Making Sense with Sam Harris - #354 — Is Moral Progress a Fantasy?

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with John Gray about the possibility of moral and political progress. They discuss historical and current threats to freedom of thought, the limits of law, the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Koestler, de-industrialization in Europe, fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape, George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as an historical accident, 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. 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. Today I'm speaking with John Gray. John is the author of many books, including The Silence of Animals, Black Mass, Straw Dogs, and The New Leviathans. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, and he's also been a frequent critic of the New Atheists. One of his books is Seven Types of Atheism, where several of my colleagues and I come in for some rough treatment. Anyway, John and I cover a lot of

ground here, or rather he does. He has a wealth of knowledge about the history of ideas. We discuss the historical and current threats to freedom of thought, the limits of law, the illusion, as he sees it, of political and ethical progress, the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Kossler, deindustrialization in Europe, the phenomenon of fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape, George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as a historical accident, and other topics. John is a fascinating man, as you'll hear.

And now I bring you John Gray. I'm here with John Gray. John, thanks for joining me. I'm very glad to be with you, Sam. Thank you for inviting me. So, I think this conversation has been a long time in coming. I have been aware of your work for some years, and I've been aware that you have been aware of mine for some years as well. Perhaps most relevantly, you published a book, Seven Types of Atheism, where you voiced your displeasure over the work of the new atheists, several of us by name. So we'll get into that. But before we track through your various... The books I'm aware of,

which I've read in whole or in part, are Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, and your latest one, The New Leviathans. You're a wonderful writer. Thank you. Which is fun because I think you and I disagree about many, many things. I'd probably agree on some things actually as well. Yeah. So I look forward to that. So anyway, before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize how you view your own interests as a philosopher. What do you think you focused on these many years? in that over 40-year period, I've been focusing primarily on liberalism, what it is, or I would now say was, where it came from, what are its strengths and its limitations, and its varieties, because like any big intellectual and political movement, it doesn't just have only one instance, but a whole range of different brands or species or varieties. So throughout that whole period, I've been interested in liberalism and that's led me to write the books I have written on Mill and also

on Hayek, whom I knew, F.A. Hayek, the liberal political economist. I knew quite well in the 1980s and talked with him at length. I can talk about that later. I still think he's a great thinker, but wrong on some fundamental issues, as we all no doubt are. I also wrote a book on Isaiah Berlin. He was my principal intellectual influence in Oxford when I was there as a, he never supervised me formally, but when I was working on my doctorate, which was on John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, I used to see him regularly. And I went on seeing him for the last 25 years of his life, almost to his death. And he was a profound influence. I should say just as a political

footnote that at that time and from the early 70s onwards till the end of the Cold War, I was an active and militant anti-communist. And that was one of the reasons I supported Margaret Thatcher for as long as I did. And I don't regret any of that because although the aftermath of communism has been a mixed bag in many ways, and we now have put in, it was one of the great 20th century totalitarian movements, which I thought, and I'm often criticized for being too pessimistic, but I believed it could be defeated. Otherwise, I might not have bothered struggling against it as I did. I thought it was more fragile, the communist state in the former Soviet Union than many people believed. And that proved to be

correct in the late 1980s. And one of the, I should say, one of the interesting features of our present situation today is that the threat to old-fashioned liberal freedoms of thought and expression and so forth comes from a different source than it did in the Cold War. As I mentioned from maybe about 1973 up to 1989, 1990, I was an active anti-communist. And at that time, the principal threats to old-fashioned liberal freedoms were from autocratic states, from dictatorships, from tyrannical governments. That's no longer the case because interestingly in the United States and to some extent also in Britain and other European countries, the threats to freedom of expression and freedom of thought come from, not from tyrannical governments primarily, but from civil society itself, from universities,

from philanthropic and charitable organizations, from professional associations, from museums, from artistic institutions, which impose codes of censorship on what their members or anyone working in the relevant industries or branches of society can say or publish and enforce those edicts with various forms of cancellation and deplatforming and stripping of career destruction and so on. So a very interesting change in my lifetime, a lifetime in which I've seen, I've witnessed the disappearance, I would say,

of a liberal civilization. There are still obviously enclaves of freedom like the one I'm addressing now by speaking to you, Sam. Freedom hasn't disappeared as it did in the totalitarian states almost entirely. But a liberal civilization, meaning a civilization in which certain norms of free speech and free thought and toleration are taken for granted across most of the society. So people don't need to worry what they say to their colleagues in the canteen or in the coffee shop. They don't need, there are many areas of society in which political norms do not apply and are not enforced. That civilization, which existed throughout most of my lifetime, no longer exists. So that if you're a reporter at the New York

Times, or if you are a university professor, or if you are a comedian, or if you are a comedian or a poet or a writer, you have to bear in mind all the time how your statements will be interpreted and reacted to by people who may seek and sometimes successfully seek to end your career in the profession you've chosen. They may aim to silence you. And although there's been some pushback in America and in other countries, including Britain, they have succeeded in doing that to quite a lot of people. And so that's a fundamental change, not only in that there's less freedom, but where it comes from.

In the 20th century, the principal enemy of these old-fashioned liberal freedoms were autocratic and totalitarian states, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the fascist regimes of interwar Europe and Latin America, militarist Japan. These were totalitarian or highly authoritarian states which stamped out whatever freedoms existed and imposed an ideological orthodoxy. The curiosity of, it's almost droll, but is that liberal societies in the 21st century have done this to themselves without really any significant intervention by tyrannical governments. For example, just to come right to the present day, private universities in America, elite

private universities, have imposed various forms of speech codes and diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology on their staff. Some universities have required what amount to loyalty oaths, which was a practice which one had hoped had died out with the autocratic states but has not. And they've also been, while doing this, they've proved remarkably tolerant, if I can put it like that, of various forms of progressive racism and antisemitism, which in recent times have included what have amounted to positive active celebrations of Hamas's pogroms in Israel on October the 7th. Now, all of these phenomena, I think, would have been extremely difficult, even for great minds such as Isaiah Berlin, my mentor at Oxford, to have imagined back in the 1990s, because in the 1990s, communism collapsed, had been defeated by the West. And even if you

weren't a Fukuyamist, which I never was, as you probably are aware, he and I have had dialogues, never reaching agreement or even aiming for it ever since he published his book. And I wrote my first critique of Fukuyama before his book was ever published as a response to his essay in the summer of 1989. I thought all this talk of the end of history and with nonsense from beginning to end, even in this slightly metaphorical forms that he later claimed to have stated, we can talk about that later. Because like all ideologues, resist falsification. They're not empiricists. They say, well, I never meant that. I meant something different. It was more metaphorical, more symbolic, and so on.

But at any rate, I don't think Berlin could have predicted this. I don't think Karl Popper, who I didn't know as well, but who I did talk with, could have predicted. I don't think Hayek could have imagined it either. None of these 20th century liberals could have imagined a situation, which is the one in which we actually now live, you and I, in which large institutions in civil society are policing themselves, censoring themselves and their members, and imposing quite serious, not death, as happened in communist countries. They're not firing squads. They're imposing quite serious sanctions on people who deviate from a progressive orthodoxy in whatever way is judged. And that, I think, is new. And to my mind, I sort of had another footnote, which is

in the 1980s, and I traveled quite a bit in what was then communist Europe. So I knew it reasonably well, particularly Poland. And one thing I was impressed by there was the courage of the dissidents, because the courage of the dissidents didn't just... Their situation was much more severe and extreme than that of anyone in these, what I think are the post-liberal societies of the West now. Because in the post-liberal societies of the West, what you lose if you lose the most you can lose is your own career. And in the former communist countries at the height of, in the 80s or the 70s when I also visited, you lost a lot more than your career. What you could lose was your housing, your children's education, the medical care for your mother or grandmother. I knew people who all

suffered these fates. So that if you decided to continue resisting intellectually, it wasn't just you who might suffer. It was the people that you cared about most and loved the most. One of the features of the intellectual conformity that reigns in the liberal West or post-liberal West now, which I find, what's the correct word? Problematic is a word that people use a lot now, is that the people who do yield to this censorship, these threats of cancellation, are facing actually a much smaller risk than the anti-communist or before that, the anti-Nazi, even smaller dissidents risk. Because it's not only to them, but it was not only to them, but to their loved ones. Whereas if you speak out on some issue and violate a progressive orthodoxy now, you might lose your career,

but your children won't be denied medical treatment. They won't be denied university places. So I regard actually those who conform to the progressive orthodoxy from careerist considerations as more morally culpable, more morally culpable than those who, even though the sanctions are much weaker, they're not going to be put in front of a firing squad, but they apply only to the persons who, in the West, who violate the progressive codes, not to the family members of loved ones. So I regard them as more morally culpable than those that I would meet people when I traveled. Most of my friends were dissidents, but I'd meet others who'd collaborated various ways.

But there was often a story behind the collaboration, which I wouldn't say justified it, but it certainly made it more intelligible. If your old grandmother is going into a hospital for an operation and you're told that if you don't shut up or if you don't write a particular thing, then she won't get her eye operation. Yeah, you and I are going to fully agree about the excesses of progressivism or the new DEI orthodoxy. But I think I share even the extremity of your concern about it, although I wouldn't put it quite as categorically as you did in terms of the change that has happened. I think you said that this liberal civilization that you took for granted and that Isaiah Berlin would have assumed would have continued simply no longer exists. I would say that it's under threat across our culture in places that we are wise to lament these changes in. But as you know, and as you acknowledge, many of us are pushing back against those changes. And I do have some sense, I don't know if you doubt this, that the pendulum is in the process of swinging back. I mean, especially in the aftermath of the recent college president testimony before Congress after Hamas's atrocities on October 7th, that was such a shocking and embarrassing and ludicrously masochistic moment, intellectually and ethically.

I agree with all of that, but I wonder if it's turning back. I mean, these things have a kind of almost semi, once they get ingrained in institutions as procedures and processes, it grinds on almost automatically. In Britain, we've had some pushback as well on various issues and which has been successful. And yet every single day, I don't think the situation is quite as bad here as it is in the United States, but it is pretty bad. And yet every single day we hear that the processes of vetting people for their views on diversity, equity, inclusion, and so on is going on. I mean, there was a report only yesterday that BBC hiring tech procedures include or

have included recommendations not to hire people who are what is described as dismissive of diversity ideology. Now, that's gone on after a tremendous amount of pushback has gone on in various issues, even within the BBC. I broadcast for the BBC still, and I've never had any censorship applied to me. But I've been lucky. If you're not as old as I am, I'm moderately well-known. I have various outlets that I write in a left-wing magazine, although I'm not from the left. I can survive. I can get by. I can carry on. But if you're younger, if you're a budding philosopher, a budding sociologist, a budding

historian of ideas, try writing something, try publishing. Well, you might write it, but try publishing something which goes against the progressive ideology on sex or gender or racism, all these other things. What will happen will be either it's not published, which is the most likely development. You'll be privately warned. I know this from people who've told me this. You'll be privately warned not to do it. But if you persist and you submit it to various journals, it probably still won't be published. Not in the mainstream front-ranked journals. If it is then published, you'll suffer for it. And your career… Do you remember the case of this young philosopher?

I think her name was Rebecca Tuval. Ah. This is now six years old. Don't tell me about it, Sam. She was a Canadian professor of philosophy, I think, at York University. Forgive me, the audience, if some of these details are wrong, but the part that I'm sure of is what her indiscretion was and the consequences of it. She published a paper where she took the trans issue and set it alongside this infamous case in America of a woman who

claimed to, a white woman who claimed to identify as black, and she passed as black for some years. She passed so successfully that she was running, I think, a local chapter of the NAACP. Oh, I remember this, yes. Rachel Dolezal, before she was found out and even outed by her all-too-white parents. And so this young philosopher,

in a fairly sheepish way, she was not making, this was not a right-wing triumphal piece of political criticism. their gender is lionized on the left by progressives as an exemplar of human freedom and diversity. But somebody who purports to change their racial identity is vilified as some kind of race terrorist, which Rachel Dolezal was, and defenestrated. And destroyed. And so she just contemplated that juxtaposition. And destroyed. And she was just as castigated as you could possibly be in academia by everyone in sight. But you see that- I mean, people who hadn't even read her essay were hurling her from the rooftops. Well, that's very common.

I mean, but that illustrates why I think, I mean, I put it in what you thought was perhaps a slightly hyperbolic formulation to say that the liberal civilization had disappeared. But if I think back to the, I got my doctorate in the 1970s. Before that, I started teaching in 1973 at the University of Essex in Britain. By the way, I taught later on in Harvard and Yale and went to various. And there were indeed 16 consecutive years in which I spent several months of each of those years in America. So I used to know America quite well, although I stopped doing that in the early 90s. But back in the 70s, what you describe this Tuval case was not only never happened, it was completely unthinkable. There were, at Oxford and at Essex, there were liberals of various stripes, Cold War liberals like myself,

the Dias-Iberlinas, they've later been caricatured classical liberals, left-wing liberals, Keynesian liberals. There were also conservatives which ranged from liberal or libertarian conservatives through to reactionary or high Tory conservatives. There were Marxists, there were communists, there were anarchists, there was a wide variety of almost, mercifully, there were no Nazis, but there were almost everything apart from that was represented. And that was taken to be normal.

That's the point. The point is that that was considered to be a normal state of intellectual life. And it was utterly unthinkable that someone could explore a conceptual incoherence, which is, I suppose, what this philosophy you're talking about was doing. She would say, well, why does this logic differ from that logic? What's the reason for that? That's all she was saying, or even just asking. She wasn't even saying anything as you described, just asking the question. It was utterly unthinkable that that would lead to her being publicly denounced or her doctoral committee turning against her. It was just beyond this

sphere of imagination that would happen. So in that sense, there's been a... I mean, I'm in my mid-70s now, so I can remember that, but I can still remember this very vividly. It was completely unthinkable. And that is a fundamental and radical change. And I actually think it's... Although there's been some good pushback in various areas, it's not easy to, well, I think it's actually impossible to get back to a situation where these things are taken for granted because the very fact that we have to fight for them now and the fact, I know the British situation better than the American situation, that in Britain, I think actually only the power of law, in other words, of the state, the power of the state can actually protect these freedoms now. Well, crucially, you lack a Bill of Rights there. In other words, if the state, the power of the state can actually protect these freedoms, freedoms now. Well, crucially, you lack a Bill of Rights there. Yeah, well, I don't think that's the solution either. No?

No, absolutely not. Because for one thing, even now, the situation in America, as I've been able to follow it, is worse than it is in many British institutions, despite that. And I wouldn't favor it at all, because first of all, the Bill of Rights would have to be drafted by someone. Most of the lawyers now are captured by these diversity ideas of various kinds. And I'm not one who has, as you know from my most recent book, my principal political influence on my thinking is Hobbes. And my eye, constitutions come and go. They don't by themselves protect freedom very well. It's one

of my differences with Hayek, by the way. I mean, Hayek slightly surprised me in a way that when I got to know him, I was interested to talk about his experiences in pre-war. I mean, he was old enough just to have lived in pre-war Vienna and lived then on to the post-war period. He knew Mises, of course. He knew Wittgenstein slightly. They famously met on a train when they were both in uniform and when they were both still socialists, by the way. And I could tell you about his family and so on.

So I was interested to talk with him. And one of the features of the 30s is that he left by the early 30s because he and Popper, his members, believed that the Nazis were going to come to power and that they would do what they had said they would do in many of the worst respects. But he could have observed that having a wonderful constitution like that of Weimar Germany, or a wonderful constitution like Stalin's Russia, didn't stop anything from happening. Law by itself is powerless when it comes up against powerful political forces. And in fact, as you probably remember from my book, one of the things I was writing about in Britain and in American publications in the 1990s was I thought that

constitutionalizing certain basic issues in America, like abortion, would have... I'm pro-choice, by the way. That's by the way, but I've been on record on that for many, many, many, many years. But constitutionalizing that issue would ultimately lead, and I wrote this explicitly in about 1991, to the politicization of the Supreme Court itself. Because if you politicize a freedom which is deeply contested in society, which maybe a quarter of the society regards as an abomination or a third, and another side is another quarter, it's an absolutely vital part of human freedom, and in the middle there are various, there's a group which wavers. If you do that, then what that eventually does is it makes the Supreme Court an object

of political capture, which has then, in fact, has now happened, although it took 30 years to happen. When I said this back in the 90s, people were incredulous because they assumed the American Supreme Court would always be liberal. But there's no reason to assume that. They're all ultimately creatures of political power. And that's where I differ very much from theorists who take their terms of reference from Locke and from right theory. I think these are all ultimately matters of a political struggle. So I do think, though, in one respect, I don't favor a Bill of

Rights in Britain, but we might actually benefit from having legislation in Parliament which would establish a right to freedom of expression. And that's partly been done in a way because the present government, which will soon be out of power, but anyway, the present government has brought in a legislation which enables people whose freedom of speech has been curbed on campus to get legal remedies for that. And I do support that. In other words, I support legislation. It's legislation, you see. In other words, it's not an embedded right which then transcends change. It can be altered. But while it's in force, it gives people some remedy. But let me add something to that, which is very crucial.

The beneficiaries of such legislation are the people who have the courage and the independence of mind to speak against the orthodoxy. It helps them. If they speak and are then punished, they can sue, which is good, but it doesn't change the incentive structures of the profession. The incentive structures of the profession are the ones I described earlier, which is good. But it doesn't change the incentive structures of the profession. The incentive structures of the profession are the ones I described earlier, which is that if you're a young scholar in some humanities or social science discipline, or even sometimes scientific disciplines, going in early and you choose to take an unorthodox stance or to investigate an unorthodox point of view or were still defended, then your career will

probably never start. Or if it does start, it'll be quickly blocked. And that, I think, can't be changed by law alone or by rights. Well, I want to perhaps circle back to politics and the career of liberalism, such as you see it. But I think there's an underlying claim that runs through much of your work, certainly all of the books I've mentioned, wherein you seem quite pessimistic about the progress of reason and really about the very idea of progress itself.

What is your argument against progress? I mean, you essentially consider it an illusion of sorts, and it's an illusion that has many guises. I mean, concepts like humanism and the very concept of treating humanity as a whole come under fairly rough treatment by you. So how do you view the assumption of progress? Again, from people like me, perhaps most poignantly, somebody like Steven Pinker, I think he's often misunderstood for being far more Pollyannish than he in fact is. But what's your case against assumptions of progress? I should say, in practice, I'm very rarely pessimistic enough. In practice, I'm very rarely pessimistic enough.

We might have differed on this at the time, but when I started writing against the Iraq War, before the Americans arrived in Iraq, I started to write about a year before, and I wrote a piece in the New States about a month before the war began. And I said, I think what will happen is a disintegration of the Iraqi state into various bits. Some neighboring powers like Iran will become stronger. That was kind of one of the predictable consequences of the Iraq war. But even I wasn't, and I said it could be like Chechnya. I said this, the article, if anybody wants to read it, they can read it. I republished it and I'll do it in my book, Collected Essays, called Grey's Anatomy. And I said, it could be as bad as Chechnya, where terrible slaughter, terrible ethnic and sectarian murder and torture and rape and so on. But it was

actually much worse because what I didn't anticipate was the full horror of the emergence of ISIS. And I didn't anticipate what would happen to the Yazidi, which was an attempted genocide. It was much worse. So in practice, I'm hardly ever as pessimistic as events really weren't. But let me answer your question more programmatically. I've always made a sharp distinction between progress in ethics and politics, or if you like, in civilization on the one hand, and progress in science and technology on the other hand. And one of my

constant refrains over the last 20 or 30 years has been that the two are not closely connected, and that there can be considerable progress in science and technology, which is used for barbarous and uncivilized ends. But the key difference between the two is that progress in science and technology is normally cumulative. That's to say when a new technology or certainly a new scientific theory comes along, everything that was known before isn't lost or found to be false. The truths that were discovered earlier on or the valid theories that were formulated are carried on and incorporated to something bigger or which explains more. And so progress isn't just advance. There's advance in ethics and politics as well. Europe in 1990 was a much better place than Europe in 1940,

to take a rather obvious example. But advances in politics and in ethics, I hold, and I must say, having lived as long as I do, this has prepared me for many things. Nearly all was lost over a period of a generation or so. Now, there's some kind of built-in moral entropy, ethical and political entropy, whereby what has been achieved, good things that have been achieved, are lost. And evils which were thought to have retreated, not abolished perhaps, come back with all their venom. I mean, this is one of the reasons I constantly attacked Dawkins and others for this theory of memes. I said, well, whether or not there are memes, or there can be theoretical entities called memes, if memes compete in a Darwinian fashion, then I predict that the most

successful, the fittest memes will be the worst ethically and culturally and politically. And I think that's been demonstrated by the way that the anti-Semitic meme has revived in recent years and even in recent months extremely virulently because it appeals to hatreds and prejudices and bigotries that were there before, but it can spread very rapidly. In other words, if there is Darwinian competition among memes, if there are such things in memes and there is a Darwinian competition, then the fittest will not be the best or the most rational or the most humane. They'll normally be simply the most virulent, which

normally is the worst, ethically speaking. I mean, what we've returned to, for example, now in the case of antisemitism is the political antisemitism of Russia in the 1890s and Europe in the 1930s. But rather than coming from the nationalist or fascist right, as it did in Russia in the 1890s or in Europe in the 1930s. It now comes from progressive liberalism itself. That's the vehicle for this meme, this extremely virulent, hardy, resilient, and almost all-conquering meme that keeps re-emerging. So that sort of illustrates.

So I draw a sharp contrast between progress, which means cumulative advance, in which what is achieved in one generation isn't completely lost in the next. In science and technology, that's normal. And ethics and politics, where the loss of what's been achieved in the previous generation or two is normal. The loss is normal. I'll give you a different example, which might make it a bit clearer. When I read techno-optimists, they say things like, humanity masters technology. We will use

it for these purposes. We will eliminate diseases. We will do all these good things and extend human longevity. Well, no doubt that will happen to some extent, but they're invoking, and you mentioned this parenthetically, they're invoking a and you mentioned this parenthetically, they're invoking a collective agent that doesn't exist. Humanity or humankind or the human animal is a biological species or category. It doesn't act any more than lions or tigers act. What there is, is simply the multitudinous human animal with different purposes and goals. And to give an example now, the immense progress in technology that has occurred in the

last five or 10 years, shall we say, has put what remains of the liberal West at a disadvantage in its conflict with groups like the Houthis and also with Russia, in that the spread of technology, the diffusion of technology, the development of new and especially cheaper and more effective technologies has produced new generations of drones, which are hundreds or even thousands of times cheaper than the missiles in which the West has invested so much, and which now can be used in huge numbers at low cost in the Red Sea and in Ukraine, often Iranian produced. Now, what does that mean? What it means is that these new technologies... Just to put a finer point on this example, which I love is that I remember being at

the TED conference, which is, as you probably know, a kind of mecca for techno-optimism, when drones were, I think, probably for virtually the first time revealed to be in production. I mean, there was a TED Talk where one of these, I think, pioneers in drone technology flew a drone out over the audience in the auditorium and, and then showed video of dozens of drones, you know, flying in formation together. And I forget,

this had to be at least 10 years ago. That's it. And it was really, it was, drones were nowhere until, you know, they were overhead at the TED conference, in my experience.

Right about the same time though, Sam, I think you're absolutely right my experience. Right about the same time, though, Sam. I think you're absolutely right about the dating. About the same time in a meeting in Switzerland, there were little tiny drones, but they fluttered above us in the audience. So they were just catching on then, I think. Yeah. But it was just amazing in that context. This was just unveiled as a pure moment of technological fun more than anything,

but the obvious military applications were- Never considered. You know, it's just several of us in the audience had a fairly ominous feeling about what we were watching. Well, you're absolutely right, because it's now come true. And of course, so that sort of illustrates one of my points, which is that as new technologies, or more broadly speaking, knowledge spreads, as they spread throughout the world, the spread of knowledge does not make human beings more rational or more reasonable. It does not tend to produce in them the same goals or values. They use the knowledge that is being disseminated and the new technologies to pursue whatever goals

and values they have, which may be barbarous. I mean, after all, the Houthis have reinstituted slavery. They're exceedingly misogynist and homophobic. This doesn't prevent their success as being welcomed in the West by progressive liberal crowds and demonstrations, but they haven't changed their values, the Houthis, from when they were formed, when they emerged as an Islamist group, as sometimes met some years ago. They haven't changed them. They're using these new technologies and others that will follow them to enact and advance their values and their goals, which they've been very explicit about what they are. They haven't beaten about the bush. They haven't obfuscated or

obscured them in any way. They know what they want, the destruction of Israel, the universal campaign against the Jews, the attacks on liberal democracy, the whole thing. So, that's my reasoning on this basis, which is that at least over the last few hundred years, science and technology has been an exponential process, let's put it like that, in which what is gained in one generation is expanded upon or magnified in the next generation. But the ethical and political life isn't like that. It's almost the opposite. What is gained in one generation is almost always lost two or three generations later,

and often in the following generation. One of my original sort of discipline, if you like, was that of Isaiah Boleyn, which was really partly a philosopher, but a historian of ideas. And if you study the ideas before the First World War, apart from a few dissidents, the assumption was pretty well universal that the basic structure of European society and civilization would persist and indeed grow and improve. And in fact, there's a wonderful book,

I don't know if you've ever read it, or your listeners have, by Zweig called The World of Yesterday. Fantastic book. And there's a chapter in it called, I think, The World of Yesterday. Fantastic book. There's a chapter in it called, I think, The World of Security, which he describes growing up in the Habsburg Empire. That was a world of security everybody took for granted. Money meant what it meant. There was a rule of law. There were blemishes. There was anti-Semitism in Vienna and other parts of the empire. There were nascent forms of ethnic nationalism, but basically, it was a highly

civilized empire and also a very modern one, interestingly, as well, until the First World War. And then in the First World War, that whole bourgeois Europe was irrevocably shattered. And after it came ethnic nationalism and narcissism and of course, communism as well. And an interesting thing then, by the way... 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. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription,

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