Making Sense with Sam Harris - #31 — Evolving Minds

Episode Date: March 9, 2016

Sam Harris responds to Omer Aziz and Salon magazine, and then speaks with Jonathan Haidt about the scientific study of morality, the problem of political correctness, 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.

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And so here I reached out to Jonathan Haidt, who is a professor of ethical leadership at NYU's Stern School of Business. He's a very well-known psychologist. Many of you know his work. And taught at UVA for many years. And he's the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind. He and I have collided with one another on a number of occasions. And this conversation could have gone either way. I was not surprised that it was as successful as it was. But it was a risk, like many of these things are. And this one paid off. We come out of a history of strong and even ad hominem criticism of one another and we make progress. I now give you John Haidt. Well, I'm here with Jonathan Haidt. John, thanks for coming on the podcast.

My pleasure, Sam. Looking forward to it. Well, listen, before we get into topics about which we agree, and there are a lot of them, let's start with areas of disagreement because we've had a few past controversies, which I think our listeners should know about. So many of our listeners will know who you are because you've done extremely influential work in psychology and have covered many topics that are really just of enormous importance outside psychology. But many might not know the history of our bickering in public. So you've been among the prominent critics of the so-called new atheists who have gone after Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett and me for what we've said about religion, principally. And you spent less time on Hitch

because he didn't claim to be representing science. So you've criticized me in the past and in ways that I thought were pretty wrongheaded. And I pushed back fairly hard against this in ways that may have bordered on incivility at times. And so the way things were left, I don't think either of us would have tended to see the other as a natural collaborator. That's right. So I mean, I find this interesting just as a social phenomenon. I find it intellectually That's right. And I should just point out to you and to our listeners who will know that this doesn't always work out. I had one podcast that I didn't even release because it went so badly. And I had one that I released recently and probably shouldn't have because it just seemed to do nothing more than increase the sum total of frustration in the universe. It was just people found it excruciating to listen to. And I've had very mixed success doing this in writing.

The most memorable failure being that I attempted to engage Noam Chomsky, and that project just fell apart as fast as it could type. Yeah, that does not sound promising. So, but I suspect you and I are up to this. So, we don't need to spend a lot of time rehearsing our past skirmishes, but I just want to, and we can just discover what we disagree about now as the topics come up, but I just want our listeners to know that this history exists, and it was fairly acrimonious. And they should just appreciate that you and I are doing a bit of a high wire act just having this conversation, because most people with our history just actually don't willingly talk to each other in these ways. And so again, my underlying aim is to demonstrate

that two people can have a fairly inauspicious beginning and then successfully communicate and make intellectual progress. Great. I want that too. And actually, you know, in preparing for this call, I was looking back over our past conflicts and, you know, looking at it as a psychologist who studies morality and moral disagreement, I actually think it's kind of revealing the way this all worked. So, you know, initially, as far as I can tell, the first salvo was when I wrote that essay on edge, very critical of the new atheists. And, you know, I don't think that I was uncivil there, although it was within the bounds of normal edge conversation. It's, you know, edge is not a safe zone. I think you and I both agree that intellectual discourse should not be a safe zone.

safe zone. And then you wrote back. And from my point of view, it was when you were saying, my ideas would basically justify or lead to Aztec human sacrifice and all these other horrible things. And okay, that too is within the bounds. All right. So we're sort of up against the edge there, but that's sort of normal. Then if I remember the timing, it was like right after that, that we first met face to face at the Beyond Belief Conference. And there too, if I remember there, I think you said like my beliefs would lead to either North Korea or something like that. Yeah. Well, not so, I don't think I would have ever said that it would lead to, but just that you would be hard pressed to say what was wrong with those systems by your lights. Okay, okay. So it may be a distinction without a difference in your mind, but it's a pretty important one.

That is, but the point is just that from, you know, the way it felt to me was, no matter what I say, you will link me somehow to, you know, North Korea or something like that. I don't think you ever did the Nazis, and I thank you for that. But the point is that I felt that you had a particular rhetorical style, which was well suited for what you were doing. You were writing for a popular audience about a very hot topic, but I felt like, hey, Sam's rhetoric, this is not academic rhetoric. This is very different, and I don't like it. So that's the backstory know, I never really responded. I didn't do anything in writing after that. And then when you wrote a book on morality, um, in which again, you were critical of me in the same way. And again, that's fine.

Um, and, but it was like, oh, okay. You had another provocation. I didn't do anything. And then when you came out with the moral landscape challenge and you were saying, if anyone can pay me, if anyone can convince me to change my mind, I'll pay him $10,000. And you were saying, if anyone can pay me, if anyone can convince me to change my mind, I'll pay him $10,000. And that was like too much. It was like, oh my God, this is too much. I've got to respond to this. And so then I wrote that the essay, Why Sam Harris is Unlikely to Change His Mind. And for the most part, as I was just reading that over, I think it's a perfectly legitimate statement of my research and how my research leads me to believe that you won't change your mind. So all

that's fine. The thing, though, is that clearly was a kind of a jerk move on my part was, I think, throwing, you know, I analyze. So for listeners who don't know this, this story, this debate, I analyzed Sam's, your books, I analyzed your books and a bunch of other books. And I found that according to this program, Luke, that counts words like always and never in a category of certainty, that you came out as the most certain person, even more so than Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and all those guys. So that was a very jerk thing of me to do. And Sam, I do apologize to you for that. That was inappropriate. has to respond to that, which I still am, to pat my own back, I still am amused by my response to that, where I used every one of your keywords in a paragraph, which was, on its face, a statement

of total intellectual humility and openness to being wrong, but it, in fact, used all your certainty terms in the same paragraph. That's right. And so, look, so, in fact, that kind of points to a similarity between us, which is that we're both, we both really enjoy being clever. That was a, you know, my thing was a very clever thing. Your response where you used all those, all those words, you know, was, you know, we were sort of smart Alex. And, you know, when smart Alex come up against each other, the audience is in for a treat, I suppose. But not to trivialize what we're doing here, because I think these issues are hugely important. And I think our disagreements are important. And I think our misunderstanding one another is important. And just to talk a little bit more about the genesis of this thing, which it occurs to me now, I never really thought about this as we were sparring about these issues. But I think this may be part of the problem. And correct me if this seems crazy, but your field is social psychology, where you've said that upwards of 95% of people are liberal and usually strongly liberal. So you've been surrounded by people who consider political conservatism to

be a form of mental illness, essentially. And you've pushed back against this in ways that have been extremely important and really ingenious. And you and I are going to agree about many of the points. Oh, yeah. The political correctness part. We both have really come up against political correctness. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been so you've been fighting from that trench for a while. And then when you saw the so-called new atheists, which are just a gang of liberal intellectuals, initiate this frontal assault on religion and arguing that it's not only false but dangerous, and in my case, hearing me say that science will eventually replace religion on questions of

morality and human well-being, I think you viewed this as yet another example of left-leaning secularists who are totally out of touch with the lived experience of religious people doing what left-leaning academics often do to social conservatives, which is dismiss them as morally and intellectually defective. I think that's right. Oh, good. Well, that's not crazy. So, I mean, so forgive me for psychoanalyzing you, but it's just, it seems to me that this, from my point of view, has caused you to be too hostile to our criticism of religion and to actually misunderstand it in important ways. And I'm sure we'll touch those points. And it's also made you too soft on religion in ways that can't

be scientifically justified. And because you believe you're correcting for a harmful bias in the scientific community, and you have been with respect to the political divide between liberals and conservatives. But I would argue that viewing the new atheist attack on religion through that lens has caused you to misread us. And at the very least, I feel like you've misread me. I see. Yeah. I don't think that I perceive you guys as a bunch of far left people. So while there is some truth to what you say, I think it's not so much left right as sort of rationalist intuitionist. That really, I think, is the heart, the sort of the scientific nub of the difference between us is what do we each believe is the nature of human rationality and the reliability of human reason? And you have a much stronger faith or belief that individual reason can lead to reliable conclusions than I do. So

would you agree with me that that is a fundamental factual difference between us? Yeah. And I want to get into morality second. I think we should deal with religion first. But yes, I think that is a difference between us to some degree, although you'll find me taking most of your points about what people descriptively do under the aegis of reasoning morally or attempting to justify or argue for their moral positions. But let's just focus on religion for a second, and we'll get to the foundations of morality after that. So religion, as you've pointed out, is more than just a set of beliefs. And you've argued against me as though I have disputed that, which I actually haven't. But you're not alone in this. Many people do that. So I just want to track through a few of the things you say in your book and then talk about

them. So, I mean, you say in your book, The Righteous Mind, that trying to, it's a quote, trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball. You've got to broaden the inquiry, end quote. So now I think that analogy isn't quite right, but I actually agree with your general point. Religion is obviously more than what people believe. And yet I think it's totally coherent and in fact necessary to worry about the specific consequences of specific beliefs. And so let me just reform your analogy a little bit and get you to react to it. Because I think it's somewhat, to stick with your analogy, it's a little bit more like asking the question, why are people on each team always tending to run in one direction?

I mean, so if you see them running sideways or even backwards for a few moments, it's always with the purpose to get the ball to the other end of the field. So what is so special about the ends of the field that everyone wants to get there? And to explain that, you have to understand the rules of the game. In particular, you have to understand what a touchdown is. But once you know that, more or less everything these people are doing is easy to understand. And again, there's more to, I mean, there's all the people out, you know, having tailgate parties outside the stadium, right? So that's part of the spectacle. But to understand what the most energized participants are doing in this situation, all you really need to know is what they want and what they believe will get them what they want.

And so I would argue that this is true for the most destructive behavior and moral attitudes we see inspired by religion. So when you ask yourself, you know, why is ISIS throwing gay people off of rooftops? It's because their scripture tells them to. It's actually written in the rule book. Now, in this case, it's the specific injunctions in the Hadith, it's not in the Quran, but it's part of the larger rule book of Salafi Islam. And you can say anything you want about religion being more than just beliefs and doctrines. And you can talk about doing and belonging, which you do in addition to belief as being central to religion. And you can talk about the power of ritual and strong communities and the importance of transcendence, which is something that interests me. And I agree about all these things being interesting.

But if you want to explain the behavior of ISIS, all you really have to know are the rules of the game as they understand them. And if their rulebook changed slightly, if let's say their rulebook on this point said, don't harm homosexuals under any circumstances, simply force them to recite the Quran for 12 hours a day and actually create a special cast of priests that there's homosexuals who just chant from the Quran and who are otherwise venerated, right? I think we can be absolutely sure that this is what they would be doing. In fact, there are analogous behaviors in other religions in human history. So this is why I think specific doctrines matter. And that no one, I mean, so you're going to talk about the intuitive roots of many of these things, but no one has an intuition that they

should throw gays off of rooftops specifically, or eat a cracker every Sunday and call it the body of Jesus, or oppose embryonic stem cell research. And in fact, ISIS wouldn't even oppose embryonic stem cell research, and the Catholic Church would. And this is why the specific doctrines matter so much. Okay. So I will certainly grant that specific doctrines matter, and that I think your thought experiment is correct. If there was a specific verse, and especially if it appeared in multiple places, that said, here's how you treat homosexuals, then they would treat them differently. So I don't deny that the scripture matters.

But first, to understand your analogy, you tell me, what is the end zone? What do you think they're all up to? What is the thing they're all striving for to get when you use this end zone analogy? Well, if you're talking about the real players, the real believers who are devoting their lives fully to this, the end zone is paradise and avoiding hell. So it's what happens after death. playing by this rule book, playing this game, advancing the ball down the field, is ensuring that after death, you will spend eternity in paradise and escape hell? Okay. So I think this is one of the differences between us, is that I am opposed to the pursuit of parsimony. I think that the social science, human nature and the social science are so complex, and especially if you look at morality or religion. So anytime someone says the goal of religion ultimately is to attain paradise,

or the goal of religion ultimately is to have a sense of meaning, or even closer to what I say, if you were to say the goal of religion is ultimately social bonding and connection, well, those are all goals. There are lots of different goals. In this case, I was talking about ISIS. I was talking about what we would call the extreme committed, you know, death cult of Islam. Now, there's analogous cults in other traditions, but I'm not saying that all religious people in every denomination of every level of commitment, that their main goal is paradise. Some, you know, Unitarians don't necessarily even believe in heaven, right? So I was speaking about ISIS in this case. Okay. Yeah. So I can certainly grant your point that beliefs do matter. And I hope I never said that they don't. But I think I would still claim that your analysis here is

too focused on the explicit. And this was, you know, my main criticism, my main concern about your writings on religion was I felt like, sometimes felt like you were writing, you know, your two religion books, I felt like you were writing those mostly with the Bible, and the Quran, and the New York Times on your desk. And you were sort of saying, okay, well, look at this verse, or look at this event that happened, and then just trying to make sense of it yourself. And I was thinking of it much more both from a kind of a Durkheimian point of view or a, you know, unconscious modus point of view. I mean, there's just so much going on here. And I have not studied ISIS. I don't know what's going on

with them. But I don't believe you could understand them by just by reading the Quran and saying, oh, the Quran says this, that this is why ISIS is doing it. There are motives of humiliation, geopolitical. I mean, I don't know what's going on, but there's a lot going on. But this is, I mean, the issue is that this is how they understand themselves. And now here, I'm not just speaking about ISIS, I'm just speaking about religious fundamentalists in general. When you ask them how they understand what they're doing, if you ask them why homosexuality is anathema, for instance, they have a scriptural justification for it, and it does explain the belief and subsequent behavior, and where in certain cases nothing else does. I mean,

it might be relatively easy to come up with other non-scriptural reasons to be uncomfortable around the phenomenon of homosexuality. And we can talk about that. I mean, it gets into your kind of moral intuitions, the moral foundations theory. But for many of these things, the only way this idea could ever get into someone's head is based on the tradition and the explicit teaching on a specific point. Agreed. I agree with you on that point. And so let's make a distinction that I think will be very helpful here, which is between fundamentalism and religion more generally. So if we're talking about fundamentalist movements, then you and I are going to agree much more,

including in the moral evaluation of them. And so if we live in a diverse society, if we live in a society or if we value progress and open debate of ideas and challenging each other and the things we need for the sciences, then fundamentalism is incompatible with all of those things. Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, I would say politically correct fundamentalism or social justice fundamentalism. I think you and I both personally dislike fundamentalist, the fundamentalist mindset, I should say. I don't mean the people. I mean, the fundamentalist mindset is opposed to values that you and I both hold as individuals and for science. So there, I think there's not as much disagreement between us. But then if you say, what about non-fundamentalists? That's where I think you're much more negative than I am

about people who are religious but not fundamentalist. Is that true? Well, yeah, I'm more negative in the sense that I feel like they make, one, honest talk about the problem of fundamentalism much more difficult because they don't want anything too critical said about their holy books or about a tradition of venerating the concept of revelation, right? I think revelation is a problem here. The idea that one of our books was not the product of the human mind but the product of omniscience, that already just deranges our intellectual and moral discourse really beyond saving. And we have to get out of that part of the religion business. And so that insofar as moderates and liberals do, well, then my only real concern is that,

well, I guess there are two more concerns. One is they tend to not be intellectually honest about the process whereby they have become moderate or liberal. So they pretend that there's something in the tradition, in the books, that has been self-purifying. But no, when you go back to the books, they're every bit as theocratic as they always were. What's happened is that they have collided with a wider set of values, secular values and scientific insights and progress, and they have found being doctrinaire and dogmatic is no longer how they want to live. They can no longer justify it, but they're not

really honest about just how that winnowing has taken place. And they tend to give credit to the resources of the tradition, whereas really it's the resources of a much larger conversation that human beings have had. Sure. So if you want to say that people are adopting positions and then searching for a justification and looking for some sort of textual justification of what they've decided to do intuitively, yep, I'm down with that. That's the core of my research, is that that's what a lot of our moral argument and justification is all about. Yeah, yeah. And so you do one, I just want to go back to your book briefly. You do one thing in your book, which I, it's pretty clearly an area where we disagree. I don't think we need to go into it any real depth because it may be a little hard to parse here in a podcast. But I think we

should just flag it because it is one, I think it's also one reason why you think I and Richard Dawkins and others have been too hard on religion. And it's this notion that religion has provided an evolutionary benefit to us. Is it an adaptation or a byproduct? You're right. That is the other core factual or scientific issue that we disagree on. Right. So I just want to introduce this concept of group selection to those who don't know anything about it, and then we can table it Right. So I just want to introduce this concept of group selection to those who don't know anything about it, and then we can table it probably. So you defend this notion of group selection, and specifically the idea that religion has helped certain groups survive, and perhaps a lack of religion has caused others to fail. And you think that this mechanism hasn't

just been cultural, but that it's also been biological. And so this idea of group selection, which obviously relates to much more than just religion, this is very controversial in biology. And its main champion who you do side with here is someone named David Sloan Wilson, who interestingly, he's also attacked the new atheists with a level of energy that I never quite understood. So I should just point out that there are many biologists, and I would think still most, as far as I can take the temperature on the whole field, disagree with this idea of group selection. And so if our listeners are interested in it, I think the best summary of the reasons to doubt that group selection occurs was written by our mutual friend, Steven Pinker, and the title is The False Allure of Group Selection. And that can be

found on edge.org. I know you must be aware of that paper. Oh, yeah. I responded to it. So you weren't persuaded by it? So, yeah. So that is what the debate comes down to, is if, you know, is religion a product of evolution? Is it an adaptation? In which case, that doesn't mean it's still adaptive today, but it would mean that it conferred some benefit um the really exciting idea that so captivated me when i first read dawkins in college was wow what if it's like a virus what if there it's just it's taken advantage of the of the hardware up there and

it's exploiting it for its purposes and of course dawkins and and dennett are you know are really explicit about that it's a really cool idea, and I used to believe it. And that was the prevailing wisdom. You know, Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, was an incredibly powerful book and a testament to the power of good writing, to be persuasive. So the state of the art in the 70s and 80s was, as you say, that most biologists doubted. In fact, almost all did. Group selection was dismissed because there wasn't any way to solve the free rider problem. If groups were to cooperate for the benefit of the group,

any free rider within the group would get extra benefit and the genes for free riding would spread. And so the topic was put aside and David Sloan Wilson was seen as alone crazy. But a lot has changed since then. So right around that time, the whole idea of major transitions in evolution was being formulated. And there are many other examples of agents that were functioning at an individual level, competing with each other, coming together to be more effective as a group. And even the cells in our body are an example of that. The mitochondria have their own DNA because it was an example of a major transition where multiple entities got together to act as a group. Let's see, what else was there? I go through in my book, I go through as though there were four new exhibits, four reasons to re-examine the case since the 1970s, gene culture co-evolution,

things like that. And while it is still true that biologists mostly seem to side against this. This is actually because I think E.O. Wilson made a big mistake in writing a paper. I love him. I think he's mostly right about things. But I think he made a big mistake in writing a paper saying that kin selection doesn't matter. And I don't understand. I don't think that makes any sense. Kin selection is really powerful. So he took a lot of flack, and people are conflating his rejection of kin selection with his endorsement of groups, or I should say multi-level selection. So just the final point on this is the whole debate since the 60s with Williams and then Dawkins was always looking at altruism. Can we explain altruism as a product of group selection? We are nice to each other because the benefits then to

the group outweigh the cost to me as an individual. And so my response to Steve Pinker was, well, if you just focus on being nice or altruistic, well then, yeah, it's kind of hard to argue that this is from group selection. But if you look at the tribalism, that's what really got me. That's why I'm on this side of the debate. If you look at tribalism, how similar it is, how initiation rights all over the world are actually mimicked in fraternity brothers' initiations. I don't think it's because they studied anthropology. It's because there's something in the human mind that makes people, especially young men, want to do things that involve painting their faces or changing their appearance, exposing each other to extreme risk, doing all sorts of things that bond them

together as a group, make them quite dangerous, quite able to be predators of other groups. So I think you and I agree on those external costs. So anyway, that's why I'm saying that if you focus on tribalism, you try to understand that, I don't see how you can explain that from individual selection. And this is why I think that the arguments for limited group selection were overwhelmed. That's why I say we're 90% chimp. We're overwhelmingly evolved by individual level selection in the way that Dawkins describes it. But we have this interesting tribal overlay. And I think that's essential for understanding not just morality and religion, but politics, as we're going to talk about very soon.

Right, right. Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't say just a couple of words about why group selection seems spooky from a more traditional evolutionary point of view, and then I'll just get off it, because I don't think we'll resolve it here. But I just think, you know, from the point of the criticism, it seems to be a metaphor that gets taken too literally and that blurs the lines between genes and individuals and groups as units of selection. So, you know, as you said, group selection is often called multilevel selection. Yeah, that's the way to think about it. Right. But, you know, as Steve and others have pointed out, there are many problems with saying that selection acts on groups in the same way that it acts on individuals to maximize their inclusive fitness, or that it acts on them in the same way that it acts on genes, increasing numbers of copies that appear in the

next generation. So these things are operating differently. And again, I'm dogged by the fact that I feel like this is a little too hard to parse in a podcast for people to listen. Right. We can skip it. We can just point people. Actually, I think, you know what? Chapter nine of my book. So let's do this. I have made chapter nine of The Righteous Mind available for free on my webpage. So if people go to righteousmind.com, they can find my argument for group selection. And if they Google, well, I guess you can direct them to, but if they basically just Google edge, tinker, what false allure of group selection. Yeah. yeah. They can find that.

So that's Steve. Steve makes a strong argument against it. So I think we can just pass it off in that way. Yeah. I mean, so just to crib Steve briefly, the issue is that there's a lot of causality in the world that you don't need natural selection to explain. And so merely having one tribe outcompete another doesn't require natural selection. So like for instance, if the Nazis had won the war, right, and we were now living in the first century of the

thousand-year Reich, this wouldn't be an example of group selection. And the difference that would make a difference here is almost certainly cultural and not genetic. So if the Germans had won the war, sequencing Hitler's genome wouldn't tell us why. And yet we would still be living in a world where everyone would now be a Nazi and the Nazis have succeeded. But here again, so when in talking about success, the success of a group, in this case the Nazis, we're using a metaphor here because this is not analogous to the success we talk about when we talk about genes spreading in a population. Because in here, in this case, the success we talk about when we talk about genes spreading in a population. Because, you know, in here, in this case, the success itself applies to the group, the Nazi party, enduring for centuries, not to some entity at the end of generations of replicators that have been copying themselves with some rate of mutation and then out-competing all others. So Steve argues, I think, very strongly that it's a confusion over a metaphor. The interesting thing for me, though, is with group selection, I think it's actually... I thought we were leaving it.

No, no, we are. No, we are. But it's actually a red herring for me because, you know, I'm happy to assume it's true for the sake of argument, right? And it won't actually change any of the things you and I disagree about in this space. Because it seems to me that you draw normative claims from the fact that group selection is a fact. Very indirectly, yes. You seem to be saying that even if the tenets of religion are false, right, group selection proves that religion has still been a kind of necessary social glue. Well, hold on. Wait, wait.

Let me reword that. So I think, look, you and I are both atheists. We're both naturalists. We both believe that religion is out there in the world. It's part of human nature in some way, shape or form, and that evolution has to dokins' view, and I think your view, if we could just get rid of it entirely, we'd be better off. And that might be true. I don't know. But if religion is an adaptation, as I believe it is, then it could still be true that it was necessary for getting us to where we are. And I do believe that religion and the psychology of religion helps explain how we and only we made the transition

to living in large-scale societies of non-kin. It could still be the case that it was useful back in tribal days, and now we've supplanted it with law and other things. So I would never say that religion being an adaptation or the truth of multilevel selection would prove anything about how we ought to live today. But what I do draw from it is that seeing it as an adaptation for group solidarity and group coherence makes it easier to see some of the psychological benefits and socio-structural benefits that might be there that are hard to see if you're a secular person on the left. Because that is what I see, is it's really hard to understand what's good about the other side once you're in an argument or debate with them. And from reading scholarship on religion, from reading books, especially the book, James Alt has this wonderful book, Spirit and Flesh,

that really helps you see the sociology of a small evangelical community. So that's my only point. I wouldn't say I draw normative implications directly, but I do draw implications for what kinds of lives are happy and satisfying, what kinds of social patterns and structures make people less selfish and more inclined to think about others. And there, I think you just have to think twice if you're going to say religion is just bad and it makes people do bad things, get rid of it. Yeah. So obviously, I share your concern for human flourishing and us getting in a position to tune all the dials to maximize it. I guess I was detecting in you some version of the naturalistic fallacy, some version of saying that because this thing is natural to us and in fact, selected for and did our ancestors good, that is some argument, some weight on the balance to argue that it is, in fact, good morally speaking. Oh, no, no. I'm only making the argument actually in a way that very much like the way you make in the moral landscape.

If we're going to talk about human flourishing, we need a full picture of human psychology, just straight descriptively. So I think you and I differ a little in our descriptive picture of human psychology. But beyond that, it's pretty much a straight flourishing happiness explanation. So I see what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure I'm not making the naturalistic fallacy by saying, if it's evolved, therefore it's right or good. I'm not saying that. Right. So it's just, if it's evolved, you would suggest that it could be harder to get rid of, if bad, because we've all evolved to think in these ways. But one distinction I still think in this area that divides us, at least it changes the way we

tend to talk about this, is there is a distinction in thinking about how science can touch this subject and the distinction between how we got here, the evolutionary story of just how we came to have the brains and mental capacities we have. And then there's a question of just what is possible given what we are. And that's, for me, that is a, those are two distinct and totally interesting and justifiable projects, but they're distinct and science has a very different role to play in each. And so if you're just going to do descriptive science and talk about how we got here, yes, that has no necessary normative implications. And many people stop there and say, well, so science can't tell you how to live. Science and racial and gender equality, right? So the question is, can we accomplish this? And I think we can. But the further question is, would it be moral to accomplish it? And would it be a

bad thing if we failed? And I think, yes, we can answer yes on both of those questions. And the crucial point, though, is that success on this front will entail overcoming a fair amount of what we've evolved to care about. So you cite a bunch of work, I remember Putnam and Campbell being some of it, that seems to show that religion is good for people. So in this case, it makes them more generous. Yes, in the United States. That's right. It doesn't say globally, but yes, in the United States, there's a lot of evidence that religion makes people happier and better citizens, according to Putnam and Campbell. That's right. And this is the result of their belongingness to a religious community, not their beliefs and doctrines. That's exactly right. And this increased generosity isn't just lavished on their in-group,

it actually extends to the rest of society, which would surprise many atheists. Now, I don't actually know whether or not this is true. Let's just assume it is all true. It seems to me that even if we accept that as true, it obviously isn't the whole story. I mean, I think we could design a dozen invidious experiments where we show that religious people are more homophobic, say, or sexist than secular people on average, or have a lesser understanding of science or less respect for science. And this would help complete the picture. But I think the problem I have with this line of thinking is that there seems to be a tacit assumption that if we can show that religion is doing something good for people, there is no better way to get those goods that's compatible

with a truly rational worldview. That's a fine point. I agree with that. But let's see, I think, but you raised a question that I think would be great for us to try to work out here. I think we might come to different views. So you said, I think we both agree that our evolved human nature did not prepare us to live in a giant, global, peaceful, egalitarian society under rule of law, where in a sense, we're living above our design constraints. And clearly, to some peaceful, egalitarian society under rule of law, where in a sense we're living above our design constraints. And clearly, to some extent, it's possible because despite the imperfections, we're sort of doing it nowadays. So our evolutionary past, while it makes, it puts on some constraints, they're kind of loose constraints, and we can live in all kinds of

ways that we weren't designed for. But here's where I think our different views of religion would lead to different prescriptions for how to do that. So I take part in a lot of discussions. I'm invited to all sorts of sort of, you know, lefty meetings about a global society. And, you know, the left usually wants, they want a global governance. They want more power vested in the UN. They, I hear a lot of talk on the left about

how countries or national borders are bad things. They're arbitrary. So the left tends to want more of a universal... Just think about the John Lennon song. This is what I always go back to. Just think about imagine. Imagine there's no religion, no countries, no private property, nothing to kill or die for. Then it would all be peace and harmony. So that is the sort of far leftist view of what the end state of human evolution, the social evolution could be. Now, is that possible or is it consistent with our evolved nature? Now, here's the other side. The other side, the conservative view, is that we are fundamentally groupish, more parochial creatures. And to have global governance and one giant country or one giant community of all earth would be a nightmare. It would be chaos.

It just wouldn't work. Far better to have authority at the lowest level possible at all times and build up with nested structures. So a country ends up, for conservatives, a country ends up being a very reasonable, basic building block, and they would not want as much of a global society. They certainly would want international law. They would want treaties. They'd want all sorts of things. So I think this is a case where if you have a kind of a blank slate view or a very positive view that our basic nature is love and cooperation, and it's only capitalism that screwed it up, you're going to want a kind of a John Lennon vision of the future. And I don't think that that could really work. Whereas if you

start with Edmund Burke, who talks about the little platoons of society we develop in the family. So conservatives are really, really focused on the family and lower level institutions. And if you focus on making those strong, and then you think about some sort of a legal and social architecture that allows multiple families and communities and states and countries to work together with a minimum of friction, I think that's much more workable. So getting a correct view of our evolutionary heritage and the psychology that resulted from it, I think is very helpful. It doesn't tell us what's right or wrong, but I think it does tell us which way is more likely to work.

And if you see us as products of multi-level selection with a deep, deep tribalism, that suggests that you're probably better off going for more the Burke way and having groups that are composed of groups and finding ways for them to work together rather than the John Lennon way, which is let's erase all group boundaries. Let's erase divisions of nation and everything else and just have one giant planet. I just don't think that's likely to work. I think that is, like as with the communist societies, it's making assumptions about human nature that end up, people just refuse to live that way and it's a disaster.

One thing about what you said that I want to pull back to the focus on religion is just that you're essentially exposing some of the holes in secular thinking. And I agree those holes are there. In fact, I've written two books that attempt to shore up some of the weaknesses I see in secularism. And what you just said relates to this very topical example of the recent migrant crisis in Europe, where you have secular liberals, for the most part, and atheists who really can't find a rationale, morally speaking, for anything less than an open borders policy. And in fact, there's two reasons here. There's two connections here because there's this low birth rate in Europe and many people attribute that to secularism. The loss of religion is really leading to a loss of babies.

And that becomes a justification for bringing in immigrants because they need people to work in these societies. So one could argue that for two reasons, both economically and morally, secularists are now in a position, you know, someone like Angela Merkel, where they're unable to find a reason to keep the borders closed. And let's just say that this happens where you have millions upon millions of Muslims who on balance are deeply religious and disposed to have large families. They flood into Europe over the next few decades. And in 100 years, Europe is predominantly Muslim and deeply religious, right? This is a possible counterfactual

or actual history. So what lesson should we draw from this? Many people would conclude that what Europeans needed in the year 2016 is more Christianity, right? That only a belief in Jesus and the associated behavior and belongingness that that confers and the fertility rates that get associated with a taboo around contraception, that only that could have protected them from the sweeping changes in their society. And I would just argue is that there must be a truly rational way for secular people just to figure out what sort of world they want to live in and simply build it. Yep, I totally agree, Sam. And I think this is a nice example for us to talk about, because I think you and I both are wary of...

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