because the moment is profound. It's in this middle place where you're distracted with the objects and people and places that matter to you, where it really does seem to matter what you have and where you are. Your attention is bound up with what you're seeing and hearing and thinking in a way that plays upon your preferences and your hopes and your fears. Think of the moment when you notice that your new car is dented,

or the jacket you love has a ketchup stain on it, or your checking account has less money in it than you expected. The team you were rooting for just won the championship, or you just finished a project that you've been working on for months, or happy hour just ended, but the waiter will still take your order, and those are the best tacos on earth. We mostly live in this place, with attention bound up with what we want and what we don't want, what we expect, what we're surprised to find, and then our minds continually wander into thoughts about the past and the future. And in our wandering, we lose awareness of the very things we want

and have been busily gathering and guarding and may even have in hand. That best taco on earth hits your tongue, and you taste it, sort of, and then your attention races away to something else, in space or time, or merely within the space and time of your imagination. Think about what matters, and how it's possible for something to matter. Many of us have thought about what we would grab from our homes in a fire. Just imagine it. Your family is safely on the street, and you have a chance to grab something. What would it be? Photos? A computer? Your father's watch? You can't fit much in your

hands. In some sense, we're always in this situation. We're always deciding what to grasp. What matters? What is worth paying attention to in this moment? Because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. And it's only meditation that gives you a choice about what to grasp and what to let go of. It's as though we continually wake up in the burning house of the present, only to find that we're holding and even struggling under the weight of some worthless object. That's what bickering with your spouse is like. That's what rumination

is like. That's what most of our worrying is like. That's what comparing ourselves to others is like. That's what envy and regret are like. That's what pride is like. I mean, really? The tape gallery was on fire, and rather than rescue a Picasso or a Da Vinci, you risked your life to grab some chairs from the coffee shop? Without a meditation practice, you will just find yourself holding something, staggering under some

burden again and again, reacting to something, brooding about something, fixating on something, saving on something helplessly, without a choice, without the possibility of choice. Meditation is nothing more or less than the art of choice. It's the art of paying attention to what really matters. Okay, so that is a lesson from the Waking Up course. And if you want more information about that, you can find it at wakingup.com. And another thing that I'm now doing in the course, I've begun interviewing other meditation teachers and trying to get to the bottom of what they teach and why they teach it.

These will be deep dives into the minutiae of consciousness and what can be gleaned about it from first-person methods, whether they be contemplative or psychedelic or philosophical or otherwise. And now for today's guest. Today I'm speaking with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin is a really great writer. She writes now mostly for The Atlantic, it seems, but she's been on staff at The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. She's won a National Magazine Award. She's also written for Time and O, the Oprah magazine, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She is a deeply irreverent and clever social critic.

She has two books, Girl Land and To Hell With All That, and it was great to finally get her on the podcast. I've been a fan of her work for many years, and we had not yet met, and the podcast provided an occasion to finally sit down and talk. And here we certainly do our best to make trouble for ourselves. We talk about the Me Too movement, and feminism, and immigration, affirmative action, the whole college admissions racket. We basically steer toward every third rail we can think of. Anyway, I had great fun in the conversation. And now without further delay, I bring you Caitlin Flanagan. I'm here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So I'm a huge fan. I've been reading you for quite some time. And I mean, you seem to touch so many controversial issues and you do it in a way that it seems, I mean, I can only imagine that some things blow back on you and you may regret having touched a particular topic. But is there anything that you, any area you've gone into that you regret touching? Never. No?

It's funny. I talk to a lot of young women writers about this. It's almost become like a part of my day every day. There's a few of them I know well. And they're writing really interesting stuff, really important stuff, and they're having such a hard time with the blowback and the response. And I try to tell them what nobody told me in the beginning, which was it doesn't matter. It absolutely doesn't matter, not just from a standpoint of the largeness of a life, you know,

that do you want to get to the end of the life where you didn't say what you thought? I don't think you do. But even in the immediate sense, it's not going to hurt your career that people are really angry. It's going to make your writing more noisy and people are going to be driven to it. And then inevitably in that drive of people to your work, some of them are going to find that they really love your work, and that's going to expand the reach. So I've certainly, well, the one that I got the most, it's interesting, I wrote a big, huge Atlantic cover story a long time ago, like maybe 2006. It was the nanny story? Yes.

I remember handing that to my wife. I'm not even sure. I knew who you were as a writer, but I hadn't read much of your stuff. And I remember handing it to her like, this is going to detonate in your hands. I don't think I spun it one way or the other. It's just, let's just see what this does to your brain. But it was, yeah, I can imagine that was intense. So summarize what your position was there and maybe back up for a second and just give our listeners a sense of the types of topics

you've tended to touch. And then let's go to the nanny story. I guess I would say I, well, I'm interested in politics always. And I'm interested, although I am a self-hating Democrat, I'm really interested in the endless hypocrisy of the left. I just think it's, it's just, I just try to have a comical attitude toward it because it's just so extreme. But so I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in boys. I'm interested in girls. I'm interested in being a mother. I'm interested in just, I've always just followed the things that are kind of emanating from my own private life and just kind of tried to put them. I love social history. So I love knowing why you do a certain thing that you just thought was coming completely from your own convictions. And then you realize, no, there's actually a history to this. And it was 20 or 30 years and this

happened and that happened. So they're kind of small kitchen table subjects. But a few years ago, I went to Santa Monica Public Library because they have great bound editions of old magazines instead of having to microfilm or whatever. And they have all these back issues of Time magazine. And so I got a bunch from like, I think the 1980s, and I went through them. And it was amazing how many of the stories they thought were the big stories, they got it wrong, like hurricanes that I didn't remember until they said it, you know, attempted coups that, you know, yes, it was newsworthy. Was it a cover story? Was it that big? No, but every single story on private life just rang true. You know, that's the record of how we live our lives. That's the record of, you know, when you come back home and the door is closed and it's you

and the people you live with, if they're your family, you know, the choices that you make and the things that you buy and the ways that you spend your time, the things that people really talk about after they finish talking about what they think they're supposed to talk about, that's what I like to write about. Well, on that point, it's been a while since I've looked at it, but did you ever see the multi-volume history of... Of Private Life? Yeah, History of Private Life. Yeah, it's a French series. Yeah, yeah, I've got all of them, yeah. But you're often accused of being an anti-feminist by feminists, right? So let's sort out that question. What's the allegation and what provokes it in your work? Well, the allegation I don't think is precisely

enough stated and I've changed a lot with time, but my thing with feminists, so I was born in 1961, so I'm 56 or 57. You may be 58 this year. Right. That's what it's going to be. My husband just told me that. Yes, it's 58 in November. Thank you. The math gets harder.

Yeah. Well, it's been hard from the very beginning for me. But I was just always, I grew up in Berkeley, very lefty place, very lefty parents, very lefty experience. Were your parents professors? My father, yeah. And historian and a writer. And it was in the English department. But when the 80s came along, and so feminism was part of this very happening, like legitimate attempt to really change the world. And it was interesting to me. And a lot of things started being talked about, you know,

when I was an adolescent, you know, people was a very beginning of women talking about rape and about things you had to do. You know, before it was all in metaphor. It was all coded language, you know. Oh, a boy might get fresh with you or this might happen or that might happen. This was the beginning of women really talking about rapes. And I remember just as a teenager, they weren't talking about date rapes or any intimate partner rape. But I remember as a teenager thinking, this is important. I need to know about this. Because your mother would always tell you, and you need to not do this, and you need to not go there. And my father would say certain things. But they wouldn't

say, because some man may grab you and attack you and force sex upon you. They just wouldn't say it that directly. It was, I don't know if it was rude or just, I don't know what it was, but I remember thinking this is all very important. But then when it got to be the mid-80s and then it became about that it was equally, well, the whole idea of feminism is it's kind of a Marxist premise. All women are a class. Okay. You know, that's true in some areas. The vote is true. Abortion, it's true. But then it became about this idea that getting this Yale graduate a job at this investment

bank is really an important feminist issue. It's just like this white woman that was raised, you know, maybe middle class, maybe upper middle class. She went to a top college. woman that was raised, you know, maybe middle class, maybe upper middle class. She went to a top college. And now it's good for all of us that she work in this callow industry and that we promote her and that and it's really criminal that she doesn't have enough child care to get this important investment banking work. It's criminal that she's not a partner in the law firm.

And I just thought this is totally bogus because now we're not a class. Now we're somehow going to push the very top white women into these careers that I certainly wasn't interested in. Who did them? I'm not really interested in the investment bankers of the world and I certainly don't see it as some. And it wasn't as though once we're in the investment banks, then we'll fund the revolution. It was like once we're in the investment banks, then we can buy the beach house and not have to have our husband be the one to choose it. So I thought that was really bogus and stupid. And I think now there's a big element of a grift in feminism that any kind of mistake that a man makes, any, like the New York Times,

I mean, they're really, you cannot single any story out for particular banality. But this one, it was about the space, you know, going to the moon in 68. Yeah. And it was like, this was a program by and for white men. And then there was another article where it was actually Russia that had won the space race because they were the first to put a black man into space. Right. And I just thought this is the most, but like the New York Times, their real reporting is still great. And the armature and the depth of knowledge of the people who work there and the armature of the machine is still great. But there's just this deep inanity that runs through all of those social pieces. And all of that, I just think is

bogus and stupid. But the main thing that I have a problem with is the erasing of boys and the erasing of men and the cackling, gleeful way that they've done it. I despise those things. And yet I have to say the life I lead, the things I do, the places I go, the rights I hold, I have to absolutely thank feminism for that. And I remember my mother would, oh, I was a kid, like, I don't know, she was like, now, Kate, when, you know, when you get married, you have to always have a credit card in your name. Because I see my friends, like, if their husband dies, they can't get credit. And I was like, nine.

I was like, what is credit? You know, I don't want a Hinks card for. But like all of those big changes that make me equal to a man, as far as my rights and abilities, I certainly owe to the movement. So I'm not, you know, I'm not some like Phyllis Schlafly, who's probably a more interesting character. I should probably write about her. I don't really know anything about her except the top lines. But I'm not someone who's in any way saying we need to go back or that women shouldn't work or anything like that. I just think that this combination of the grift and

the inanity of it that's being passed down to young women, I think it's just, the inanity, I think is silly and the grift is ugly. Well, I actually want to talk about Me Too and that movement. Maybe we can jump into that earlier than I expected, but just a few more general points. One is that you, so obviously you have a nuanced position here, and as we have discovered, nuance is the enemy of common understanding more and more. It's just if your position can't be summarized in a sentence, some detractor will find a completely false reading of it by which to summarize it and hold you accountable to that. Or the least charitable interpretation of one of your nuanced points

that needs to be, by definition, needs to be understood in context becomes the advertisement for what your position actually is. So just bring me back to, one, just for members of the audience who haven't read your stuff. I hardly think there's any members of the audience who haven't read this obscure woman's writing. withering. And it's really, I mean, it's delightful to read, but I can imagine, I mean, you take it right up to the line where it's just like, you know, I think at least once or twice on Twitter, I've said, okay, Caitlin Flanagan is, you know, guilty of murder here. Somebody called the FBI, right? So it's, I mean, you do essentially what Hitch did, but you, I think you being a woman makes it, I don't think you're perceived as a bully the way he was. But I got to say, seeing you take on Naomi Wolf, it's right up to the line. You're just eviscerating her, right?

Not enough. Right. So anyway, the pleasure of schadenfreude in your articles is just immense. But do you recalibrate that at all now in the social media age? Or did you set the dial at 11 back in the day and it's just stayed there? If somebody just comes out in a major place like a network news program or a really visible newspaper and they come up with some, inane, idiotic thing. And then they're sort of getting the imprimatur of whatever it might be, the New York Times or wherever it is that, say, Naomi Wolf is published, you know, very serious presses. That just needs to be dealt with, and I am the woman that will take care of that.

Yeah. You know, like I always say with Kirsten Gillibrand, like, don't worry if she ever gets her head above water. I'm like, I just have a total assignment that will be taken care of. So anybody who's really fair game and they're publishing or they're speaking or they're being accepted in a very elite space,

then I just, that just drives me crazy. And then the whole idea that they kind of skip over all these half-truths, all I want to do is just expose the truth. And then because I'm funny, it becomes withering. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very, very funny. All right. So I have an enemies list. I want to turn you loose on my enemies. We can talk about that. All right. Speed round enemies. So let's talk about, we touched the nanny thing. So tell us, what was the controversy around your nanny article? There was a lot of discussion about the title for the essay. No one could come up with a good one. And then Colin Murphy at The Atlantic came up with a perfect title, which is a mouthful,

Alan Murphy at The Atlantic came up with a perfect title, which is a mouthful, but it's How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement. And it was just about the fact that for all these women suddenly to go into these jobs, including, say, middle class women who needed two incomes, but also women who were, you know, Ivy League educated women married to Ivy League educated men. So they could either one of them could have, you know, curtailed their career a bit. The way they made it happen, not in the absence of a daycare culture, which we didn't have, but that wasn't really the issue. These women didn't want their kids in daycare. They wanted them to be at home. You know, there's just always felt to be, oh, my child's not in daycare. My child is at home. She's in her own crib at nap time. She's playing in the backyard. And the person who's doing this caretaking, she's my direct employee.

You can't really boss around a daycare worker. She's an employee of the daycare and she's responsible to her boss. And so the way that that circle was squared is that we were at the beginning of really the very beginning of mass immigration so that the cities were really filled with women who were easily exploitable. They were, some of them not documented in any way. And some of them were desperate. They needed work. They desperately needed work. And they had a lot of great, you know, mothering skills. And so all these women that were going back to work hired all these nannies. And they did a lot of terrible things that they do to this day is that, okay, a family

hires a nanny. And, oh, you know, the nanny doesn't want to be treated in a cold way as an employee. And the family doesn't want to think of her as an employee. We wouldn't leave our precious baby with some employee. Why? You know, Rosa is a member of the family. She's a member of the family. And we do a lot of things for Rosa. You know, she wasn't able to get a car and we paid the down payment and we put the money down and got her the car. And her brother was having trouble. And we did this and that for them. And, you know, you'd run into them with the nanny. Oh, it's Rosa. She's a member of the family. And inevitably, three years later, you run into the mom and the

kid. Where's Rosa? Oh, it didn't work out. There was something that happened. You know, I'll tell you about it. And it's, you know, the always be something that happened. And then Rosa goes on to her next job. But inevitably, I mean, it's really rare to find someone who's paying their social security set-asides for that woman. They don't want to do it. They want to have, and the woman doesn't really want it either. They want the full amount in that check. They want to say they're giving Rosa full dollars. But when you're a low-income worker and you move from job to job to job, you should be accruing those social security set asides. And if you remain poor or even, I can't remember the exact number, but it's like 70% of the income of people who are like over 60,

who are maybe lower middle class, it's their social security check. You're not paying into that. And let alone the fact that you're probably not paying time and a half if they're working over this certain number of hours, but they are really grinding down another woman. They're getting ahead in their lives by grinding someone down. And so I wrote extensively about all that. And there was a huge blowback. And then all these women wanted to debate me in places like the 92nd Street. Why? I was like, are you kidding? But then they were such serious women. And I was getting a lot of heat from my publisher to do it. Or that was when the book came out that was from that article. was when the book came out that was from that article. But they were such big people that it seemed really weird or fearful that I wasn't debating them. And I was fearful because I knew if I went to the 92nd Street Y, there wouldn't be anyone. You got a thousand women with nannies. Right, exactly. And I guess intersectionality, which now is kind of in this weird way, which I hate, but it's sort of like really making the point that I was making so long ago,

maybe would give me some cover. But so I came up with this audacious thing that I didn't think would work. And I won't say the names of the women it worked with, but it worked 100%. I said, I'll debate anyone anywhere, but we're just going to get a neutral person to look at our taxes for the last five years. Because they were all moms and I was a mom and I knew I was clean. Right. were all moms and I was a mom and I knew I was clean. And they fell away immediately. They disappeared. They disappeared. And some people could say, well, you're blaming women for this when it's a parenting issue. I think nowadays it's really changed. Fathers are more involved with those decisions. But at that time, it was the women who made those decisions,

the women who dealt with the nanny, the women who decided whether or not they were going to do the low income worker in their home and think that she's going to be a lifetime retainer like in some, you know, Cary Grant movie where these like, you know, old retainers are wandering in and out. She's not, you know, Nora Ephron had this funny thing in one of her final books of essays of like things to remember. And she said, one of the most important things to remember is that even the best babysitter in the world won't work after a while. Your family's going to change. You know, it's not going to be right. And what have you done for her is my question or to her. And this produced a lot of rage from a lot of women. But it also got me, which and then what just completely maxed them out,

and this is why I keep telling people, don't worry. I got invited to join The New Yorker as a staff writer. So it's like if you're a big, noisy writer and you're taking up this space and the culture and you're really saying some new things, as much as you're going to have a lot of painful incidents, the world will take note of you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess obviously there are people who are getting canceled. I mean, you have to be on the right side of certain questions because you are not right wing, right? So you violate certain taboos of the left, but when push comes to shove, you're arguing for progressive causes. I don't know if I can say that because... How would you describe yourself politically?

Well, do you remember the Covington incident when those kids... Yeah, that was a great flashpoint. I just was thinking, so I was like, oh, I just heard the top line, these kids abusing this Native American man or whatever. I thought, oh, that's terrible. And I just watched the little tiny piece of video that everybody was saying, this is the evidence. Yeah. Everyone became a clairvoyant reading into a smile. Yes, it was a very odd piece of video. It was one child smiling in a very enigmatic way, standing close to a Native American man who's playing a drum. And I thought, I'm always thinking in cases like this, oh, there must be another clip

they're using because clearly this doesn't show me anything that that guy did wrong, that this kid did wrong. And then I just went farther and farther and farther and it was completely bogus. and farther and farther. And it was completely bogus. That guy is a real sort of performance artist who like mixes it up in this way in different places and gets attention and was promoting himself as a Vietnam vet and then a Vietnam era vet. And the whole thing was just a fraudulent event. And then NBC, here I go again. These are the things I say that get me in immediate trouble. But Samantha Guthrie on NBC was give, I mean, they should have talked to me, these Covington families. She was given the opportunity to interview that exact kid in his home back in wherever they were from, Kentucky, I guess. And it was a very disparaging interview on her part.

It was all the worse for it being sort of gentle in the way that she did it because it was a morning show. But it was she was not an honest broker to that kid. And and the other thing is, now I know all these people, you know, I don't know, Samantha, but like I'm in that world enough that I go to events, parties, dinners with these people of M-Bac East. enough that I go to events, parties, dinners with these people if I'm back East. And the right is absolutely correct. They are all extremely progressive. That is to a person. They are pro-choice to a person. They are anti-Trump to a person. And so the right is absolutely correct that the mainstream media, the important media outlets are peopled by extremely partisan reporters, editors, and opinion writers who try at the best they can. They don't go in there and sort of say, let's make a plot to do this or that.

So- Yeah. I guess my point there was just that you would probably be cancelable if you were actually right wing and making some of these same points. Like if you couldn't check some of the progressive boxes that at the end of the day make you look more saint than sinner from the point of view of the left. I mean, just take the New Yorkers response to the platforming or almost platforming of Steve Bannon at the New Yorker conference, right? So David Remnick had a total mutiny on his hands. So if you were on some level pro-Bannon, pro-Trump, making those points,

then you could have some of the same essays that would spark the same controversy. But when someone drilled down, they would discover that you were politically toxic. And I think that would have a big effect. You're right. Although Bannon is certainly loathsome. I mean, somebody just sent me an email the other day from the magazine based on a couple of tweets. And he's like, I just don't understand your position on immigration because I wasn't in one lane or the other. It's a very complex situation. Well, I want to talk about immigration, too. So let me just.

So we're close to we're circling in on me, too. And let's start there. So we've had huge cases in recent memory that have focused concern around sexual harassment and violence against women, this continuum from bad jokes to rape. And this has all been summarized by the hashtag MeToo movement. There was the Kavanaugh hearings. More recently in the news, we have the Jeffrey Epstein case. And I think so many of us who have a nuanced position on this are certainly worried that the continuum doesn't get acknowledged as a continuum, that you have in certain quarters what appears to be a similar level of outrage around literally bad jokes, wanting people to lose their careers

over bad jokes. I mean, there are literally cases like this. There's the academic in the elevator who crowded who you know crowded elevator at a conference and he says you know lingerie please and and you know this is that's like a bad you know dean martin style joke right and i didn't hear the other shoe drop there but i think he was actually fighting for his career last i heard that's what he was doing was fighting for his career yeah and people think it's totally warranted right you know this is, you have to hurl these people from the rooftops. Well, that's the problem is that where they're so often located is in academic life, which

is where we used to have our smartest people. And now I think our- But also journalists. Like I had- That's what I said. Yes, you're absolutely right. I was immediately thinking that. I had Rebecca Traster on the podcast and we didn't go too far in that direction, but she has very strong intuitions here ethically that, you know, you have to break some eggs to make this this equity omelet.

And it just doesn't matter on some level that people in the people who lose their careers, they'll be fine. I'll get another job. You know, and that's actually not an exaggeration of the position she articulated. The one example I used was Matt Damon. Matt Damon said something utterly benign and rational around this 20 megaton controversy. And he simply said, listen, we just have to acknowledge that groping someone is not the same thing as raping someone, and telling a bad joke is not the same thing as groping someone, and let's just save our, you know, save the cops for, you know, one end of the spectrum and, you know, our, you know, raised eyebrow for the other end. And had he not immediately backed out, certainly he perceived

that had he not just apologized, backed down, and shut up for all time on this topic, he was in some real jeopardy as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And people like Rebecca think it's good that he's terrified, right? Like, we've got to silence any demurral on this point. So how do you... I want to talk about Kavanaugh. I want to talk about actual violence against women. But I guess the larger question here, the question we really have to sort out, and I have very few intuitions about, how do we navigate the changing social norms in this space? Because there's no question that norms are changing, and many probably should change, but there's just a very awkward landscape. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young single person in an office where you're just surrounded by other people, and those are the people you're going to meet on a day-to-day basis, and you're trying to navigate workplace dating or not. in the news whose work we still seemingly should admire, I mean, some of the most creative people

around, their biographies continually disgorge these what now are unseemly stories and were stories at the time, just a few short years ago, the norms were different, right? A joke told 10 years ago was being told in a very different context. So I'm just wondering how you think about the changing norm issue before we get into the actual spectrum of indiscretion. Well, part of what you're talking about with Matt Damon, that's the grift. So long as we keep them all terrified, so long as we show that we can cancel them, we can push ourselves ahead some way. We can push our ideas, our half-baked ideas. Well, your ideas should be able to stand on its own without having to police these people. Sometimes I think, because I've certainly had experiences, Me Too kind of experiences, not at work, because I don't go to the office, so I have to be Me me too by the dog. And it is the history of women. It's the history of women is the history of rape, the history of assault, the history of, you know, someone was just saying to me this weekend asked men, the same sort of social class or office, what do you do? They're like, what are you talking about? I don't do anything. You know, it's the history of, of women and it's a terrible thing. And,

and there was, you know, when I was in college, there was this girl who really was raped in a fraternity. So this is like in the 80s. And she went to the dean. And I mean, she had to go. I mean, she woke up in a bloody sheet in a fraternity house. She'd been a virgin, all the rest of it. She got herself to student health. She had, you know, a report on that level. I don't know if it was a rape kit, as we would say today. But I mean, she had been kind of bruised up. And she went to the dean and the deans told her a man, you know, he told the young man to be more of a gentleman. And he told her to, you know, what were you doing in a fraternity that late at night? And she was really, not that it matters, but she really was just doing something very understandable. She got her, this was before binge drinking was the norm for young women on campus.

Someone had really handed her a spiked drink. So anyway, she decides to stay at college. Oh, the guy even suggested you might want to transfer. This might be too humiliating. So there's an end to this story, which is that like years go by. Hopefully it ends with a hanging. It just about does. Because she's 20 years later or 19 years later, she's about to go to Virginia Beach on vacation with her family. She gets the mail and there's a letter. And the guy who did it has joined AA. And he's written, you know, he needs to make amends. So he makes this complete amends to her. And she calls the Charlottesville DA. And he's like, okay, we got six months left on the

statute of limitations. And that guy went to jail. And so, which, you know, people have strong feelings about that. But the fact of it was, I went to college, it really was a situation where there was a tremendous amount of rape at the University of Virginia. It had only, I mean, I went there in the very early 80s. It had only been co-ed for about 10 years. And it was just really, I mean, I couldn't even imagine even thinking of going to a dean about anything in my personal life. So on the one hand, there's been this great progress.

On the other hand, young women want to participate in behaviors that aren't good for them, that cause them tremendous grief, and then looking for some reason for it, oh, it's a rape culture. And then they also attack the West. The West does not have a rape culture. We have rape, but we don't have a rape culture. Okay. So there was so much condensed in that, in even just those last few sentences. I just want to plant a few flags on some landmarks there. And this is why it's very difficult to have this conversation because the ethical fact-based conversation is clearly nuanced. And unless you take the party line here and ignore the nuance, you're susceptible to a lot of blowback. So what you just sketched there is that obviously violence against women is a perennial problem.

I mean, men are on average stronger than women. A certain percentage of men are going to force sex on women. This is just a crime problem that has been with us before we had a concept of crime. And then there are moments in culture where even totally apparently civilized people blithely ignore this problem. And as you describe your college experience, that was the case. And so we have woken up to the problem, and yet it seems like now we have executed a kind of pendulum swing of overcorrection where now there are hoax crimes that we have to respond to that which do immense damage. I don't know what was actually believed to be true about the Rolling Stone rape case. It was zero there.

Total fantasy projection by the girl. So, I mean, that is just, I don't even know how to think about this, but clearly false allegations of rape do immense harm, not just to the unfairly accused, but to all the women who actually get raped, who then inherit this burden of disbelief. And it really only takes a few cases like that to spread the skepticism about legitimate accusations. So there's the false accusation problem, and there's just the exaggeration,

which seems to be fairly well-subscribed at the moment, of just the level of abuse of women and rape on college campuses in 2019. I mean, for several years now, people have been claiming that the chance that you're gonna get raped when you go to college if you're a girl is just, if true, no one would send their daughters to college. I mean, I've heard people say,

it's like, well, it's like, well, you know, 30% chance you're gonna get raped at college, right? Now, either they're defining rape in so loose a way as to encompass sex you regret or something fairly anodyne, or they're just making things up. But there's just no way that 30% of women are getting raped on college campuses. So this is a hard space to navigate. And one thing I would add, which goes to this issue of false allegations, my bias has always been, goes to this issue of false allegations. So my bias has always been, you know, unless there's something obviously anomalous in an account, you basically, the default setting is you just believe

women, right? You believe the victims. And my intuitions here are that it's just, it's such a pathological thing to make up a fake rape account, that the likelihood that anyone would do it is, you know, almost infinitesimal. And yet, I had one conversation recently that has kind of knocked me back on my heels with respect to that intuition. I was in London a couple weeks ago, and I was at dinner with a barrister. And in the UK, as you probably know, barristers, And I was at dinner with a barrister in the UK. As you probably know, barristers, the lawyers, often work as prosecutors and defense attorneys. It's on a case-by-case basis.

And I was asking him the kinds of cases he handles. He handles a lot of sex crime cases. And I said, what percentage would you say of cases that come to trial? There are many that get dismissed before they get there, but what percentage come to trial where you're worried, let's say you're on the prosecution side, you're worried that you're actually prosecuting a guy for a made-up offense, that this was not actually a rape. I was expecting him to say that virtually never happens. And what I got from him was just the antithesis. I mean, it was like 30 to 50% in his experience where he's, as a prosecutor,

worried that this guy is just getting railroaded by somebody who just regretted the sex or had some other reason to hate him and knew that this was a way to destroy his life. Now, I don't, again, this is just one conversation of one, you know, based on one barrister's experience, but it completely ransacked my ethical intuitions here. And again, maybe we can filter this through the case of Kavanaugh. I mean, when I looked at Kavanaugh, the case of Kavanaugh. I mean, when I looked at Kavanaugh, I saw this fraternity jerk who seemed like he was very likely guilty as charged. And while this wasn't criminally actionable,

it was enough to warrant him not being on the Supreme Court, in my view. And certainly his propensity to lie about it and theatrically protest his innocence in the way that he did, it just seemed like he was radioactive from my point of view. But half of the country had the opposite intuition, which is here's a guy who is probably guilty of either nothing or something that virtually every college-age man was guilty of at some point, right? Something that could be misinterpreted. And now this is going to come out of his closet and ruin his life Something that could be misinterpreted. And now this is gonna come out of his closet and ruin his life.

It was a high school event. High school event, yeah, right. I'm just wondering, so let's talk about this issue of, say whatever you want about Kavanaugh, but let's just talk about this issue of false accusation and how to, just how to, I mean, what I got a lot of after the Kavanaugh hearing was irate emails and tweets from my audience around whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty. I mean,

the fact that there was no proof here, apart from her saying it was so, seemed to be dispositive for people. But again, that was not my intuition at the time. And it's just not my default intuition. It seemed to me that there was nothing for her to gain and everything for her to lose to give this testimony. So as far as the motive to lie about this, it seems very hard to find. But yeah, I just pitched that to you because it's a very difficult thing to sort out. I had a very strange journey with the Kavanaugh situation because I had heard that there was this potential claim coming up. I was completely agnostic about Brett Kavanaugh.

I didn't really know anything about him. I mean, I knew that Trump had been the one to nominate him. So, you know, I sort of had a bit of skepticism because of that. But then the guy he'd done just before, Roberts, was that it? He, you know, he turned out to be not that bad. So anyways, I was agnostic about it, but I was hearing this rumbling that this woman, and then I heard a little bit that it was this high school event. And then the next day I was just sitting at Santa Monica High School. A friend of mine was becoming an honored grad, Hall of Famer there. And I just, you know, kind of bored during the middle of the

program. I scrolled through my phone and I, and then Washington Post was just breaking that it was in her psychiatrist notes. So I automatically said, I believe, you know, because I knew so many people and something like this happened to me when I was in high school. And I just thought, well, there it is. You know, you're not going to waste your time and money in your psychiatrist appointment to bring up, you know, there's really no in there. And this is years before he would be nominated to the Supreme Court. Right, exactly. You're laying the groundwork for a very long time, you know, it's like, well, we've got all our representatives out there for like every man who could ever be possibly nominated, telling their shrinks things that he's done. So I just

quickly that night, just wrote out, yeah, I believe her, you know, I had this thing happen to me. night just wrote out, yeah, I believe her. You know, I had this thing happen to me. I described it. It was very, very, very derailing and upsetting for me as a 17 year old girl, kind of in a, or 16 year old, 16 or 17 year old girl in my senior year of high school and didn't tell anybody about it. I mean, and then a few years passed. I remember when I went to college, it was the first time I heard the term date rape. And it was just like, it sound like an oxymoron like date rape but date is this and i remember going oh it was just like the world opened up to me that the two things could coexist so anyways i wrote that and immediately i had to go to dc for just the atl Atlantic Festival and it was right in the middle of all this Kavanaugh stuff and the city was going crazy.

And we had all of, we had Lindsey Graham on the main stage, we had everybody on the main stage and it was really like the Atlantic was like the right time from the sort of callous news breaking way of talking about things. So anyways, I go to bed the first night, I wake up the next morning and I'm looking at my Twitter and somebody's reached out to me and said Ben Sass of Nebraska is reading your piece on the Senate floor and I was like who's Ben Sass of Nebraska you know like what are you talking about and then I thought this is just this they must have you know how things come through on Twitter you're always getting tagged on things you have no reason being in. And someone else said, Ben's house is reading your piece into the record. And here's the video.

And then I clicked on this video and it was the most embarrassing thing I'd ever, I mean, what can I say? I'm always embarrassed. I'm just, I live in a state of embarrassment, but it was just really awful because he was just calling me Mrs. Flanagan, which is my mother's name. I'm not Mrs. Flanagan. And then he was like, poor, he's really laying it on, like poor Mrs. Flanagan. You know, she never thought she could get a date again. Imagine how Mrs. Flanagan would have felt night after night.

Like he's just laying it on. And I'm like, this is really mortifying. Like, and that's what I'm telling myself. Well, that's the cost that you pay when you put your personal stuff out there. You might have louts retweeting it or you might get it read on the Senate floor

and be in an embarrassed way. But then I thought, but I guess he's voted against Kavanaugh because he really sees my piece. And then I found out he didn't vote against Kavanaugh. I was like, I was really jacked up. I mean, I was like, so I'm in D.C. and like my editor's like, go talk to him right now.

And and then he had just left to Nebraska. And now we've gotten to know each other pretty well. And I like Ben a lot. But so that all happened and then after that happened Michael Barbaro from the Times do you ever listen to the daily yeah yeah so he happened to be out in LA and he had they'd never done a story that wasn't from the Times reporting but he said this seems to really and he has this there's this fabulous guy Andy Mills who works there's really smart do you know him just by by phone and email, but yeah, he's great. Oh, he's fantastic. I spent

a weekend with him at Aspen. He's this great guy and really smart. Anyways, can you do it? I'm like, yes. So this thing happened when I was 16. This conversation with Michael Barbaro happens when I'm like 56 or whatever we've decided I am. And I had never, ever in my whole life talked about it in any other way except philosophically, because when the trauma of it had happened, I wasn't telling anybody. And then I learned about date rape years later. And then I'm like, I understand this new term. It's revolutionary. You know, I had something like this happen. And for some reason, I just sat down across from Michael Barbaro and he goes,

tell me about senior year of high school. And I never have had anything like this happen to me in an interview. I just couldn't keep it together. And I was mortified. There were all these young people there. I thought I can't cancel. I literally thought I'm not going to make it through this. And I just realized that there was a tremendous amount of trauma that had been holding in my body for 40 years that I talked about it to people, but always in a, yes, I'm on the side of these young women. You know, I had something like this happen to me once at a beach, you know, when my parents moved. This guy I didn't know well. Do you feel that it was a genuine unmasking of the trauma that was there? Or do you feel like the framing and focus in this way, I mean, you were given a very kind of therapeutic framing and problematized focus. Did that kind of amplify well it was a weird event in that the nice young people who make the show that are very smart they would describe me like in the i think maybe in the promo to the piece and then online like

we're going to be talking to a sexual assault survivor so right away i hold their name for what happened to me you know whereas something that happened to me on a date is more correct. You know, so but but truly, I didn't think I was unguarded at all when I went into that interview. And suddenly these people are leaning in and asking me. And I'm just telling you, the thing that came out of me, if it had just been the therapeutic context, I would have been different. I would have said, yes, and I feel fealty to other young women and this and that. It wasn't like that. It was like I was 16 years old. I really didn't think I'd get through it. And I just think, you know, there's all these women,

you know, men always think that women are hysterical and we are a little bit hysterical because we hold all this trauma in us. Like even women like me who are just very careful about, you know, when I was young and sexual danger and things like that, it still happens. And I think that it then we get into arguments like the Kavanaugh argument where we aren't logical. And men are like, this isn't logical. Where's your evidence? You're saying something happened 40 years ago. She doesn't remember where it happened.

She doesn't remember this. How can you possibly be trying to say this should stop a man from becoming a Supreme Court justice? And women are just in this volatile fellow feeling of having things like this happen to them. And we all went a little bit nuts. But it was, so it's, I don't think women are as logical as men on a lot of things. And it's because... We should just... Okay, stop that. Erase that part.

No, no, we'll keep that, but just a sanity check here. Even that statement in the current environment is anathema. Just to acknowledge that there's any biological difference between men and women which has psychological correlates, that is already among the sisters a taboo, right? I mean, if you go far... And the brothers, too, a lot of the brothers. Yeah, if you just go far enough left, certainly on women's issues, it's just inadmissible. Women's issues is not a term anymore. Yeah, well, I'm sure I'm a dinosaur in several different ways in this conversation. But if to be woke is to be convinced on this point that all of the apparent differences between men and women are culturally enforced to the detriment of women, and what you want is a kind of hard reset of cultural expectations.

And thereafter, you will find that you should have a 50-50 representation of women in every walk of life. Except the death row. They don't want them 50-50 representation of women in every walk of life and, you know. Except the death row. They don't want them 50-50. Like, it's like, okay, let's really become as violent. Find all the serial killers. Yeah, exactly. It's like we would have to introduce into our collective makeup enough violence and enough power and enough rage that we could get ourselves in a death row, man, in a serious way. And we can't break in, man. It's a freaking glass ceiling on death row. So that's just, you know, it doesn't hold up to me that these things aren't legitimate phenomena. I think we have your next title, the death row glass ceiling.

Okay, all right. ceiling. Okay, all right. So then what do we do about the prospect of either false allegations or honest confessions of trauma over things that shouldn't be traumatizing? I mean, so that we now have a generation of people who have been convinced that certain things are traumatic, which other generations could rightfully say, well, those were normal and unavoidable, and you should have a thicker skin, right? And where is the line there? Because clearly there are norms that we do want to change, right? I mean, it's not like the Mad Men era is something we should be nostalgic for, but... Although the main premise of the show was nostalgia.

Yeah, yeah. That was fascinating. And I'm a fan of the show. But some of the things you saw in the show, you couldn't believe were actually true then. I assume that they were not actually taking much poetic license, but it was just mind-boggling, the stuff that was normal around gender and race and everything else. So yeah, so what do you do? poetic license, but it was just mind-boggling, the stuff that was normal, you know, around

gender and race and everything else. So yeah, so what do you do? Like the Rolling Stone case, right? Listen, let me tell you about that. If this woman on her big contract at Rolling Stone had turned out to be a woman, If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

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